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?