Why Voice #14 - How voice lessons make you a better listener

A voice and speech student came into a lesson today and proclaimed that not only did he now speak more with other people, but also he now felt he could actually connect better to people and better understand not only the words they were saying, but also the meaning behind their words. 

I want to talk a little bit about why the statement didn't surprise me. When you work with your voice you should be spending a lot of time listening. Listening to how other people sound, if it is speech as it was in this case, you listen to people and try to figure out what you like about their voice? Are they making the sounds right or wrong? Do they have tention in jaw and tongue? Is breath flowing freely? Do I want to sound like this? Does their voice give them authority or not? And an array of other things you learn to listen for because I in your lessons, make you listen to your own voice in this maner. It's not about judging, but more a matter of curiosity. Think of yourself as a scientist trying to figure out the mechanisms of the human voice - maybe (hopefully) you will remove some judgement from the sound of your own voice...which actually will make you a better voice user on its own, nice right?!

In terms of the singing voice the principles are the same except you listen to music and more specifically, singers instead. Which singers do you like? What sounds do they make? Can I imitate what they do? What is the quality of their voice like? What do I like about it? What do I dislike about it? And so on....

I might seem like the simplest thing - and subconsciously you are already doing this - but if you can bring it to your conscious learning you will improve your own voice so much faster...

Is it fun? I don't know, but if you are one of those people who doesn't like the singing of scale after scale vocalizing from dusk till dawn, it sure beats that approach:-)....all you have to do is listen, maybe test it on your own voice and listen some more....then you come to your lesson and maybe I can answer a question you have - or maybe ask another one...

Being a great listener is rule number one of being a good voice user - it's as simple as that!

 

Why Voice #13 - The Constant Experiment

"All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better". (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Today I wanna share with you why I have the best job in the world....or at least why I think it is:-)

As I have mentioned a few times already in this blog; singing is a new thing everyday. As you get better the level of consistency gets better, but really just like you body feels slightly different every day, so does your voice. I didn't use to think that it was a gift - more like a curse in fact, but now that I teach and thus am "forced" to sing and make others do it for hours on end, it has become an absolute blessing.

Teaching in it self is one long experiment. My students teach me something new about the voice and how individually we perceive it, almost every day! The constant experiment means that I am never bored, always challenged and hopefully my students are too in our common search for greater mastery of our common, yet individual instrument. We all have one - a voice - and more or less we all use it, but we are all utterly unique in doing so. The voice is like a fingerprint that you can fiddle with, but somehow it still remains totally and completely, singularly yours. No one can ever steal or have your instrument ever! But it can be destroyed...something I have experienced first hand, and on some of the clients that I work with that have damaged voices - it's another matter all together. Building your voice back, finding it again, is like looking for your souls fingerprint in a sense, and can needless to say, be a difficult endeavor, but I believe never an impossible one. As a matter of fact I am the singing example of how a voice can be rebuild, rediscovered and re-found:-)

The voice has an outstanding ability to make us feel special and unique and yet somehow still connected to the whole - that is what I spend my life experimenting with and that my friends is pure unadulterated fun!