I have had a request to go more into detail with the therapy exercises, and I will honor that request right now. (Disclaimer: I am not, as of right now, a licensed SLP, so any conjectures I make about the reasons behind therapeutic exercises are purely my educated guesses. I cannot recommend these exercises as a way to treat any vocal difficulties for anyone. If you have difficulties, please seek out a good ENT and SLP in your area.)
As I described the therapy exercises here, they really started out as simple, really-hard-to-mess-them-up exercises. (Pretty sure that’s what makes them so darn effective.) On the first week, my therapy practice CD comprised mostly of onset exercises. Just a simple pulse (staccato-like) on one note on the three vowels: /a/, /i/, /u/ that all of my exercises were on. So this would look like pulsing ah-ah-ah-ah-ah, then moving up in half-steps and back down to the starting pitch again. Then the cycle would repeat on the /i/, and so on. This might look very similar to many singing exercises, especially those mentioned by Richard Miller in his Solutions for Singers book, but the main differences were that the therapeutic exercises were done in the “speaking” mode not singing mode, they were done in a speaking range (not going higher than, say, A about middle C for me), and they were done following the stretches, massages, and belly breaths I mentioned in the above post. I think the key there was that all those relaxation techniques set up a nice laryngeal posture before starting the onset exercises. (I have no idea if they are referred to as onset exercises in the SLP literature, but speaking as a singer, that’s what you would call them.)
On my second visit, my practice CD was about 30 minutes long, and included more of those onset exercises, slides (or glides) on thirds from the lower note to the higher note and back down again (1-3-1 pattern) going up by half steps, and the pattern would be reversed when descending by half steps (3-1-3 pattern). Once again, these exercises would stay in a range of about A3 to A4. (Remember, these exercises were purposefully pitched around there for my high-coloratura voice by my SLP.) There was also an exercise of octave slides, just on /a/, from about middle C to the Eb above. Other exercises involved going from the unvoiced /s/ to /z/ on the same pitch and breath and unvoiced /ʃ/ to voiced /ʒ/ on the same pitch and breath, usually around middle C. Also, sustaining phonation for as long as possible on /a/, /i/, and /u/ became an exercise for me to do every day. (By the end of therapy, the previous exercise had developed in to a sort of “spoken” messa di voce with a crescendo and decrescendo on each vowel and pitch, which also ascended by half steps and back down again on each vowel.)
This comprised the bulk of my therapeutic exercises. The second therapy session was the only one with a 30 minute CD. Most of the others were around 15 minutes in length, which made them very easy to do throughout the day, or once every hour after work in the evening if my voice wasn’t too tired. I would actually make a point of doing the exercises at least once when I got home if I felt any focal fatigue, since I always felt a lot better after doing the exercises. I think the whole key to that was the release of any excess tension being held in the laryngeal area. Remember, throughout every practice CD, every exercise was sandwiched between either belly breaths, massages, or both. Constant, regular relaxation seemed to be the biggest key to my recovery. (My conjecture about this is that reducing the ineffective muscular compensation will either require the body to repair the injured nerve (the ideal situation), or it will allow for more effective compensatory actions to make up for the injury without causing vocal fatigue and strain. I hope to read up some more about this, but unfortunately this semester is turning out to be a busy one!)
Although I was not really singing throughout my therapy course, I did use that concept of regular laryngeal relaxation to do some “silent” singing practice. I would put on my favorite singers singing my favorite arias (that I know by memory), and I would lip-sing through the aria with the recording. The whole time I would lip-sing, I would make sure to feel any sensation in my throat that felt the smallest amount like squeezing, and I would try to go back to releasing my throat and lip-singing with no constriction of the air flow whatsoever. The belly breaths became my biggest asset when needing instant relaxation, as my body began to just equate those breaths with releasing the larynx by my third week of therapy. In fact, I would sometimes just “think” through the belly breaths in between costumers at work to release any tension I was feeling. I think this is what made me so highly tactile in terms of sensing what’s going on in my throat. This process also made me realize just how much tension I had been feeling in my throat literally all the time! No wonder I could never find “release” in my singing lessons! It’s pretty much impossible to find a relaxed larynx if it’s something you haven’t experienced at any point, even in speaking, in about a decade.
But I must say the greatest thing I learned throughout therapy was how important it is to realize that vocal improvement is an ongoing process. It’s not about just finding the right “space” or “placement” once and waiting for the light to go on. It’s a constant pendulum swing from one place to another, but if you’re going in the right direction, the swings become less and less severe over time. Maybe it was just my getting into yoga previous to the therapy or maybe it is just my getting older, but I have a new appreciation for accepting where I am at my point in the process and not expecting a magic spell or exercise to instantly fix my singing. This rather Zen attitude of mine would not always hold throughout re-learning how to sing, (seriously, it was frustrating as all get-out,) but at least it would serve me well in the long run.
Up next: Back to singing
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