Now, I would suspect many university-educated singers would think something similar to what I thought about going to therapy: “I probably know almost as much as a therapist about the voice, so this should be a piece of cake for me.” Especially if you took all the graduate-level courses in pedagogy at your university, like I had. I mean, I taught voice lessons, which couldn’t be all that different, right? Boy, oh boy, was I wrong.
I had already been exposed to some medical jargon about the voice that I didn’t understand at the doctor’s office, and I had a sneaking suspicion the voice therapist would have actually understood all that stuff if she had been there, but when it came to the basic function of the voice, I figured I was pretty much on par with one of them. Well…no. Therapists come from a whole different field than singers…a much more scientific field. Yes, we do learn about the voice, and yes, we do know a lot more than the average person if we’ve studied our pedagogy books well. We singers and teachers of singing can teach you how to use your voice with ease, but therapists (the good ones anyway) can actually take a broken voice and rehabilitate it to the point of complete ease in most cases of injury. I guess what I’m trying to say is that we all have our roles to fill, and they are all important and deserve to be respected. So, I had decided that while I thought I wouldn’t really learn anything new at therapy, I would follow her instruction without question and see where it got me. That was the best decision I’ve ever made.
On my first visit, she did an assessment of my voice. She measured the pitch where I spoke, the intensity, clarity, resonance, and duration of my speaking voice. She determined I spoke too low…which I had been told before by proponents of the “sopranos should sound like sopranos when they talk” school of thought. She also discovered my duration (the length of time I can sustain a single pitch in my speaking range) was several seconds below the average (15 seconds for me instead of the average 25 seconds)…which is a bit disheartening for a singer to hear. She also said my measurements lined up with my diagnosis, but that I had “a lot of voice to work with” so her prognosis for recovery was very good. Then she gave me some exercises that she recorded and put on a CD for me to take home and practice a few times every day. The exercises were more like “speaking” exercises. As she said, she didn’t want me to go into my “singer mode.” The exercises were nothing fancy. In fact, my singer brain kinda laughed at them a little bit because they were so easy and simplistic. But, as I was determined to get better, I followed her instructions and did my exercises every day about four to five times a day. And, much to the surprise of my mocking singer-brain, they worked! I went back the next week, and my measurements were already a lot better. I got another CD, practiced it three to four times a day (it was longer than the first one) and got better some more. My voice was getting less fatigued at work, and I was straining a little less than usual to talk. I wasn’t singing at all during this time, as I thought it would be better to re-learn how to walk before I re-learn how to run. I was limiting my talking in general to cut down on the fatigue, but I was noticing some good improvements already. A month went by, and I was even better, another month went by, and my voice was feeling almost normal…which was something I hadn’t felt for years.
Up next: Rediscovering What I Had Lost
No comments:
Post a Comment