The exercises my therapist gave me really seemed to work without me trying to do anything to get them to work. After a couple of weeks of doing the belly breathing, my larynx was automatically releasing in my throat. In fact, this technique became my primary way of releasing my voice if it felt tense or fatigued at work. If fatigue got really bad before the end of my shift, say on a busy day, I would go to the bathroom and do some laryngeal massages along with the belly breath and some pulses on a hum to get my voice back on track. I carried a pitch pipe with me to work so I could check and make sure I wasn’t going back to a low, strained pitch. I am hoping to go more into exactly how these exercises were so effective, but I’m afraid I need a little more time to research that one.
I suspect it was this vocal strain that would occur when I spoke too low that made the SLP want to re-pitch my voice. She really did this with her exercises for laryngeal relaxation and by keeping all my vocalizations centered around the target pitch—or area of target pitches. There wasn’t any more to it. I wasn’t instructed to “think higher” or anything during my day-to-day communication. I was only instructed to relax my voice with the belly breathing and massages if I felt fatigued or strained. I think the success of re-pitching while improving my voice was a result of not thinking about it at all while staying very diligent about the laryngeal relaxation. The simple act of doing the exercises a few times every day did the work for me. This is why I became such a tactile voice user, I was feeling differences in my speaking voice day in and day out without consciously trying to bring those changes about.
Through this process, I learned a great deal about what I was doing wrong when speaking and what effects it was having on my life. I realized that I had been speaking with a lot of strain and over-pressurization, so it was no wonder my voice was getting so fatigued by the end of the day. My therapist was pitching my voice around middle C instead of the F below middle C where I was speaking before therapy. She was totally right about the F below being too low. I couldn’t even sing that pitch without feeling strain, so why was I speaking down there all the time?
I learned that all this time, I had been going about the “speaking higher” concept entirely wrong. When other people had told me to speak higher, what I had actually been doing was one of two things: I either raised my larynx, which caused a lot of strain, or I was actually not speaking any higher at all, but using my head voice to talk too low. This sounded like I was speaking higher in my head, when in reality I was just adding more strain and stress to my already-struggling voice. (I really would suggest that voice teachers should probably just recommend a short round of voice therapy for the students they think have bad speaking habits, since there is simply not enough time to adequately address speaking habits in a lesson, and you never know what that student is doing with your well-intentioned suggestions outside of the studio day in and day out.)
What shocked me the most, though, was how much denial I had been in for years about the shape of my voice. All throughout grade school, I was that girl with a loud voice. (Which was actually just a naturally resonant voice; it wasn’t loud from strain.) I was always the first to be shushed by my teachers, probably because they heard me above everyone else. I was also the girl in theater class who never had to be told to project because folks could usually hear me just fine out in the house. I know it’s not unusual for singers to have loud speaking voices, and I’m sure many of you could share the same stories of grade-school woes about your voice and how it stuck out. But for the last several years of my life, I had not been hearing anything about how loud my voice was. I was rarely shushed, and if I went out with a group of singers, I usually couldn’t speak loud enough to be heard over them. I couldn’t be heard in loud restaurants very easily, and there was absolutely no hope for me in a dance club. I don’t tend to like going out to loud places anyway, but being heard in those loud places used to not be a problem for me. I had somehow forgotten that fact.
Throughout my master’s degree, I always thought it was the fragile nature of my light soprano voice that made it so sensitive to fatigue and strain in comparison to other singers’ voices. This “sensitivity” was in part what I credited to my not developing any secondary injuries as can be common with paresis. I just had to be very careful about how I used my voice and when. I had to make sure I rested it when it got tired, and I had to not go out to loud places when I had to sing the next day. (Which is good advice for any singer, but if I went out to loud places and strained over the din, I would automatically have induced laryngitis.) My recovery time from fatigue was also a lot longer than it should have been. Normal recovery time shouldn’t take more than a couple hours at most, yet for me it took nearly a whole day to recover. I had seriously been in denial about all of these issues pretty much through the whole of my twenties.
Through my therapy, my loud (i.e. resonant) speaking voice came back. I began to be shushed by colleagues at the bank who thought I was too loud. And instead of being embarrassed or hurt by these comments like I had been in high school, I was so happy to hear them. Not only was it a great reminder to back off the volume, it was also a great sign of my healing! My speaking voice was finally returning to the voice it used to be.
Through this process, I learned a great deal about what I was doing wrong when speaking and what effects it was having on my life. I realized that I had been speaking with a lot of strain and over-pressurization, so it was no wonder my voice was getting so fatigued by the end of the day. My therapist was pitching my voice around middle C instead of the F below middle C where I was speaking before therapy. She was totally right about the F below being too low. I couldn’t even sing that pitch without feeling strain, so why was I speaking down there all the time?
I learned that all this time, I had been going about the “speaking higher” concept entirely wrong. When other people had told me to speak higher, what I had actually been doing was one of two things: I either raised my larynx, which caused a lot of strain, or I was actually not speaking any higher at all, but using my head voice to talk too low. This sounded like I was speaking higher in my head, when in reality I was just adding more strain and stress to my already-struggling voice. (I really would suggest that voice teachers should probably just recommend a short round of voice therapy for the students they think have bad speaking habits, since there is simply not enough time to adequately address speaking habits in a lesson, and you never know what that student is doing with your well-intentioned suggestions outside of the studio day in and day out.)
What shocked me the most, though, was how much denial I had been in for years about the shape of my voice. All throughout grade school, I was that girl with a loud voice. (Which was actually just a naturally resonant voice; it wasn’t loud from strain.) I was always the first to be shushed by my teachers, probably because they heard me above everyone else. I was also the girl in theater class who never had to be told to project because folks could usually hear me just fine out in the house. I know it’s not unusual for singers to have loud speaking voices, and I’m sure many of you could share the same stories of grade-school woes about your voice and how it stuck out. But for the last several years of my life, I had not been hearing anything about how loud my voice was. I was rarely shushed, and if I went out with a group of singers, I usually couldn’t speak loud enough to be heard over them. I couldn’t be heard in loud restaurants very easily, and there was absolutely no hope for me in a dance club. I don’t tend to like going out to loud places anyway, but being heard in those loud places used to not be a problem for me. I had somehow forgotten that fact.
Throughout my master’s degree, I always thought it was the fragile nature of my light soprano voice that made it so sensitive to fatigue and strain in comparison to other singers’ voices. This “sensitivity” was in part what I credited to my not developing any secondary injuries as can be common with paresis. I just had to be very careful about how I used my voice and when. I had to make sure I rested it when it got tired, and I had to not go out to loud places when I had to sing the next day. (Which is good advice for any singer, but if I went out to loud places and strained over the din, I would automatically have induced laryngitis.) My recovery time from fatigue was also a lot longer than it should have been. Normal recovery time shouldn’t take more than a couple hours at most, yet for me it took nearly a whole day to recover. I had seriously been in denial about all of these issues pretty much through the whole of my twenties.
Through my therapy, my loud (i.e. resonant) speaking voice came back. I began to be shushed by colleagues at the bank who thought I was too loud. And instead of being embarrassed or hurt by these comments like I had been in high school, I was so happy to hear them. Not only was it a great reminder to back off the volume, it was also a great sign of my healing! My speaking voice was finally returning to the voice it used to be.
Next up: The End of Therapy
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