Our 25th anniversary, Hamburg StimmSymposium, Breathing, singing and support

In this landmark episode of This Is A Voice (S9 Ep5), Dr. Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher take a stroll down memory lane to celebrate a remarkable 25 years since founding their voice education company VocalProcess. From being the UK's first private company to pioneer online voice webinars to sharing insights from their latest experience at the esteemed Hamburg StimmSymposium, this episode is packed with nostalgia, innovation, and forward-thinking in the world of voice education.

What to expect in this episode:
- A heartfelt look back at our journey and key milestones
- Our groundbreaking work in voice education and online learning
- Exclusive highlights and takeaways from the Hamburg StimmSymposium
- Fun anecdotes and a peek into what it's like running a company as a married couple

00:00 25 years together
05:23 Hamburger StimmSymposium - Do we speak German?
08:05 Highlights Day One
12:09 Diagnosis and causality
18:18 Highlights Day Two
21:07 Breathing for singing
23:07 Breathing, speaking & singing compared
25:38 The round table on “support”
29:04 What does support mean to you? 
34:51 More than a masterclass – the Bond theme
37:44 Billie Eilish, am I prejudiced?
44:42 God made high notes louder so you don’t have to

Whether you're a voice coach, an aspiring singer, or a long-time listener, this episode offers something for everyone. Join us as we reflect, celebrate the past and look towards the future of voice education.

Remember to subscribe to stay updated with "This is a Voice" podcast episodes, and share your thoughts and stories with us on social media!

#ThisIsAVoice #VoiceEducation #AnniversarySpecial #Hamss #VoiceCoaching #PodcastCelebration

You can find out about our Teacher Pathway for singing teachers, vocal coaches and choir leaders here 
https://vocalprocess.co.uk/teacher-accreditation/

We've also got this ↓ 

For the best self-guided learning, check out the Vocal Process Learning Lounge - 22 years of vocal coaching resources (over 600 videos) for less than the price of one private singing lesson. 
Click on the link https://vocalprocess.co.uk/learning-lounge/learning-lounge-level-2-deep-dive/
 
If you want to discover if our singing teacher training programme works for YOU, message us - we can share the process for joining Cohort24. https://www.cognitoforms.com/VocalProcess1/TheAccreditationProgramme 

Get the One Minute Voice Warmup app here, it's got a 4.9star rating 
Appstore https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/one-minute-voice-warmup/id1212802251 
Google Play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.speechtools.warmup&hl=en_GB  
 
Check out our brand new Voice Journal, written with Rayvox's Oren Boder https://www.rayvox.co.uk/products/voice-journal?ref=VOCALPROCESS 
 
Find us - follow us on the socials! 
🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/Vocalprocess   
📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/vocalprocess  
📖 Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/vocalprocess

Transcript

TIAV S9 Ep5 Our 25th anniversary and Hamburg StimmSymposium pt 1

This is a Voice, a podcast with Dr. Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher.

Hello and welcome to This is a Voice, Season 9, Episode 5. The podcast where we get vocal about voice. I'm Jeremy Fisher. And I'm Dr Gillyanne Kayes. And we're actually, we're going to start with a celebration, which we almost forgot. It's 25 years. since we set up our limited company. Yeah, we've actually been running a business together longer than we've been married, haven't we?

Yeah. Because our silver wedding anniversary is coming up next year, just giving you a heads up on that. Yep. Lots of preparations. Lots of nice things to send for us, please. And I think, I'm going to stick my neck out and say, I think we were the first private voice education company, certainly in the UK.

Uh, 27th of April 1999. Yeah. Really ages us, doesn't it? We're in the previous century. Yeah, well you did the paperwork so you remember the exact date. Yep. And I also think that we were, maybe we still are, let us know what you think, trailblazers, because I think we were the first people in the UK to run voice education webinars online.

Yep. And, and also the the online endoscopy videos that I did in 2004. Yeah. Those are kind of like precursors of eBooks. And it was, that was interesting because, you know, I, what you could see on the internet at that point, which wasn't very much actually was you could see diseased larynxes. You could see a larynx that wasn't functioning properly, but nowhere could I find somebody putting up film that had a functioning larynx, quite healthy larynx, doing ordinary things.

So that was my first ebook. Mm hmm. And do you remember when we were recording some of the voiceovers for these? Because we lived in London at that time. And you know, there's a lot of traffic around in London. And we were trying to find a way of doing it, you know, so that we could cut out that external acoustic noise.

And I can remember setting up a clothes horse. I don't know if people know what that means nowadays. Basically, it's a wooden structure that you hang clothes on to dry. Yeah, well, what we did was we put We put a duvet over it and Jeremy sat underneath the duvet. That's a comforter for the Americans.

Recording the voiceovers and actually the quality is pretty damn good. It's not bad. I mean, interestingly, I might re record them now, 20, 20 something years later. But the thing is that it was a dead sound, which is what I actually needed. And then I get very intimate in the videos. Oh, it's absolutely gorgeous.

Another first, I think, we were the first people in the UK to deliver a voice education eZine as well. Yes. And we got, how many? Hundreds? I think we hit a hundred of them, and that was extraordinary. And when we switched from doing paper newsletters to doing eZines, I have to tell you that when we did paper newsletters, it cost over a thousand pounds per newsletter.

Because we had to print them out, we had to send them out, we had teams of people putting, stuffing envelopes. come over and have a free lesson and we'll tea and cake and there'll be stuffing envelopes, sticking the stamps on. Oh yes, we've done it all, haven't we? Yeah, yeah, it's been like a few years. So, I mean, you know, when you do run your own business for other, entrepreneurs out there and small business people.

I mean, it is blooming hard work. And although it's it gives you, I will say it gives you an envelope for doing what you love, rather than necessarily being stuck in a job where you're working for someone else. There are lots of ups and downs. You don't always earn the same amount of money. It's not always predictable.

I'm sorry, what's earning money? I, I, I don't know this concept. Come on, you don't want to tell them all about that. And also I think you have to do a lot of rethinking and recreating. I mean, this is, I think, the great thing about running your own business is that you can turn on a dime. You know, you can see something that you're interested in and By the next week, you've done it.

It's out there. That's really one of the very powerful things about doing it yourself. And I mean, you know, as I said, lots of ups and downs and lots of learning curves. I mean, you've been amazing with picking up on all the latest tech. Well, you know, my method of learning is what happens if I press this big red button here?

And that, and genuinely, it's like, I don't know how this works. What would happen if I press this button? And I was also thinking about the importance of getting your legals in place, you know, your contracts, so that you don't have, you know, for example, people who are working for you going off and taking your stuff and thinking they can do it cheaper or better.

And that has happened to us more than once. We might do a podcast on that one. That would be interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Creatives against copycats. Yes. Yeah. Hmm. I think we could invite some guests. I'm sure there are other people who'd love to talk about this anyway. 

What we'd like to do today is share our experience of attending the recent Hamburger Stimms Symposium in Hamburg, which is run by the Medical Voice Centre in Hamburg, which is a fantastic, it's absolutely one of the premier voice clinics in Europe, in our opinion.

Yeah. So we're, we're up to date now. Yeah. We're in 2024. Mm hmm. It's been busy since we came back. Yeah. Yeah, it has. So we went over and the first thing that I want to say is and I mean, you pointed this out, we have it so easy most of the time because most voice conferences are in English.

It's one of the international languages. So if English is your, you know, your home tongue and what we call the mother tongue, Honestly, you are absolutely privileged, and I did not realize, because I can pronounce German quite well, having trained originally as a classical singer, and I sang lots and lots of Lieder, and I did do German for two years at school.

So I have a little bit of knowledge about the sentence construction. And when you're watching a slide as well, it also makes it easier, but do you know what? It was jolly tiring listening to people deliver presentations in a different language, wasn't it? It was very interesting because the, the days, every day everything was delivered in German except us and a couple of other people.

Yeah. And it's really interesting because I, I mean, I never studied German. It was barred. I was barred from studying German in at school. I was the only one who wanted to do it. And therefore they wouldn't do the classes. Never told me. No, I know. I know. I had to do geography instead, which I failed. It's no good trying to get me to do anything I don't want to do.

Anyway, So it was interesting in that I understand German pronunciation, and I've worked a lot on Lieder as a coach, but I'm not a natural German speaker. And so it was very interesting being on in the room where people are speaking a language that you sort of catch the odd word for but don't really understand.

And again, visuals, great. Thank you for the visuals. Videos, great. Good to see what was going on. And in the end, we went with Google Translate on the phone, live translation. Well, we might share some of that. some nuggets of fun from Google Translate, because it doesn't always get things right, let's put it that way.

It's about 60 percent accurate and 40%. What have you just said? Yeah, but it does give you some idea, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah. And we made lots of notes. I mean, you know, just a fantastic event. 

Shall we share some of the highlights? Yes, day one. So day one seemed really, the theme seemed to be clinical insights of various sorts.

So, we had presentations on, let me just check, sort of titles, A Crash Course in Vocal Physiology, delivered by the wonderful Professor Markus Hess. And then the 10 most common voice disorders. That was great. Then we had some case reports from Markus and his colleague, Kim Gutowski. We then kind of dipped out of the vocal circus, didn't we?

Because it was 12 o'clock and we were both really, really tired. There was some very interesting diagnostics following that, and then a lovely session on myths and facts. And I'm going to talk about one or two of these highlights in a moment. Laryngoscopy, laryngoscopy explained easily. And, and live demonstrations.

Oh, they were so good. Yes. I am so jealous of that equipment. And manual therapy with live endoscopy. So, and that then finished the day. So this was great. It really laid the ground. Because this is very much a multidisciplinary event, isn't it? Yes. Yes. There were singing voice pedagogues, There were speaking voice pedagogues, there were singers and speakers, there were clinicians and speech and language therapists.

So it was a great variety of stuff, which is one of the things that I think made it such an exciting event. I love those events because you You get opinions and ideas and you're exposed to things that you've never seen before. And I mean, Markus's clinic is just amazing. And I have to say my favorite bit of the day was the live endoscopy because not only do you have a surgeon there, who is phenomenally good with the camera.

I mean, he's getting within a millimeter of the vocal folds. I have never seen anybody get so close and all the interesting maneuvers that they did, you know, for instance turning the head to the side, which I think from what we understood. And it certainly looks like it, enabled us to see the large sort of the superior, the superior horns of the thyroid, which I've never seen before in a scoping session.

And there's also a manoeuvre that all of them seem to do actually, which was kind of tipping the head forward. And he talked about being able to see the. cricoid, the ring of the cricoid. And that was fascinating. So yes, basically seeing things you've never seen before. And also really interesting because they obviously have a set, it's like a routine, they have a set of protocols that they want everyone to do, partly so that they can match everything up and partly because those protocols will show you exactly what's going on in different parts of the larynx and different parts of the vocal tract.

And that was really fascinating seeing somebody else's. set of protocols. Yes, and listening particularly to Markus speak, even though he's speaking in German, this is interesting for those of you who do need to deliver in English to a country where most people aren't using English as their first language.

You need to really be clear, and both of us were sitting there thinking, I think I understand what Markus is saying, because it's not just that his articulation is clear and his voice is clear, but it's, it's just the way he puts the sentences together. It just kind of allows you to understand better.

I think he was very good at keeping his syntax relatively simple because German's actually really complicated with all of those multi syllabic words. I also think that his diction and intelligibility were very good indeed. So, I mean, diction, and I know we've had these conversations, but just for people who haven't heard this, diction is spitting out every consonant.

Intelligibility is just choosing the consonants that will make the difference to how you understand it. And therefore, you don't need to spit every consonant, you just spit the important ones, or preferably just don't spit at all, it's not very nice. And what I love about Markus Hess and his team is the way that they dig into let's call it causality, you know, so when they were sharing the cases he was talking about, You've really got to understand the problem itself versus the cause, and actually really digging into that, because it's very easy, not so much to misdiagnose, you might know what the problem is, but if you need to know what the cause is, in other words, what is it that's led to it?

The vocal folds or the patient or whatever, or the acid reflux, all of those things that might have given rise to what you see on the scope. I think what was so fascinating is that when we are listening to a singer for the first time, we actually do something extremely similar. So, and the, the, the, there was a whole session with Kim, I think which was the diagnosis thing, where she would say, okay, you know, here is a piece of information.

What can you take from that? Here's a second piece of information. Essentially, does that change your mind? Yes, and also listening to the voices to try and work out what's happening. So we'd have a bit of background, then listen to the voice, and then maybe look inside and discuss what was going on. Apart from the look inside thing, it is exactly what we do when we're diagnosing singers and when we're finding the right technique for somebody at that moment in the room.

And it's the whole business of you listen. It's what does your singer tell you? What do you see? What do you hear? And then you can, if you like, make a snap decision within a second of them walking in and opening their mouth. That is absolutely fine. People do that. What's important is that you don't hold onto that snap decision, is that you carry on asking the questions.

And this is what I think Kim just did so well. is that you carry on asking the questions and then you sort of, you're finding out more information and you're saying, was my original idea accurate or has something else come in that will change my mind? And the idea that I had is actually not the problem.

It's just a symptom. And I think that is so useful. It's like, Let's just collect the symptoms and then work out what the problem, the underlying problem is underneath it. And I do this all the time. It's like I have five possible things I could do. Which is the one that's going to undo the problem and not just the symptoms?

Can we also give a shout out for, I was just checking for, Suzanne Fleischer, who was involved in in some of the case presentations and laryngoscopy. Why can't I say laryngoscopy today? Making that thing easier and also with the manual therapy side. Yes. So, I mean, they're a fantastic team. And do you know, can I just say because we're going to be talking about something interesting that happened the next day.

Yeah. in a roundtable session. I did have a chat with Markus afterwards about the whole business of sometimes how there's a lack of collegiality and a lack of team support between voice pedagogues. And one of the biggest take homes I get from watching a medical team work is They're a team, there's supervision within the team, there's sharing within the team.

And I think it's something we often lack within our side of the profession. And you know, what it boils down to, if you don't work as a team, as medics, if you can't rely on the team and share on the team, you could endanger somebody. That doesn't surprise me though. When you think about the genesis of, a medical team and the genesis of a singing teacher, they are actually almost polar opposites.

Yeah. Because in order to, it's almost like, in order to become a surgeon or a speech and language therapist, it's very much a team effort. It's very much a team diagnosis. You go onto a team and it's the team that works together. And some teams work better together than others, that's fine. It's the wretched master apprentice model that we've all inherited, isn't it?

It is, but hang on a minute, because I think that there's something very specific here. In order to make your name as a singing teacher, there is no structure, there is no pathway, there is no organization, there is no ladder that you climb. So in order to make your name as a singing teacher, it's almost like you feel the need to create something or name something that is specific and that becomes your thing, it becomes the thing you're identified for.

Funnily enough, it is a problem for us because we don't have a thing that we are identified for. Yeah, people ask us sometimes, well, what's your method? Yes, and we don't actually have a method, we have a whole set of things that we do, that we analyze, and also a whole set of techniques that we use, and a whole set of understanding that we use, and that's what we're teaching our teachers at the moment, is that much broader base, which is still accurate, but quite wide.

Well, that's why we're called Vocal Process, aside from it being a play on words. for a part of the vocal anatomy. Yes. If you didn't know, the vocal process is actually one of the parts of your vocal folds, but it's also a process. So just a minute, just a moment, hold on a second, hold on a second. Cause the whole singing teacher thing is really interesting.

If, if therefore, in order to, if you like rise above the pack, you have to have something that makes you stand out, then you're going to be very precious about it because it's your thing and the difficulty with singing teachers and singing lessons in general is that things can be challenged very easily and unless you are used to being challenged and you can actually deal with that then there's going to be anger, there's going to be defensiveness, there's going to be this and what's so interesting about that is if you can have your thing but still keep an open mind then you can become part of a team.

And that's where these multidisciplinary events are so important. Oh, love them. Because it creates an arena, if you like, for us to have these discussions and to share. Yes. Okay. 

So, day two. Day two. Starting with the round table. Yeah. Well, no, we didn't start with the round table itself. The thing that was very interesting about day two is that the broad theme was various aspects of breathing.

So again, I'm going to read out one or two things. Although we did start off with hormones and voice in the fertile phase of a woman's life, which actually we didn't go to. It was a nine o'clock session and we were tired. But there was a fantastic presentation by Klaus Kenn, everything you always wanted to know about pulmonology, and you know what, I learned a lot there.

So obviously he talked about various aspects of lung function and people being compromised in terms of lung function. And that was really interesting because singers obviously tend to be a bit breathing obsessed, but to look at it from that perspective was really enlightening for me.

Can we just, I just want to go into this a little deeper, because this is a really interesting topic. And also the idea that you are, you know, there is a breathing way, there's a breathing physiology, and everybody must do this breathing physiology. And it's like, well, stop right there. Because a lot of breathing physiology and techniques and things that I've seen are based on when people can't do it.

So they are I'm going to say curative because it's not the right word. They're therapeutic and therapeutic is great when you realize that the person that you're working with is not, I'm going to get really weird with wording there because my brain is tired and I can't find the right ones, it's, they're not a standard breathing pattern, they don't have a standard breathing pattern to start with.

The other thing is that No! No, seriously, a lot of therapeutic stuff is used precisely because they don't have a standard breathing pattern. I see, okay, I'm not sure where you're going with this so carry right on. Okay, the thing about A non standard breathing pattern is that the goal is to get them back to a standard breathing pattern, if you like, if there is even a standard breathing pattern.

But we're not talking singing! We are talking speaking and breathing! Please understand this. So if somebody has a non standard pattern, then the idea is to get them back to a standard pattern for life. Once you start bringing singing into the equation, the whole pattern of breathing changes. Okay, cool. I see exactly where you're going.

Would you like to explain it in a different way? Yes, I would. A lot of this talk was obviously about people who were lung compromised in some way. Thank you. I mean, So people who are suffering from conditions such as COPD or ILO, and also people suffering post COVID.

And I want to say that this is followed by a very interesting presentation, which was literally about using singing based breathing and voice training for post long COVID by Marc Secara, and that was fascinating.

The work that he was doing so I hope we'll hear more about that. So he was using rhythmic patterns, wasn't he, to begin to elongate the out breath. And I mean, I think that relates really to what you just said, Jeremy, about the breathing for singing is slightly different, but that we can use singing in order to elongate the outbreath and improve lung function.

Well, the whole purpose of singing in a way, the moment that Okay, and I said this, I've forgotten where I've said it, I've said it fairly recently. When you are doing what's called tidal breathing, which is just relaxed resting breath, it's approximately 50 percent in, 50 percent out. Those figures change slightly depending on the person.

And there's often a pause just either at the top of the breath or at the bottom of the breath. Occasionally both, but it's basically 50 50. When you start to speak, the in breath gets faster and the out breath gets slower because you are now sustaining through speaking. Once you get into singing, pretty much every genre give or take one or two, the out breath is even more elongated and once you get into classical singing the out breath is extremely elongated.

And I think this is because, although we do have pitch in speech, because melody is such an important part of singing and music that we need to sustain certain levels of the outbreath, let's say for now, not just to sustain the note, but in order to manage the pitch or the frequency itself. I just want to demonstrate something.

In fact, I did this on a podcast that we recorded with Paul Meier, and we were talking about speaking and singing and what the differences are. If I said to you, hello, my name is Jeremy. If I said to you, Hello, my name is Jeremy. If I said to you, Hello, my name is Jeremy. I have to elongate it more so that you can hear clearly which notes I'm on.

And I think this is so simple and it's so straightforward, but the moment you start to sing pitches, you have to elongate them so we can hear what they are. Once you get into, oh and this is also sentence structure. Sentence structure doesn't change exactly, but the rules change. So if you're singing rap.

Then you have a sentence structure. It's on approximately the same pitch. It's approximately the same volume. There are variations, but you stay within that, that area. And often, and particularly the really fast machine gun rappers, it just goes. And you have like 50 words per breath. When you're doing something like, Easy pop.

You speak, you sing pretty much the patterns that you speak. You're still having to pitch, you're still having to elongate slightly, but you're breathing in a way that fits the sentence. And quite often the sentences are quite short. Once you get into classical, and particularly classical classical, so we're talking Handel, Mozart, early Rossini, those composers, then really where you breathe is laid out by the composer.

It was also a committee that met in 1785 that actually told everybody how to breathe. You're so bad. But the, the, there's really interesting thing because it's almost like there's a good and bad version in classical music and if you breathe there that's terrible and I'm going doesn't matter where you breathe as long as you make it work.

Well look a shout out Jeremy for anyone who's watching the YouTube check out Jeremy's How to Sing Legato. How to Sing Legato. Yeah. Practical exercises for smooth singing because I deal with breathing and I deal with consonants and I deal with cutting the line and all sorts of things in that. The reason why we're going into this is because I maintain that there is no one way to breathe.

I know, and this is so important, and it's a lovely segue. into what happened next that day. 

So, I had heard early on when, you know, we were negotiating with the wonderful Jale Papile about coming to the conference. I saw that they were running a round table and the title of the round table is the confusion surrounding the topic of breathing support when speaking and singing.

Oh, I want to be on that round table, I said. Interesting, anyone listening, particularly anyone in the singing pedagogical community will go, Oh, brave Gillyanne. And there were three of us, there was myself, and two colleagues Valeska Yudisch, who is a functional voice trainer, and Uwe Schürmann, who has been trained originally by the Coblenzer method.

So let me talk to you a little bit about this, because first of all, you know, there's always a sense, right, I'm going to be on a roundtable with two colleagues I've never met before. I don't know where they're coming from. We have, I think it was an hour session. And somehow we've got to coordinate this.

So, we agreed together with Markus Hess that, as I'd been a moderator for roundtables before, I would moderate the round table, which was great, except that people wanted to communicate in German and I don't but nevertheless, it kind of worked out. So it actually worked quite well. Yeah, thank you. So the three of us just sort of spoke to each other and said, well, this is the way I work.

This is how I think of it. And what we decided to do was that each of us would speak for a few minutes about our thoughts that we wanted to share on this topic. And then we would sort of pick up on things and the audience, the audience would respond, and so forth. And I will say, the session got a little warm.

But I think we got somewhere in the end. In fact, we did get somewhere in the end. So, you know, my approach was very much about something we talked about, I think, in one of our earlier podcasts this year, which is, it seems to me that when we use this word support, we're really talking about how we manage airflow in relation to vocal fold behavior.

So I, I did kind of, raise a few questions, and one was What is support? Is it a sound? It's such a good question. Yeah. Is it a sound outcome? Because, you know, when we say you're not supporting, what do we really mean? Is it a feeling? Is it something you can see? And most importantly, whatever you think it is and what you need your student to do with it, how are you going to teach it?

And those seem to me to be the critical things and they're kind of still unanswered questions. Interestingly, none of the three of us use the word support in our teaching. I only use it if my clients, and my client could be a teacher client, or my singer clients use it. In which case, I will always say, okay, what does that mean to you?

What have you been told? What are you thinking about when you do it? And we adjust accordingly. I want to give the listeners an opportunity to respond to this because I think it's such an interesting question. What is support? What does it mean to you? And if you're a teacher, what does it mean to your students?

And do your students have a different idea to you? But as a singer, what does support mean? People use this word all the time, usually as in, I don't have it, or I don't have enough of it. Well, I was told I didn't have enough of it, but I didn't really know what it was. Yeah. Yeah. So really, really interesting.

What exactly is it? And if you have a technique or a, or a method or a, an activity that gives you support, what is it? How does it work? And immediately I'm going, okay, can you switch it on and off? Do you, you know, can you dial it up and down? And also if you're going to change genre, which is my big thing all the time, If you're going to change genre, does that method of support, whatever you're using, still carry over?

Is it relevant? Yeah, and I mean, I've probably talked about this before on podcasts that, you know, when I first started working with people on the song material in Miss Saigon, uh, quite a few of the singers who came to me had had a more, maybe not a classical training in the sense of singing arias, but they had been trained with classical approaches towards legato and breath management and breath use, so very much on flow phonation.

And I, contend that when you're working in, particularly in female voice, and they're taking their, you know, their chest mechanism higher, if you try to use the same volume of breath and flow phonation underneath that sort of a more resistant vocal fold, you're in trouble if you try to sing legato, it's not the same.

You have to manage your breath in a different way. You absolutely do. And in fact, we ended up demonstrating that in the masterclass later that day. Yeah. And we also had, I mean, I got a bit, you know, like, I don't teach people to raise their ribs because we have plural linkage, and the diaphragm does most of the work, and therefore, provided that someone's body balance is working for them, then the ribs will lift automatically, and it always seemed to both of us that holding the ribs out, is a waste of energy because the abdominal wall is for support, I mean, as in during the expiratory phase because the abdominal muscles are much better placed to deal with those nuances that we need for phrasing and stress and so forth and volume.

I'm going to contradict you very slightly on that one, but I'll wait until you've finished. So, so for me, it's about holding the ribs out. I mean, it may be, because we're going to talk about Jacob later, Jacob's truth bomb. Jacob Lieberman. Um, Because, you know, I was taught, anyone who's watching on YouTube, to do this.

Okay, so Gillyanne is doing a repeated sniff in and the rib cage, the bottom of the rib cage swings out slightly more each time. And I was very good at holding my rib cage up. Okay, can I? Are you going to contradict me? I am going to contradict you very slightly because this is contextual. Jolly good. The time when I would and in fact do myself raise the ribcage and hold it is if I am going to sing a very long phrase.

So I need to take in a large amount of air and because I've got a large amount of air and the pressure inside my my lungs is high, I need to control that pressure without it all gusting out at the very beginning and then there's no point in taking the large breath. So the thing that I do is raise my ribcage and hold it up at the beginning of the phrase.

Yes. And that's fine because essentially you're you are holding your ribcage out in order essentially to make the canister bigger inside you know with your lungs and so you're lowering the pressure deliberately. Then as you start to feed the air out you can hold that for a bit but let's say you hold it you've got a long phrase.

Let's say you hold the ribcage up for maybe a quarter of the phrase, the first quarter, because that's the way that you're controlling a very fine outflow. But once you start to, to release air out into the wild, into the atmosphere, Once you start vocalizing, once you start singing, then the pressure in the lungs is going to go down because you are using the air.

By holding your rib cage out, you're going to make that pressure go down far faster than it needs to, and therefore you go out of control. So what you need to do, as you get about a quarter to a half way through the phrase, you start, you need to let that ribcage start descending because by descending you're making the canister slightly smaller and you're maintaining the pressure inside your lungs because you're losing air but you're making the canister smaller and that helps you maintain the same pressure.

This to me is absolutely standard physiology. You've got to understand the aerodynamics of it and not just the muscular connections. Yes. Yeah okay well we are on the same page. We are on the same page. The thing that I don't agree with is swinging the ribs out, holding them, and holding them until the end of the breath.

Please don't do that because it's counter intuitive. Yeah, I was taught to do and I always had problems with my breathing technique. Well, there's a surprise. Okay. Well, yeah, I'm not actually going to share where we ended up with this particular event. Because there's something that might happen next year and it would be fun to leave it until there.

I made a suggestion for a way forward. It was a very good one. Which everybody liked, um, so that this conversation can be continued. Yes. 

Okay. Let's talk a bit about what one of the sessions that we did, which was more than a masterclass. We've done more than a masterclass a few times now. We've done it online. We did it at the AOTOS, BVA, EVTA, Global Connections, NATS Conference. That was fun. And the reason why we call it more than a masterclass is we work with the student.

And by the way, these are students that we've not met. We don't bring our own students in because that's pointless. And they're both professional performers in this case. So yeah, we, we, the whole point for us is that we work with students that we haven't met and haven't heard necessarily and therefore it's like it's a quote real masterclass, it's not just a demonstration.

What we do is we, we listen to the singer sing, we work with them and then we talk to the audience about why we did what we did, what we, what we did, what they would have done. Was there anything that we did that surprised them? Why did we go with that particular technique instead of this one? Why did we not tackle that problem, but we tackled this one instead?

All of those things, and it becomes much more of a dialogue between teachers with live people working in that environment. It's great. It's a really good model. And one of the first things we do, and the singers know that this is going to happen, we ask the listeners to write down what do they see, what do they hear, and what does the singer tell us.

So they actually made notes, and that, I mean, it was brilliant, not only because of a little bit of discussion that we were able to have at the end, but Because the following day, when we did a session on Practical Coaching for Singing Pedagogues, we were able to back refer, and we were really happy because we noticed that almost everyone who came to the Masterclass then came to that session.

Yes. So, but now with the More Than a Masterclass, it was a bit like, we better walk our talk here. Well, I mean, yeah, I think we did. And they were fantastic to work with. So we had two singers and the first one sang one of the Bond themes, No Time to Die, which is originally a Billie Eilish song.

And he transposed it into a key that worked for him and his voice. Really interesting, really interesting guy. So we said to him what, it's like, what's your backstory? This is before we'd heard him sing. What's your backstory? Tell us, you know, why you're singing this song. And he shared quite a dramatic story, which I'm not going to share on, on here.

But it was, wow. Okay. Well, we had no idea. No, he did say. is it okay for me to go deep? Yeah, and he did. And this was a song that he'd performed before, there'd been quite a pause sort of due to Covid and also having had a challenging illness. And he said that he felt he'd never really nailed it and you know, it was sort of like, now's my time.

And that was, that was brilliant, wasn't it? Just as a song choice, this is really interesting because the original is written and sung by a woman in a very, very breathy, very loose adduction sound for most of the song. Incredibly intimate close mic work. And the first thing, the first thing we have to deal with is how is he going to do this?

How is, is he going to do an exact copy? Is he going to do more of a musical theater version? Is he going to do something with more adduction? What key is he going to do it in with? Where's it going to lie in his voice? It's going to be a different song simply because we have, we now have a man singing it.

Yep. So that was really interesting even before we started, which is where is this going to go? How are we going to map it in that voice? Do you mind if I just do a little side note? Because I want to fess up to some of my prejudices and I think this is really important when you're working with singers and they bring you a song.

We have listened to and watched Billie Eilish on live YouTube performances and I've really enjoyed them actually. And there's been quite a lot of conversation in the pedagogical community about, oh, all my girls want to sing like Billie Eilish, what do I do? And apparently she did reveal on an interview that she often uses a whisper track with her vocals.

As an overlay. Yeah. And so. I did my homework and listened to this song, and I wasn't watching Billie Eilish perform, I was just listening. And Jeremy, do you remember me saying, I just can't stand that way of articulation, it's going to be a problem for me working on this song. And I knew this was my stuff and I was really quite worried about it, because I felt I don't like this song, you know.

Anyway, Jeremy said, look, you need to listen to these two other performances, one of which was the official Billie Eilish, so you could see her and, you know, even though she was lip syncing, I imagine, to the track, because there are a lot of other visuals on and clips from the Bond film itself. And also another performer who had a completely rend different rendition, a female.

And something changed. I listened to it again, and I said to Jeremy, Oh, this is a great song. She's really skilled, isn't she? And somehow, you know, I think, just investigate your prejudices, people, because as someone who's worked a lot in musical theatre, if I'm hearing a very loose articulation, it kind of can annoy me.

And you have to start thinking about the song in a different way. I mean, I'm very pleased with this. And I couldn't have worked on the song. Yeah. If I hadn't got to that point, because there was a bit of me going, I don't like this song. How are we going to make it work? Yeah. First of all, I love the song.

It's most of the Bond songs are really well written. They're so brilliantly structured. Yes. But also I loved that performance because I am not a huge fan of wispy singing. And by wispy singing, we're not talking sound, we are talking character. And you hear it a lot on ads. There's a lot of people who do they, they take a well known song and they do a cover version in an incredibly wispy sound and, and ad producers just love it.

And I hate it because it sounds so feeble. What is so important about her, it's very much like listening to a jazz performer who will play around with all sorts of rhythm, but they have an incredibly strong rhythmic structure underneath it. She has a very strong rhythmic structure. Thank you. She has a very strong rhythmic structure and therefore she has energy even in that incredibly loose what sounds like relaxed sound.

She has a tremendous amount of energy underneath it. It's really focused and I love it. I mean, for me, she is one of the best examples of that type of sound out there. And you then took that, that sort of focused quiet energy into the performance so that we could start to landscape that performance for this male singer.

I mean, it was very interesting because he told us the story. which was extremely dramatic, and he sort of took that drama into the song, and it sort of worked, and it sort of didn't, because really when you take that level of drama in at the beginning of a song, you have nowhere to go except volume, and height, and riffing.

That's really, those are the things that you've got left. And he needed to sing A, didn't he? No, I think it was a C. Yeah, yeah. I think it was a C. He had a good falsetto. So But he did the C in full voice. So I said, I want to give you a completely different, a different story behind the opening. And I want you to do it dead, which was an unfortunate use of the word because of the story that he was telling.

But he absolutely understood what I'd said. Absolutely. And nailed it. It was so good because what it did was it gave him somewhere emotionless to start with, and then the song built and built and built and built and suddenly the end was so much easier because he'd done this amazing journey. It was so good.

Mm hmm. And there, there was a point when you know, he, he needed to crank up the energy, and he was worried about a particular note with a consonant onset, which was a p, if I remember rightly, on one of the highest notes in the song. Paradise. And you got him to bring his, sort of, connection with effort level down, didn't you?

Yes. Do you remember? I do. I do. In fact, we've got this bit on video. It was very interesting because I said to him, he'd got to this. It's the highest phrase. I mean, he goes higher in falsetto, but it was the highest full voice phrase. And he has to hit this word paradise and it's the highest note and it's a stopped consonant and it's unvoiced.

It's probably the hardest combination of things to do. And I said to him, what energy level are you at at that point? And he said, Oh, you know, I can go big. And I went, yes, I know. But right at that point that you just sang, what energy level were you? And he said, I was about a seven. And I said, can you give me a six and a half?

Which just made the audience laugh because I'd just gone down a fraction. I think they were expecting me to go higher, to go up. But it was interesting because what I heard was that his voice was working fractionally too hard for him to be able to control an unvoiced consonant on a high C.

But I didn't want him to lose the energy, or the volume, or anything like that, so we brought him down half a step. And again, he got it, he nailed it. It was amazing actually, because I'd stepped into the audience at that point, you know, and handed over to you, and I heard the audience go, Because he got it.

And then we did the thing, you know, I, I just reminded him, God made high notes louder so you don't have to. Yes. That's an acoustic fact. Yeah. And it's really important because if we take the same pressure level or even increase our pressure level as we go up to the high notes it can really cause us problems.

I think, and that, that was such a brilliant demonstration of that. I think that we should save the next person in the masterclass and the rest of day two and three to the next episode because I think we have quite enough here. We have. So we will see you next time.

This is A Voice, a podcast with Dr. Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher.