As presented at the VASTA Conference, August 8, 2012
I am talking about the use of the Voice for Good as an agent for many kinds of Therapy for human beings, including how I recovered my own speech after a stroke in 2008, although it probably won’t sound as I recovered it today — because under stress, I regress. I was three hours late starting to drive here because my printer crashed and it had to be fixed before I could print out this talk and leave.
Sound waves from many sources are a very potent energy with many beneficial uses, such as doing ultra-sound tests, doing surgery without scalpels or stitches, driving bridge pilings into river beds, mapping the ocean floor, etc. And the sound waves of the human voice also have many beneficial uses, if they are continuously focused out of the throat and into the bones of the hard palate, nose bone and head bones for optimal resonance and projection.
The Voice is also an Agent for maintaining general good vocal health, for healing nodes on the vocal folds, as well as for preventing their formation–and the Voice itself has always been a healing agent for maintaining emotional, physical and psychological health, as evidenced by all the cultures of the world since the earliest times by their marching songs, sea chanties, songs of worship and praise, and songs to dance to.
We are probably all familiar with the fact that when Congresswoman Gabby Gifford was shot in the head and lost her ability to speak, her speech therapy at the Texas Treatment Centre was based on moving from singing to speech.
Neuroscientist Prof. Oliver Saks at Columbia and the neurosurgeons at the Harvard Medical School have for a number of years been researching singing as therapy for brain-damaged patients to recover their speech. I have so far restrained myself from telling them that they are re-inventing the wheel, because Arthur Lessac began using singing and music to recover speech for brain-damaged patients back in the 1950’s, working with WWII veterans who had been referred to him by psychiatrists.
Arthur’s classic questions that are quoted on our Lessac Institute website ask: When you talk do you feel like you’re singing? When you walk do you feel like you’re dancing?
It is important to recognize that the music of the singing voice is carried on the vowels; but the music of speaking voice is carried on the consonants.
We can all recognize that the music of the singing voice is carried on the vowels. But Lessac recognized that the music of the speaking voice is carried on the consonants not the vowels. And that is the step that is needed to make the effective transition from singing to speech.
All of Lessac Kinesensic Training is based on recognizing the human body as a musical instrument—the Voice is the soloist instrument; of the 27 English consonants, twenty-two of them are each classified as a different instrument in a symphony orchestra, either melodic (Strings and Woodwinds; Percussive, drums and cymbals, or as sound-effect instruments (wind machine). This musical metaphor does not mean that we try to imitate the actual sound of each instrument. (As a matter of fact, Imitation of any kind is not used in Lessac Kinesensic training. No. We play each consonant instrument in order to bring its own particular musical values into our speech: melody, rhythm, sustained tonal colors, and variety and contrast which together guarantee intelligibility and clarity of meaning in such a pleasurable, energizing and relaxing way that they eliminate affected or careful speech. Here are the violin Ns, in that Scottish play:
If ‘twere done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it ‘twere done quickly
What’s done cannot be undone
Or in prose, here are the Violin N, M viola, V cello, Z bass fiddle, played in one sentence.
Wisdom was Dave’s main concern.
With the sound waves of both the vowels and the voiced consonants always vibrating to some degree through the hard palate, nose bone and head bones in all daily speech, our own voices can act as therapists to keep themselves and their use healthy.
None of my students in 50 years has ever developed vocal nodes. Two students did come into to my beginning class already suffering from nodes. One was scheduled for surgery on them; the other was seeing a speech pathologist but wanted to work with me privately. Both cured their nodes on their own through the work they did in my beginning Lessac Voice class.
I have never lost my voice even when teaching voice classes for 22 hours a week or when performing with strep throat.
My own most significant use of the Lessac Kinesensic voice training came in 2008 when I suddenly began talking gibberish at the dinner table, the left side of my face was paralyzed and I realized I had had a stroke. The only thing I could say with any intelligibility was: ER now! ER, now!
When I was still talking gibberish in the ICU, nine hours later at 3 a.m., I started doing a beginning Kinesensic developmental process:
(Yawn into the W) Woo—woe—war—wow (Speak then Sing)
Within an hour I had diffused all the paralysis in the left side of my face and I could say single words intelligibly, except for my consonants “w, “r” and “L”. (Which still gives me some trouble.) However, I could not connect one word to another in connected speech—it felt like stammering or blocking.
Then I remembered that stutterers don’t stutter when they sing and to the amusement of the ICU nurses I sang “America the Beautiful” without difficulty—and I could do every consonant and link every word to the next word. (A demonstration followed).
To conclude, I’m going to give you a short example of how singing as therapy can recover brain-damaged speech. All the vocal skills and dynamics are combined holistically and synergistically by singing in our most resonant tones from our highest pitches and gradually moving lower, pitch by pitch, preferably from half-pitch to half-pitch, to relying on the music of the consonants in conversational speech range. This exploration normally starts on my highest high Call pitch, but in the interest of time I am starting half-way down my Call range. All the vowels will be distorted by maintaining the specific Call resonance in the hard palate, nose and head bones until I reach the Conversational speech.
(We are teaching ourselves to sing on the most resonant singing tone, the “Mother” tone (the Call) of the voice on every vowel and every pitch and we don’t move to the next vowel until we know we can carry it forward. I pretty much narrated what I was doing from moment to moment, making the meaning clear while using each specific Vocal NRG to move from singing to conversational and then intimate speech.)
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