Time for some honesty: I didn't sing much this semester. It's a little hard for the voice majors I know to understand since they sing all the time at school, but when you're in a non-music major, music starts to take a back-seat to your studies. I sang a couple of concerts back in March and April, and since then...nada. So I decided this week to get myself back in the game.
If there is ever a time when you get reminded of all your bad vocal habits, it's when you start singing again after a break. I think in part it's because you think you can just jump back in where you were, but the truth is, you've got to ease back in, at least for a couple of days, before you can sing like you used to. If we think about this in terms of daily workouts, I think most people know that if they stop jogging, weight lifting, or fitness classes for a few weeks and do absolutely nothing that the first day back will hurt! Your muscles will be weaker and your stamina just won't be there like it was before. Don't know why I always forget it's the same with my voice, since it is muscle after all!
So here's what I've figured out as a recuperating singer/voice teacher: First, allow the laryngeal muscles to balance out again and the resonance will come shortly after, with some work. (Or, to follow the South Park model: Step 1: Balance laryngeal musculature, Step 2: ?, Step 3: Perfect singing!...maybe that's just what it feels like to me sometimes.)
Here's another confession: I've always had easy high notes. I'm one of those freakish sopranos with the easy high notes that drives the rest of the folks trying to get high notes insane. (Sorry about that.) When I come back from a break, however, while I still have the high notes, the stamina is just not there at all! I can't sing up there for very long before I feel tired. So I've learned to just not do that to myself. I go back to practicing really short bursts of time and that's it, until I feel I can go longer without tiring myself.
However, the very first practice session back in the game: I always, always wear myself out! Singing just usually feels so good after a break. I find myself enjoying it so much that I just don't stop until I can't sing anymore. This is like my little "bowl of ice cream" I allow myself that one day. I just allow myself to enjoy the heck out of it, even if it's not perfect by any means. By allowing myself this moment of "singing for singing's sake", I gain so much motivation to go back and practice again the next day. I give myself the motivation to do those short, intentional practice sessions that aren't that much fun. I remind myself of how great singing is in general, and I'm reminded of how great it is when my voice is really in shape by struggling a little through what was easy a few weeks ago. (Now, I do always allow myself a good 20 minutes or so of vocal rest, along with laryngeal massages, at the end to curb the fatigue a little for the day.)
Does it take long for my muscular balance to come back? No. Takes about 2-3 days of intentional practicing at most. (Just like it takes your body about 2-3 workouts before you're back in that fitness class for real.) Is that time going to increase as I get older? Absolutely. Heck, it used to only be one day before I was back when I was in my 20's, so the amount of time has already extended a little. (And these are breaks of a few weeks, not a few years.) But hitting that grind stone again after I've reminded myself why I need to hit it is worth my one day of vocal extravagance.
My best advice for those coming back after a break: Just enjoy singing a couple of times before you really hit the grind stone, cause the grind stone alone sorta sucks.
Next up: The bad vocal habits I always, always have to work through every time I come back to singing. Fun times.
New Voice, New Career
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Monday, May 16, 2011
The science and responsibility of vocal training
"Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense." --Carl Sagan
As many of you may be realizing based on my past posts, I am training to be a scientist. Through this lovely process, I am learning that being "scientific" about things really is more about a thought process than anything else. Until I'm big enough to conduct my own studies, being scientific about the studies I read involves thinking critically about the quality of the study, the reliability of the results, and the decision whether or not to put those results into my practice. To put it another way, I am training to be hyper-critical of the evidence that either supports or contradicts any hypothesis I might think of. Where there is no evidence, I let my hypothesis remain just solely that and I don't hesitate to change what I think is right as soon as quality evidence is presented to contradict it. This all leads me to wonder: Why is this training not part of every pedagogy class in music, at least to some degree?
In the SLP field, there is a huge push for something called evidence-based practice. This is a practice put in place in the other medical therapies, like physical and occupational, and the field of education, just to name a few. The reason for a big push is there is relatively little evidence for the SLP field. Part of this could be how far-reaching the field is as a whole. I mean, you could be recuperating injured voices, working with neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson disease, improving children's language skills, working on speech problems like stuttering or apraxia, working with aphasia, or treating cases of dysphagia. It is a really broad field! At the end of the master's degree in SLP, you test for your ASHA license which tests your proficiency in the field as a whole. After that, you've got to log in a certain number of training hours every year with ASHA to maintain your license. If you specialize in voice, it would be logical for your training to be in that area and vice versa for any other area your specialize in. Being able to discern quality evidence for your treatment plan from the body of evidence available is rather critical for your choice in on-going training in the field and for your responsibility to provide the best treatment you can for your clients.
This has led me to wonder why we don't train voice teachers to discern quality evidence from techniques lacking evidence, even if it's based on expert opinion and experience and not randomized control studies or meta-analyses. Heck, a fair number of voice teachers aren't even trained up on the physiological intricacies of the vocal, pharyngeal, and articulatory systems well enough to understand current studies being published on those topics. (Obviously, the excellent and well-educated teachers out there are the exception to this.)
Perhaps it is being in an artistic field that we tend to think of the best voice teachers as people who have the talent to teach. We think of teaching as something that's ingrained, not taught. While I do agree that the passion and desire for teaching can be based in innate talent, I would argue that what great teachers do instinctually can be taught, to some degree. If students in SLP can be taught to think critically about the evidence for their treatments, then I believe music students can be taught that as well. Obviously, this is not a field in which licensure demands you keep up on the current studies (which makes me wonder why don't we require ongoing education on voice/vocal technique at least from our university professors...), but the sense of responsibility to use the best techniques at your disposal to aid your students should be emphasized. We like to think that so much responsibility lies on the student, and they do bear a great deal, but when it comes to what they are being taught and putting into practice, that lies with the teacher.
Perhaps there is an assumption that students are lazy if what you teach them doesn't work, but I think that is an irresponsible assumption to make. When my voice was partially paralyzed, I'll be honest, I did stop "practicing" technique at a certain point in my path. I didn't stop because I was lazy, I stopped because I wasn't making any progress no matter how much I practiced. I stopped because it was frustrating and disheartening, and it was equally frustrating and dis hearting to have my (at that time) voice teacher to assume my laziness and not think to ask why I had just given up like that. Was it my laziness or his/hers?
Here's the other problem: There are probably a lot of voice teachers still all aflutter over what some great voice scientist discovered twenty + years ago and basing much of their pedagogical ideals on that study. In the SLP field, there is some great, great stuff from 20 + years ago that is still in practice because it works, there is a much larger body of evidence from 20 + years ago that has been disproven, that has never been recreated in another study (meaning that study lacks test-retest reliability), and/or has been proven not to generalize to the client's daily life. If you're still practicing something that's been disproven or that was initially based in grand assumption then you're being irresponsible to your clients (in SLP). I believe the same thing happens in our field as well.
We assume things about our students and we assume things about vocal science that might not be totally reliable, and then we put a lid on it and don't think of changing our assumptions. Or, because we didn't think the old studies from the 70's served any reliable purpose in the training of our voice or our students, we throw the baby out with the bathwater and assume voice science has nothing to offer operatic training. I propose that those tendencies to make broad assumptions should be what gets trained out (or we at least attempt to train-out) of all of those thousands of voice students that go out into the world and teach to some degree. We should feel enough love and respect for our field to make that effort, shouldn't we?
As many of you may be realizing based on my past posts, I am training to be a scientist. Through this lovely process, I am learning that being "scientific" about things really is more about a thought process than anything else. Until I'm big enough to conduct my own studies, being scientific about the studies I read involves thinking critically about the quality of the study, the reliability of the results, and the decision whether or not to put those results into my practice. To put it another way, I am training to be hyper-critical of the evidence that either supports or contradicts any hypothesis I might think of. Where there is no evidence, I let my hypothesis remain just solely that and I don't hesitate to change what I think is right as soon as quality evidence is presented to contradict it. This all leads me to wonder: Why is this training not part of every pedagogy class in music, at least to some degree?
In the SLP field, there is a huge push for something called evidence-based practice. This is a practice put in place in the other medical therapies, like physical and occupational, and the field of education, just to name a few. The reason for a big push is there is relatively little evidence for the SLP field. Part of this could be how far-reaching the field is as a whole. I mean, you could be recuperating injured voices, working with neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson disease, improving children's language skills, working on speech problems like stuttering or apraxia, working with aphasia, or treating cases of dysphagia. It is a really broad field! At the end of the master's degree in SLP, you test for your ASHA license which tests your proficiency in the field as a whole. After that, you've got to log in a certain number of training hours every year with ASHA to maintain your license. If you specialize in voice, it would be logical for your training to be in that area and vice versa for any other area your specialize in. Being able to discern quality evidence for your treatment plan from the body of evidence available is rather critical for your choice in on-going training in the field and for your responsibility to provide the best treatment you can for your clients.
This has led me to wonder why we don't train voice teachers to discern quality evidence from techniques lacking evidence, even if it's based on expert opinion and experience and not randomized control studies or meta-analyses. Heck, a fair number of voice teachers aren't even trained up on the physiological intricacies of the vocal, pharyngeal, and articulatory systems well enough to understand current studies being published on those topics. (Obviously, the excellent and well-educated teachers out there are the exception to this.)
Perhaps it is being in an artistic field that we tend to think of the best voice teachers as people who have the talent to teach. We think of teaching as something that's ingrained, not taught. While I do agree that the passion and desire for teaching can be based in innate talent, I would argue that what great teachers do instinctually can be taught, to some degree. If students in SLP can be taught to think critically about the evidence for their treatments, then I believe music students can be taught that as well. Obviously, this is not a field in which licensure demands you keep up on the current studies (which makes me wonder why don't we require ongoing education on voice/vocal technique at least from our university professors...), but the sense of responsibility to use the best techniques at your disposal to aid your students should be emphasized. We like to think that so much responsibility lies on the student, and they do bear a great deal, but when it comes to what they are being taught and putting into practice, that lies with the teacher.
Perhaps there is an assumption that students are lazy if what you teach them doesn't work, but I think that is an irresponsible assumption to make. When my voice was partially paralyzed, I'll be honest, I did stop "practicing" technique at a certain point in my path. I didn't stop because I was lazy, I stopped because I wasn't making any progress no matter how much I practiced. I stopped because it was frustrating and disheartening, and it was equally frustrating and dis hearting to have my (at that time) voice teacher to assume my laziness and not think to ask why I had just given up like that. Was it my laziness or his/hers?
Here's the other problem: There are probably a lot of voice teachers still all aflutter over what some great voice scientist discovered twenty + years ago and basing much of their pedagogical ideals on that study. In the SLP field, there is some great, great stuff from 20 + years ago that is still in practice because it works, there is a much larger body of evidence from 20 + years ago that has been disproven, that has never been recreated in another study (meaning that study lacks test-retest reliability), and/or has been proven not to generalize to the client's daily life. If you're still practicing something that's been disproven or that was initially based in grand assumption then you're being irresponsible to your clients (in SLP). I believe the same thing happens in our field as well.
We assume things about our students and we assume things about vocal science that might not be totally reliable, and then we put a lid on it and don't think of changing our assumptions. Or, because we didn't think the old studies from the 70's served any reliable purpose in the training of our voice or our students, we throw the baby out with the bathwater and assume voice science has nothing to offer operatic training. I propose that those tendencies to make broad assumptions should be what gets trained out (or we at least attempt to train-out) of all of those thousands of voice students that go out into the world and teach to some degree. We should feel enough love and respect for our field to make that effort, shouldn't we?
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