Category: Vocal Mechanics

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Why do I keep losing my voice?

Many ask me

“why do I keep losing my voice?“

As well as…

“why am I constantly hoarse?”

“I feel like I’m never getting back to full strength vocally”

The truth is, losing your voice can be caused by something very small and simple, but is a serious, serious thing whatever your job.

I meet a lot of speakers (e.g. church preachers, business-people, teachers, call-centre staff, etc) who are losing their voice on a regular basis throughout the year.

Why is this?

This is due to abuse, overuse, and/or misuse.

When we do any or all of these things we cause a swelling in the vocal cords – an edema. If we are not careful, this general swelling can become localised inflammation such as nodules… which can carry serious consequences (while serious, this isn’t the purpose of this article, as we’ve already discussed this in another article. Click here if you want to read more about nodules).

The best way to tackle losing your voice (before even talking about voice therapy) is to identify where you are abusing, misusing or overusing your voice in the week.

IMPORTANT DEFINITION: To get the best use out of the following, we are going to define a comfortable speaking volume as the volume you would use when holding a conversation with one other person, in a completely silent room (e.g. no other people, no music playing, no hum from electrical goods, no TV, etc). This is your voice’s natural weight and calibration showing through. Bear that in mind as we read the following:

AREA 1 – Abuse

– This is often the easiest one to spot. If you spend a lot of time at (say) football matches or at loud clubs, then you are going to be shouting a lot. It only takes a few minute of intense shouting to cause noticeable damage to your vocal cords.

Scaling it back from “shouting”, I know many speakers who (in an effort to be more dramatic onstage) regularly go for a soft yell throughout their talks. Whilst obviously dramatic and helpful for communication, if shouting is a 10/10 on the wear and tear scale, then that artificial soft yelling or aggressive speaking can be a 5-7/10 on the wear and tear scale.

Mark’s Suggestion: Reduce your weekly vocal load

Try looking at your average week and its activities, and pay attention to periods where you are regularly raising your voice above a comfortable speaking volume. Recognise that these are going to be the biggest source of vocal stress and vocal loading during your week.

Try to either reduce the frequency of these events, keep the highest vocal intensity to a minimum duration, or reduce the overall intensity at which you use your voice at these events (or ideally all three) will result in a BIG difference overall.

AREA 2 – Overuse

– This one is a little harder to spot. Whereas everyone can identify shouting, not everyone can identify what constitutes overuse. Particularly in teams of people where a leader or critical numbers of team members raise their voices all day every day, people then assume that is what they need to be doing as well…

But, we are not all built the same – we need to recognise our own abilities and strengths, and play to those, not those of others.

Everyone has (relatively speaking) their own vocal balance point, where they are not so loud they are fatiguing themselves, but not so quiet they feel like they are drying their voice out.

More than that, we all have a certain amount of vocal loading that we can take, i.e. how much talking/singing can we take in a day without suffering. Some people can take a LOT of use of their voice with no ill effects, others need regular time-out time for their voice.

A lot of people also have a diary where they have a day of heavy vocal use (e.g. at a conference, meeting with lots of people), then yet another day of heavy vocal use (e.g. the same again, or a de-brief with team members about how the day before went), followed by another day (e.g. more meetings, etc). It’s like doing repeated intense gym days, but never actually resting.

Mark’s Suggestion: Establish and change problematic patterns

Try looking at your average week and its activities, and notice when your voice starts to fatigue. Then, try and establish the trajectory that landed you there, e.g. what’s happening on the days leading up to that regular voice loss/fatigue.

Like in the abuse section, try reducing the amount of vocal loading you are doing in those times (e.g. talk to fewer people, factor in allocated rest time, don’t sing along to things if you don’t have to) as well as identifying any potential excess intensity.

AREA 3 – Misuse

– This one is even harder to spot, particularly as we’ve already covered shouting as abuse, and excessive use as overuse.

When I talk about misuse, I’m talking more about the way in which we use our voice as an tool/instrument. Many people aren’t shouting or even using their voice excessively, but they suffer fatigue – why? Because the way in which use their voice is fundamentally unhealthy.

Call centre staff can often be overly breathy when they speak, with excess air going over their vocal cords. This dries them out and fatigues them, despite low volume. Therapists are similar. Certain business people can be more glottal when they speak (abrupt, hard starts to words) in an effort to be more authoritative or dominating. Whilst arguably effective, without even being loud, this can aggravate the cords.

Others often speak at the very bottom end of their voice in an effort to introduce vocal fry into their voice (think Morgan Freeman), which can be very wearing on the voice without any substantial volume.

These things can be addressed through various vocalises (voice exercises) that help return the voice to a more balanced and relatively normal state. With time, these will create robustness in your voice, by increasing the threshold of vocal stress you can take, and by increasing the duration of vocal loading you can cope with.

Mark’s Suggestion: Establish a base-line of your voice, and stick to it

To identify this, think about your normal speaking voice (as defined above) and compare that to the various stages of your day to day activity. If you want to get really analytical, perhaps even record the two, and identify how they differ.

While you need to know what you’re doing to fix this, this will go some way to showing how far from healthy you are likely straying with the daily use of your voice.

Question: Why do I keep losing my voice?

Answer: Abuse, overuse and misuse

Revisit your week, and identify these three areas. You’ll be surprised what you’ll find that can improve your voice. I use this same process when I work with people who’ve had weekly or seemingly constant ongoing voice issues (e.g. church staff members, call centre staff, teachers, business-people, etc), and we find that this approach means their voice returns fully within a few weeks.

Within a few months they find they rarely get knocked off balance again. Many comment that their voice is so much more robust, that it almost seems insane to think they’d ever had the voice issues they’d had previously.

Try following the above suggestions, and look after your voice – it’s the only one you’ve got!

Learn More: Related Articles

If you want to learn more about vocal health and voice issues, you may enjoy the following articles:
Shouting masquerading as singing: Why so many singers are just yelling
Why vocal problems so regularly derail careers, permanently
Famous Singers with Voice Problems
Vocal Health Issues
My Singing Voice Hurts: 5 Habits for Vocal Health
Vocal Longevity: The Icarus Effect
The Seriousness of Vocal Fold Nodules

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The Seriousness of Vocal Fold Nodules

Last night, I was contacted by someone I taught briefly, and this chat brought up the seriousness of vocal fold nodules.

This person was someone I taught for a short period of time whilst collaborating with a local dance and drama school. This singer successfully auditioned and secured a place at a major National dance school, where they have been for a little while now. I’m being intentionally vague about whether they are male or female, or which school they are studying at… I’ll leave you to read between the lines.

This student has a nice voice, but ultimately an untrained one. The reason they contacted me was that it was confirmed they have nodules, and they wanted to know what they could do about it, whether coaching could help, etc, as they had received little help from their instructors they were studying under.

Before we go any further, let’s talk about nodules and what they actually are.

Nodules are the result of swelling of the vocal fold, typically due to overuse/misuse – i.e. ABUSE. Excessive use or abuse of the vocal folds can lead to redness/swelling of the folds (swelling = vocal edema), which (if they are continued to be sung upon) can lead to localised swelling (like the formation of blisters on your hands – soft nodules), and can become hard and fibrous (like the formation of callouses – hard nodules).

The progressive nature of this interferes with correct use of the vocal folds, and corrupts the sound you here from the vocal folds.

Vocal Edema – Like swelling of any other part of the body, if you catch it at that stage, adequate rest can return it to normal. Most of us have had this, maybe during a bad respiratory infection, excessive coughing, shouting at a sporting event, talking too loudly at a party or a pub/club, etc. With adequate rest, you can recover in a relatively short space of time, but if you keep using your voice despite this, it can progress towards…

Soft Nodules – This is not an official term, it’s just to help you realise there are certain progression levels of nodules. If I had to give an analogy, these are like the beginning of blisters on the palm of your hand as they are beginning to form. This is obviously a more advanced condition than just straight swelling, but despite this, adequate rest and some care/medication can reduce this, and a return to normal can be achieved.

Continued singing on the folds is NOT a good idea, as this can lead to…

Hard Nodules – UNLIKE swelling or blisters, and very much like callouses on the rest of your body, these do NOT disappear with rest. The fibrous material that these turn into need to be cut off surgically, and there are risks and long-term hazards with dealing with this. Trust me, this is serious. Which then obviously begs the question of…

How do you avoid nodules as a singer?

As a normal person whose job doesn’t involve singing or raising their voice, adequate rest for their voice and simple exercises like Ingo Titze’s semi-occluded straw exercise is massively helpful.

For singers who just sing at home/very occasional gigs, or maybe normal people who don’t sing but who use their voice a fair bit in their day to day job (e.g. teachers, call centre staff, etc) the above combined with avoiding excessive volume of speaking/singing on a regular basis will help.

For those who sing regularly, train in a dance school, gig in a band, or perhaps those who hold down a job behind noisy bars or clubs, etc, more serious measures should be taken… because once you start down the road of swelling, without immediate rest, the progressive nature of swelling > soft nodules > hard nodules tends to take over.

What can coaching do for people with nodules?

If they are hard nodules, as far as I am aware, there is nothing that can be done by a coach to improve the situation… not until the nodules are removed surgically. The fibrous mass that defines the hardness of hard nodules is just too solid to shift by the body’s natural processes.

For those who’ve had hard nodules removed or who have even serious but still soft nodules, rehabilitation can still be done.

Frankly, if nodules occur even once, just standard speech therapy is (in my opinion and experience) rarely enough. Most speech therapists deal with SPEECH, the demands of which are substantially lower than the demands of high intensity singing. What they often prescribe are great for restoring a speaking voice for someone in whom the nodules were a freak accident. But for singers, they will be given a lot of vocal rest, some limited rehabilitation, and then they will go right back to doing what they did before.

The nodule is not the disease, it’s the symptom.

It’s the symptom of a voice that is not capable of surviving under the demands the singer chooses to place on it. It is the state of the voice that is the problem… and that is something that a skilled voice coach can help dramatically with.

For example, with lower level edema and some small soft nodules, the voice can often feel a lot weightier than normal, which only serves to aggravate the voice as it is used even minutely throughout the day… only making things worse and prolonging recovery. A way that I have found successful in assisting recovery is to get the singer OUT of that part of their voice with various functional stretching exercises (prescribed on a per singer basis, dependent on the state of their voice and what they can cope with in their damaged state) helps to lift their voice out of the bottom end. What does this mean? Whereas before the very symptom created a vicious cycle where the voice couldn’t recover properly, this cycle is broken, and assisted recovery is possible.

Another thing this does, is help to retrain the singer to accept more correct vocal function. Typically singers that develop nodules sing too hard and too heavy for too long, not allowing the right resonances to happen as they ascend, and that fatigues the voice dramatically. As such, by introducing the singer to an extremely light but ultimately correct connection from bottom to top and back down again (where possible), helps them to accept a more functionally correct and ultimately sustainable singing approach once they have recovered…

In truth, if the singer doesn’t retrain even a little, once the nodules are gone, it is extremely likely they will just occur again, because nothing has really changed.

If you ARE concerned you have nodules, book in a visit with your ENT. If you DO have nodules, and they have said speech therapy will be necessary, please do drop me a line – if this has happened before (and if you want to make sure it doesn’t happen again) retraining to some extent will go a LONG way to helping this.

Learn More: Related Articles

If you want to learn more about vocal health and voice issues, you may enjoy the following articles:
Shouting masquerading as singing: Why so many singers are just yelling
Why vocal problems so regularly derail careers, permanently
Famous Singers with Voice Problems
Vocal Health Issues
My Singing Voice Hurts: 5 Habits for Vocal Health
Vocal Longevity: The Icarus Effect
Why do I keep losing my voice: Overuse, Misuse and Abuse

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The Power of Singing With Simplicity

I want to talk to you today about singing with simplicity.

I was chatting with another voice coach this week about what fires them up, musically and vocally speaking. This coach (female) is massively into RnB, soul, etc. THAT’S their bag. People should be going to them, not necessarily to polish their technique on a foundational level, but because this coach gets most fired up about styling the voice in the way that they & their students want.

This is awesome. I love this. It shows an understanding of who they are, and (most importantly) WHY they do what they do.

And it got me thinking, at least from a style point of view, why do I do what I do? Musically and vocally.

Well, once about a time, I was a bassist and guitarist, and I was heavily into jazz, some of it fairly advanced. I got stuck into virtuoso musicians and, in trying to cop what they were doing, I went out and learned how to do some pretty darn complicated things. I loved it… or at least, I think I loved it… truth be told, I can’t really remember whether I ACTUALLY loved the sounds I was making – i.e. I was making sounds that I genuinely thought sounded good – or whether I loved the feeling of doing something complicated – i.e. I was making sounds that I thought sounded impressive.

And it’s that question that’s driven me over the last few years. Am I doing something because it SOUNDS good, or because I think it’s impressive? Singing with simplicity forces you to confront that question head on.

Don’t get me wrong, the two are not mutually exclusive… but it’s an interesting question isn’t it?

And when you drill down into it, there’s also a fundamental difference in what each says about you. Choosing to do something because it sounds good is about delivering OTHERS a great sound, but doing something because it’s impressive says more about your need to impress others – again, not that either are necessarily mutually exclusive or that impressing others is a bad thing, but these are definitely some powerful thought experiments for musicians to play with, and these are the outcomes I’ve reached over the years

So where does that leave me with my voice and my kind of music?

Well, the realisation that simplicity and quality go hand in hand has been huge – singing with simplicity is the crystallisation of this. It’s made me realise there is real power in simplicity. Immense power, in fact. Just singing the melody (like my blog article ‘The importance of singing the damn melody’) and committing 100% to delivering it beautifully is HUGE. It can raise the hairs on the back of people’s necks without ever breaking a sweat, and without having to do insane vocal acrobatics.

In short, I’m a big believer that if your technique is solid (and I mean REALLY solid), utilisation of range, riffs, power, etc, they all get recruited pretty naturally as a way to support the quality of your voice. I’m not even saying “sound good first, style second”, I’d go so far as to say “sound good first, and you will FIND your style through that”… in essence, style becomes a natural by-product and outworking of great technique.

This is not to say that other teachers who start with style are necessarily wrong (though there are definitely coaches out there who ONLY know how to style, and not to train a voice), nor that style should never be looked at directly/explicitly… rather, that the above thought experiments and my own personality have led me to the working conclusion that simplicity is incredibly powerful, and that this musically trumps complexity every time.

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Can vocal technique fix laryngitis?

Or a sore throat? Or other vocal issues?

Laryngitis is an inflammation of the larynx, usually caused by a viral infection, but sometimes has a bacterial source. The vocal cords are typically swollen and irritated, leading to hoarseness, partial or even complete voice loss depending on the severity of the laryngitis. It typically takes around a week to clear, sometimes a little sooner, but often takes a little longer.

As a voice coach or singer, to contract laryngitis is not good. It not only means sessions with clients need to be arranged, but a great source of joy is basically off-limits to permit speedy recovery. If you’ve ever had issues like this, you’ll know how frustrating it can be.

Your instrument is essentially broken for a period of time, and returning to it too soon can result in prolonging the issue, or even causing some harm to it outside of the laryngitis-related swelling.

Now, with that out of the way, time to answer the question:

Can vocal technique fix laryngitis?

In a word, no.

BUT!! It can do amazing things in the recovery – let me explain.

In my experience of working with singers as they are getting over a bug, whether laryngitis or something else, a working knowledge of the state of their recovery can help a HUGE amount.

TESTING THE CONDITION
Firstly, we can test the extent of the swelling during laryngitis (or any other vocal trauma/illness) using simple tests. Swelling means it’s hard for the vocal cords to adduct and perform as they normally would. This normally causes excess air to bleed through, and head voice co-ordination to be hard to access without force, or even inaccessible. Trying to sing a simple melody in the head register (e.g. happy birthday as lightly as possible) tends to indicate whether any work can be done on the voice, or whether it needs to be a day of vocal rest. It’s important to note that sometimes this test is passed, but rest is still necessary.

DURING THE ILLNESS/ISSUE
Often the very swelling of the vocal cords causes the condition to last longer than the initial condition would suggest. Why? The extra thickness in the cords tends to result in a lower pitch of vibration for the person’s voice. Even with limited speaking/singing/talking, this can really grate on the person’s voice even during recovery.

This is where specific applied use of exercises can be immensely helpful. This is NOT something that an inexperienced person can do, it does require training and time spent regularly working with voices.

In a nutshell, the way that functional voice exercises work is to get the operational muscles of the larynx to co-operate correctly with one another. Specific stretching exercises done lightly and in an appropriate range/direction can help to *lift* the voice out of the heavy area it has been left to sit in. While this does not *fix* the condition (laryngitis, nodule recovery, etc), in my experience it DOES serve to neutralise the day-to-day symptoms of those conditions. This can aid in the speed of recovery, and in the cases of singers with bad habits that caused the issue, help them to form new good habits during recovery so that they do not return to that state so readily in the future.

So why did I ask whether vocal technique could fix laryngitis, if the answer is ‘no’?

Well, in short, while it can’t fix it – physical and vocal rest, staying hydrated and keeping energy levels up (like recovery for any illness) is best – the manner in which good functional vocal exercises work can aid massively, both in the diagnosis, and also in the recovery process.

Learn More: Related Articles

If you want to learn more about vocal technique and great singing, you may enjoy these related articles:
The Difference between Amateurs and Pros
The problem with trying to teach voice using ONLY voice science
Vocal Pedagogy: Past, present and future
Singers: The Difference Between Vocalists and Performers
Vocal Tessitura: What is it?
What is vocal fach?
The Key to Vocal Consistency

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Formants In Singing – What on earth are they?

So, let’s talk about Formants in Singing…

While I’ve taken a break from coaching and working on my own voice in general over the Christmas holiday (boy was that a good rest!), I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading on formants in singing. If any of you have any interest in voice science, I can thoroughly recommend Kenneth W. Bozeman’s ‘Practical Vocal Acoustics’. This is a helpful book covering the science of the voice from the perspective of the TEACHER and the singer, rather than purely from a voice scientist’s perspective. It’s this book that I’ll be drawing on for today’s explanation.

One of the things that keeps cropping up in my ol’ noggin is how critical the first bridge is… why? Because it’s crossing this portion of the voice that enables access to the rest of the voice… therefore, pretty important!

For many of us, we may accept that there IS this magical mysterious thing called a “bridge” or “passagi”, or as Kenneth W. Bozeman puts it, “where the voice turns over”… but…

What exactly is the first bridge?

Let’s discuss this. To do that we need to do a very quick (and very coarse) anatomy lesson.

The voice as an instrument consists of two parts:

1) the vocal cords; and

2) the vocal tract (the airway tube between your vocal cords and your lips)

The vocal cords

The vocal cords generate sound (acting as a source of sound), the vocal tract shapes the sound (filter). From here on in, please do me a favour – think of the vocal tract like a plastic water bottle, the squishable kind you can buy from any corner store.

The vocal tract

Have you ever blown across the top of a bottle that isn’t completely full? Have you ever noticed that the bottle has a particular pitch that it seems to generate? This is called resonance. Empty volumes (like plastic bottles) have distinct frequencies that they vibrate at when excited (e.g. by blowing across the top of it). You can spot the same effect by banging the side of a long cardboard poster tube and notice the pitch of the noise it emits, or even by humming down the length of that tube. These pitches are referred to as “formants”, and are a by-product of the fact that empty volumes exhibit resonance at particular frequencies.

NOTE: You don’t need to remember all this per se, I merely mention it so you respect the idea that empty volumes have an associated pitch they like to vibrate it, and that these pitches are called formants.

Now, let’s continue the analogy. If you change the shape of the empty volume inside the bottle (e.g. by squeezing it or adding some water in/taking some water out), then blowing across it, the associated pitches it wants to vibrate it (the formants) will have changed. The same effect can be achieved by cutting that long cardboard poster tube to a different length, then banging it again. The change in shape affects the resonance, which in turn affects the formants.

HALFWAY SUMMARY:
– The vocal cords generate specific frequencies (the singer’s pitch)
– The vocal tract resonates at specific frequencies (the formant(s) of the instrument)

In short, despite the chief difference where the cords generate the frequencies whilst the tract doesn’t actually generate those frequencies, both the vocal cords and the vocal tract possess their own particular sets of frequencies that are associated with them.

It’s the interaction between these two sets of specific frequencies that is an important phenomenon for singing.

Here’s the low-down…

The first bridge occurs when a certain frequency generated by the vocal cords happens to pass through a certain corresponding frequency of the vocal tract (a specific formant)*.

As you can see, this makes the whole concept of the first bridge *relatively* straight-forward to understand, but also results in the realisation that it’s a REEEEEEALLY complicated thing to get sorted in singers. If the first bridge happens as two frequencies cross each other, then what happens if they both start changing together? What happens if one suddenly changes during the process?

It’s a complicated system… it’s dependent on the pitch/frequency of the voice, the pitch that the vocal tract wants to vibrate it, which in turn is dependent on the shape of the vocal tract, but is also affected by the volume of the singer (as this affects excitation of the vocal tract).

*Deep breath*

Don’t panic.

This is all completely trainable, and completely manageable… but it takes more than just good exercises. It requires (in my opinion) a structured and logical approach to applying those exercises, so that singers are not constantly hyper-aware of bridges and essentially trying to control a million things at once all whilst trying to sing with emotion, but instead builds the required co-ordination into muscle memory, to thereby make easy connected singing automatic.

So… now you know where the first bridge comes from… What’s stopping you?

* – Specifically, when the second harmonic (H2) generated by the vocal cords passes through the first formant (F1) of the vocal tract. You DON’T need to remember this to be a great singer.

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Clever Use of Keys

Today I want to talk about the clever use of keys. For those of you who don’t know I grew up in Hong Kong. One of the things that you hear a LOT of in HK is canto-pop – i.e. cantonese pop music.

In canto-pop there is a HUGE love for softly sung ballads with lighter voices and higher pitched songs.. often CRAZY high pitched in order to get a much thinner and arguably more feminine sound even from the men.

Other countries in Asia have a very similar preference for pop music, and Korea is no different. A Korean student of mine (who has great taste in music!) brought in this prime example of more Asian lighter-voiced pop from Park Hyo Shin:

IMPORTANT: Even if (like me) you don’t speak Korean, just have a listen to the quality of the voice in the verses – notice how light and airy it is…

This is the result of intentionally picking a higher key than perhaps is vocally ideal for ease in the voice, then overly thinning the voice out in order to make it more comfortable to sing.

Over time this can be verrrry fatiguing or even damaging for the singers’ voice, and can also result in a singing voice that is drastically disparate from the singers speaking – i.e. they sound verrry different when they sing.

While there are many singers that do this, at a very basic level (to one extent or another) this does erode the conversational nature of the singer singing the song…

If singing is about moving people, maintaining a conversational spoken quality to the voice is of critical importance in achieving this… irrespective of style.

The Clever Use of Keys I Mentioned…

Here is another singer from Korea (also brought in my by Korean student) who keeps that conversational quality I mentioned above…

Notice how he bucks the trend of the light voiced Asian pop? There is real depth and definition to his voice, and the WHOLE range is richer for it.

I would probably put money on the notion that if the other singer (Park Hyo Shin) was given the same song, he would probably choose to place it several keys higher to achieve that more thinned out sound (NOTE: I’m reliably informed Park has adjusted his sound to be more appropriate for the natural balance of his speaking voice since that era of his recording life).

By changing the tonal centre, by way of a clever use of keys, singers can not only embrace the best bits of their voice and avoid the pitfalls of any organic instrument, but also create a more conversational spoken quality to their performance… irrespective of style or genre.

Try it yourself!

Try taking a song you feel is a bit of a reach down about 3 semitones and see how it sounds in your voice. It’s not about ego or being macho, it’s about sounding the best for your voice. Remember, 3 semitones is not the magic key change number, it’s just to get you starter in experiencing a different sensation in your voice, and to realise that a clever use of keys and key-changing of your songs is a BIG factor in how good (to great!) you can sound!