A Voice Apart

You are obviously familiar with the term "peripheral vision". Every driver knows that if they don't exercise their peripheral vision they might get into trouble, as when you're driving you have to watch front, back, left and right. It is that level of attention that will help you avoid an accident because you can catch an unexpected object racing at you with just the corner of your eye. Personally, I encountered that situation not too long ago... Needless to say, if it were not for my active use of peripheral vision, I would not be writing this blog now. Along a similar vein, while running a number of vocal workshops and seminars over the last close to four decades, I have learned that when conducting a large group of people, I had to mastermind a skill allowing me to be able to see all of my participants at once in order not to lose their attention while I was engaged with them on a subject. In the context of sports; For example, hockey players cannot play their ga

Apparently there is! And yes, it is possible and it is fixable… however, with great difficulty. For comparison, let’s look at classical ballet dancers: Everybody knows that ballerinas have to have a certain arch in their feet, especially females. It is detrimental to their careers if their feet are flat and not properly arched, because it would be difficult to do pirouettes; circling up to 32 revolutions ( fouettés)  with one leg while keeping the whole weight of the body on the other leg while the flat foot is virtually unable to hold the body weight. Similarly for singers, the upper palette (located in the vocal box) also has an arch and curve. The deeper that arch is, the more the "body of the voice" will be projected. The palette arch, however, is not everything, as the sound also needs to be supported simultaneously by the lower abdomen and upper diaphragm, or else the whole lift of the voice becomes obsolete. Singers can avoid cracks in their vo

“…and can we stop the spread…?” Like any cancer, in my opinion, vocal cancer is also a serious disease. However, there are always stages. And if the real cancer is diagnosed and detected early, it usually falls in at stage 1, which means it is quite curable and if not completely, at the very least could prolong the patient’s life significantly. Unfortunately the vocal cancer, I would classify as stage 4, which in most cases is terminal and no cure could be offered unless something really alternative, out of this world and crazily outrageous comes along. Strangely enough, it actually has already come, like a lot of alternative treatments for the real cancer, which have been suggested by the alternative herbal and naturopathic medicines. The problem is that the people are so brainwashed and so believing in what they’ve “known” for years, ie. conventional medicine, which in a lot of cases is killing while supposedly “healing”. That said, no doubt, it’s very hard to change the herd menta

Being teaching and producing vocals in Canada for over thirty years, it never ceases to amaze me how many people have gone for conventional vocal training , practicing, the least to say, nonsensical and leading nowhere exercises - and think that one day they are going to wake up with a wonderful voice and be able to sign a million dollar record deal . A lot of them were complaining that they were feeling quite strange making sounds, some of which reminding them of cats meowing and wolves howling. I'm sure if the latter would hear those people, they would be extremely jealous, as those singers were sounding "better" than the original mammals. A lot of these people after years and years are still trying to make some sense of it, while concurrently ruining their voices, as they were told that if their throats hurt to the point that they are losing any presence of their voices, that is good, because their muscles are working and they must be doing something right. Neverth