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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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The Importance of Singing the Damn Melody

I’ve had a number of lessons in the last few weeks that needed us to take the time to stop and visit the original melody of the song.

This is completely normal, whether in lessons or outside of lessons. Whether you are an experienced singer or brand-spanking-new to singing, it’s 100% part of the process to have to break down the melody and get it right.

Now some of you will be thinking “well, DUH Mark – of course I know that”… well, just hold on a tick, because I would almost put money on you not doing this to the fullest extent… and robbing your voice of quality in the process.

Trust me, this is a goodie. Keep reading.

The reason I bring this topic up is because in certain lessons, the student was not truly singing the full melody, but they were convincing themselves the melody they were singing was fine, when the reality was anything but.

In some cases, the singer was rushing to get to styling the song. In other cases, the singer had been singing a prep’d song for so long, they thought they had it nailed and had stopped thinking about the melody… and what they were singing had drifted from the actual melody. And in some cases, the singer had just plain-old not learned the melody to the passage they wanted to sing well enough, but had convinced themselves they had.

Why do I bring this up?

In a webinar series I attended with jazz singer Monique Thomas-Ottaviani, Monique talked about the importance of learning jazz standards from the original sheet music. Why? Because there was no definitive version of jazz standards… if you went to listen to a recorded version from a particular artists before learning it from the sheet music, you would not be getting the true melody that was originally written. Every singer imparts their own style, no matter how little they style the song.

Jazz singing has a lot of room for improvisation. Monique will happily tell you this. BUT! One of the biggest things she mentioned was that unless you “sing the damn melody”, unless you RESPECT the original melody, you have NO RIGHT to solo/improvise with your voice. That’s right. Unless you respect the melody, you haven’t earned that right.

When you take this to it’s logical (and correct!) extreme, you need REAL discipline to learn the melody and express it to it’s fullest before you start deviating and styling.

There is real power in singing a simple melody.

This idea of respecting the original melody is something I see a lot in contemporary musicians generally nowadays (not just in singers). Guitarists want to constantly solo without learning chord progressions. Drummers want to play in advanced time signatures without learning how to play ahead or behind the groove in perfect time. Bass players want to slap all their bass lines without ever learning to hold down a simple groove.

And – thanks to X-factor, The Voice, and various top-level solo vocalists – singers want to style the heck out of their songs, before they ever really learned to sing the melody well in the first place.

But when you REALLY learn the melody. When you really commit to singing that melody, and you’re not just hitting the right note in the right place, but sustaining that note with tonal clarity like a great wind instrumentalist would… man, that’s something else entirely.

THE TAKE-HOME MESSAGE

Instead of spending all that time on styling, finding inordinately complex riffs, manipulating the words to enact some Adele-esque style, putting the song in an impossible key, etc, try spending THAT amount of time milking the original melody to eek out every ounce of quality. Sustaining notes, adding vibrato, understanding the power of space when introduced into a melody, experimenting with varying dynamic levels… and these things take ordinary melodies and turn them into something extraordinary.

That level of discipline, that level of serving the song, that level of “non-ego” in working on a song often negates the need for excessive style. All those things that people strive to do, e.g. riffing, extreme range, etc, suddenly become insignificant when you hear someone “sing the damn melody”.

And this does require real discipline. It requires not giving in to ego, or getting distracted by shiny things, and really committing to singing the damn melody. Trust me, when you hear a great singer start to sing, and they do this, you’ll understand why all the other stuff is no substitute for the real thing.

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The Importance of Clarity

As I’m off this week (with laryngitis, if you’ve not read the other post from this week), I’ve been doing a lot of thinking… I definitely can’t be doing any singing, that’s for certain!

I was having a conversation with another coach recently and they commented on the importance of drive/discipline in achieving goals.

Makes sense right? The more driven you are, the more disciplined you are, the harder you’ll work, and the quicker you’ll arrive at your goals… right? right?

Well… kind of.

Where does discipline come from?

Where does drive come from? Can you really just summon it up at will? Or does it stem from something else? Can you ever truly just create it?

Whatever your answer, most people start every New Year with resolutions and they get all verbally worked up about how this is going to be *their* year, and that things will be different… yet for very few do things actually change. Was that really drive and determination? Seemed more like a flash in the pan.

Or for other people they will tell you that their dreams are to be super-successful at x, y or z. Or they will tell you that their drive and discipline is to achieve time with their family instead of working… yet it never truly transpires that way…

It just doesn’t add up…

Why does the above ever happen if discipline is something you can summon up, or have it stem from statements of intent?

In my honest opinion, drive and discipline stems from the same source:

CLARITY

A great entrepreneur once told me:

Be wary of people whose behaviour is not congruent with their alleged goals.

Why? Because these people are unclear on their true goals. If someone says they are all about X, yet their behaviour only seems to be stacking up to Y, which are you going to believe, their actions or their words?

However, for people whose words and actions are aligned, powerful things happen. Why is this?

Because they have clarity.

Such people whose words and actions match-up have bothered to take the time to be honest with themselves, and identify the things that truly matter to them. Not the things that people tell them they should want (big house, fancy car, 6-7 figure salary, 2.4 kids, etc), and not the things they think that will bring them approval from others (huge business, jet-setting lifestyle, etc), but the things they genuinely long for and know will bring them satisfaction. I’m not saying these things are bad, but a lot of people SAY they want them, and maybe even their actions seem to indicate that’s what they want, but it never arrives… they are not clear that’s what they want.

But once you identify what you TRULY care about with precision, once you completely identify what you VALUE, you gain clarity.

And once you have clarity, EVERYTHING changes. Because everything you do can only ever centre around that… because there is ZERO wiggle room on what matters to you. You know it. Your brain knows it. Your actions can’t help but flow out of this realisation. You just know that if you value X, Y and Z, then no action should ever be taken unless it unlocks X, Y or Z. It’s remarkably simple, yet remarkably powerful.

Drive and discipline to achieve your goals are merely a BY-PRODUCT of clarity. No longer does being disciplined feel like a chore, because it’s the natural outworking of clarity. No longer is drive hard to muster up, because you know beyond a shadow of a doubt where you are trying to get to, and that every action WILL add up to that.

The hardest part of all of this?

Ego.

To be honest with yourself about what you value and what you don’t means losing your ego. For some people it means admitting they don’t really want this or that, and for others it means owning up to the fact they feel like they’ve settled for less. It’s not easy, and it may even mean losing a few friends that are not compatible with the direction you want your life to go in… but it’s worth it to make the space for the right friends.

This is universally applicable.

This can be applied in every area of your life. From how you practice, to how you run your business, to how you run your day to day life. Whether you are applying this to your hobbies, or your own life goals before you’re 60, clarity will bring you all the drive and discipline you need in spades, because these are the natural by-product of clarity.

Give it a shot. Take some time out to identify what it is YOU really value, what you honestly care about, and you’ll be surprised what comes of it.

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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.