Might seem a pretty obvious thing after reading my earlier post about just how asymmetrical my laryngeal musculature had become thanks to paresis, but it really took me about two to three months post-therapy to realize I needed to rebalance my voice. It’s not like I had an adolescent voice…quite far from it in fact…but I don’t think I fully realized just how atrophied my right vocalis had become. Therapy really had healed up my voice, meaning I had full glottal (which is the term for the space between the vocal folds) closure when speaking. That’s the only way I was able to successfully achieve those measurements my SLP took at my last session. But my laryngeal cartilage still didn’t feel totally symmetrical when I did my massages. It was getting better slowly, but it really took a good six months before it felt normal again. It seems perfectly reasonable to me now that I needed to re-balance…or maybe finally actually balance…my laryngeal musculature when it came to singing. I had to get that right fold up to speed, so to speak.
As any pedagogy-guru would tell you, you need adequate fold closure at the onset of phonation, or else the whole darn phrase just ain’t gonna go very well. (Paraphrasing from the great academics out there…but you get the idea.) This is why I set out with some onset exercises as my main vocalization about two months post-therapy. I had never had a clean onset before. Prior to healing up, I had so much “adjusting” that I made before the onset of every sound. Onset was more of a process of manipulation than the ideal balance of air flow and fold closure that it should have been. And without all that manipulating, then my voice would just be breathy at the onset and breathy throughout the phrase. (Of course, that manipulation was really pressing too much, but what else are you going to do with a ‘gimpy’ fold, right?) My head and chest registers were healthy and strong, and I could transition into whistle register just fine, but my onset was still a sloppy mess and my middle voice just couldn’t figure out the right balance between chest and head voice. While the later issue would take more time and a few more lessons to sort out, the first issue I decided to tackle on my own…with some help from Richard Miller and my teacher, of course.
I started out doing the onset exercises, five pulses on /a/ followed with legato 5-3-1 and eventually 5-4-3-2-1 down quickly (simplified for myself in the beginning to just the pulses), without any thought to resonance placement, solely in my middle voice. First, I’d do the classic pulse-the-air-out-from-your-belly on a count of five. Then, when that felt fairly automatic, I would start the onset exercises, just on /a/. The main key for me was to not actually think about the exercise at all. I did not allow myself to analyze if it was good or bad, right or wrong, breathy or clean…anything. No analysis, no manipulation to make it better, just pulse my breath out and add voice to the air movement. This is one part of my great paradigm shift: Not over-thinking every sound that came out of my throat. But, since I was such a chronic over-thinker, I had to start out by blanking out my mind completely and letting my body figure it out without the help of my higher cognitive functioning. This turned out to be a pretty good idea. My laryngeal musculature and my air flow started up a nice little relationship without that pesky cognitive analyzing getting in the way. (As with any relationship, this one would take time to refine and mature, but a good healthy start to this balance was worth its weight in gold to me.)
After about two weeks of this, I was able to gradually increase my range on this exercise, and my onset was starting to get all clean and shinny. What a revelation it was to just be able to start a clean sound without a lot of fuss! No wonder so many singers out there actually enjoy singing! When you don’t have to analyze every second of every sound, or spend ridiculous amounts of time thinking about how to start your sound, singing really does start to get rather fun!
Another little perk from this was the beginning of developing a belt voice for me. I had never belted before, but like I said, I did nothing to adjust my sound into anything at all, so I end up sounding a lot like a musical theater belter. That was what my middle voice onset sounded like about two weeks into using this exercise. But the onset was clean! Oh glorious day! Who cares if I don’t sound like an opera singer just yet? I can work on resonance and vocal quality later as long as the foundation was finally good! I was able to just open my mouth and sing. That was a feat worth celebrating.
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