So I had just finished my therapy with my wonderful SLP (getting sick of me calling her wonderful yet?) whose measurements were proof to me that I was healed up. This obviously meant that my voice was completely fixed and that my singing would instantly be that polished, professional quality I had long sought for, right? …Of course not! Didn’t you read my last post?! We all know how hard muscle memory dies, but add compensation for a decade-long injury into that muscle memory mix, and you’re in for one long, frustrating haul. Basically, you’re back at square one, just with what feels like a brand spanking new voice.
Speaking of new voices, have you ever wondered what it would be like to sing with a totally different voice for one day? Ever heard that one singer who sings more powerfully/higher/lower/more “shimmery” or “metallic” than you and wondered what it would be like to “borrow” that person’s voice for one day? I used to wonder that stuff all the time and now I know the answer to that: It feels totally weird. When I started singing again, about three months after my diagnosis, I had been given a whole new voice…and I had no idea what to do with it. Now, before my treatment, my voice was always referred to as a nice “light” voice. It was basically a nice, light soprano sound; not too small for the operatic stage, but very light and floaty. After my treatment, my voice seemed completely different to me. First off, it sounded really dark inside my head. Second, the resonance sensations were completely different. And third, it was larger than it had ever been, and I had no idea how to control it. One of the main symptoms of recurrent nerve paresis, which is different from secondary nerve paresis, is a reduction of volume. Now, my voice didn’t jump from being a light coloratura to being a wagnerian or anything like that, but it did gain enough in volume to completely throw me off when I started singing with it. I was so excited to have this brand new voice! (If I had known the constant pendulum swing I was in for, it might have quelled my excitement a little bit.)
The first thing I needed to do when I got back to lessons was I had to relearn the amount of air needed to sing. Since I had only been speaking and doing speaking-like exercises, my body had forgotten the kind of support it needed to get up to my higher range. Luckily, a few good breathing exercises al la Richard Miller would help get that support strength back up pretty quickly. Unfortunately, finding the right air-flow balance during singing would take a lot longer.
I also needed to learn what pharyngeal space actually felt like. This concept would take a long time for me to figure out, mainly because my tongue base still had this lovely way of wanting it’s hand in the process; kinda like that pesky neighbor on Bewitched.
Physically sensing pharyngeal space is a strange thing. It’s especially strange to someone coming off an eight-year injury like me. I think the main problem was that I had been trying to physically pry open my throat with every muscle I had, because nothing actually ever opened. If I could have used the jaws-of-life to reach in my throat and open everything up, I would have! But without proper laryngeal functionality, healthy phonation is simply not possible. And without healthy phonation, a relaxed laryngeal position enabling pharyngeal space for resonance is also not possible. That equals a big lose-lose for someone with an injury. So when it came for me to try to find all that space international singers use to resonate with, I was kinda screwed. The truth is, for someone coming off an injury, obtaining that “space” doesn’t feel like they’re doing anything at all. It doesn’t feel special. But I would wager money that what happens when you first ask someone coming right out of therapy to create “space” is they jam their larynx down, retract that tongue base so everything sounds “dark” in their head, or maybe they jack their soft palate up through their nasal passages (which isn’t really raising the soft palate at all if things are getting nasal.) Either way, the result isn’t pretty. My teacher would sometimes have me think of darkening the sound to find the space, but that mainly got the tongue too involved, so then we went back to just phonating comfortably. I swung on the dark-light-dark pendulum so many times I got pretty dizzy and confused. While I’m sure regular lessons with my fabulous teacher would have solved some of these issues more quickly, my finances and work schedule simply did not allow for it. So I decided, since I was the one who would really have to solve the puzzle that was my voice, I would start to work from the beginning again. Only, I had been singing on an injury for so long that I had absolutely no idea where “beginning” was. (Dang... New I should have gone to med school instead.)
And all the while, I had to continue to deal with all the emotional repercussions. Was it mainly a confidence thing? Of course! My voice had been like that one incredibly unreliable friend that always cancels on you at the last minute and is never around when you really need them to be. It’s very hard to trust something like that. Now that it was healed, I had to learn how to trust it when it came time to perform. That required a whole new bag of tricks than just technique…
The first thing I needed to do when I got back to lessons was I had to relearn the amount of air needed to sing. Since I had only been speaking and doing speaking-like exercises, my body had forgotten the kind of support it needed to get up to my higher range. Luckily, a few good breathing exercises al la Richard Miller would help get that support strength back up pretty quickly. Unfortunately, finding the right air-flow balance during singing would take a lot longer.
I also needed to learn what pharyngeal space actually felt like. This concept would take a long time for me to figure out, mainly because my tongue base still had this lovely way of wanting it’s hand in the process; kinda like that pesky neighbor on Bewitched.
Physically sensing pharyngeal space is a strange thing. It’s especially strange to someone coming off an eight-year injury like me. I think the main problem was that I had been trying to physically pry open my throat with every muscle I had, because nothing actually ever opened. If I could have used the jaws-of-life to reach in my throat and open everything up, I would have! But without proper laryngeal functionality, healthy phonation is simply not possible. And without healthy phonation, a relaxed laryngeal position enabling pharyngeal space for resonance is also not possible. That equals a big lose-lose for someone with an injury. So when it came for me to try to find all that space international singers use to resonate with, I was kinda screwed. The truth is, for someone coming off an injury, obtaining that “space” doesn’t feel like they’re doing anything at all. It doesn’t feel special. But I would wager money that what happens when you first ask someone coming right out of therapy to create “space” is they jam their larynx down, retract that tongue base so everything sounds “dark” in their head, or maybe they jack their soft palate up through their nasal passages (which isn’t really raising the soft palate at all if things are getting nasal.) Either way, the result isn’t pretty. My teacher would sometimes have me think of darkening the sound to find the space, but that mainly got the tongue too involved, so then we went back to just phonating comfortably. I swung on the dark-light-dark pendulum so many times I got pretty dizzy and confused. While I’m sure regular lessons with my fabulous teacher would have solved some of these issues more quickly, my finances and work schedule simply did not allow for it. So I decided, since I was the one who would really have to solve the puzzle that was my voice, I would start to work from the beginning again. Only, I had been singing on an injury for so long that I had absolutely no idea where “beginning” was. (Dang... New I should have gone to med school instead.)
And all the while, I had to continue to deal with all the emotional repercussions. Was it mainly a confidence thing? Of course! My voice had been like that one incredibly unreliable friend that always cancels on you at the last minute and is never around when you really need them to be. It’s very hard to trust something like that. Now that it was healed, I had to learn how to trust it when it came time to perform. That required a whole new bag of tricks than just technique…
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