I usually describe myself first and foremost as a vocal nerd! I am a voice teacher, vocal coach, educator and perpetual student of all things voice, artist development, performance and songwriting. I have worked in higher education since 2004, alongside maintaining a portfolio career as a singer-songwriter, performer, vocal coach, educator, festival director and creative practitioner.

What would you consider to be the main focus of your career, or your “specialty”?

Interestingly, I think my speciality is probably being a generalist. I have a particular interest in voice science, vocal habilitation, vocal health, artist development and optimal performance, that's why I would probably describe myself as a generalist rather than someone who sits entirely within one specialism. That really suits the way I work. I am interested in how all the different elements connect: the function of the instrument, the health and preparedness of the performer, the music and stylistic choices they are making, their artistic identity, communication and performance psychology. My own little motto is that I help people find their voice — both physically and metaphorically.

How did you discover your calling for your specialty? How did it start?

It wasn't really one dramatic moment.

I grew up in Norway, where music was part of my life very early. I was involved in violin and choirs from around the age of five and then semi-professional musical theatre from around twelve.

I also had a strong sporting background as a young person, which gave me an early interest in how the body works, physical training and performance.

I moved to Liverpool in 1999 to study at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. Originally, another possible route for me had been studying journalism with music alongside a football scholarship, so my career could very easily have gone in a completely different direction.

While I was at LIPA, I volunteered as a vocal coach for New Deal for Musicians, a programme supporting musicians who were not in employment.

That was probably the moment something clicked.

I loved working with singers on their songs, helping them prepare for gigs and watching them make discoveries about their voices and themselves.

After graduating in 2003, some of my former lecturers asked me to come back and cover teaching, and I gradually realised that I often got more satisfaction from helping another artist develop than I did from some of the function-band work I was doing at the time.

I still loved being an artist and performing my own material, but helping someone have an epiphany about their voice, their music or what they wanted to do with their life was enormously rewarding.

That has never really changed.

What do you love the most about your work?

People.

And variety.

I love seeing progress. I love the moment somebody understands something that previously felt impossible or mysterious. That might be a technical breakthrough, an artistic decision, a change in confidence or suddenly recognising what they actually want their career or creative practice to look like.

That's partly because of my personality and probably also my late diagnosed ADHD. I also genuinely love learning and have keep the curiosity of a child when it comes to learning.

One of the great privileges of working in higher education is that learning absolutely does not travel in one direction.

My colleagues at WaterBear influence my practice all the time. I work alongside people with expertise across songwriting, performance, production, education, artist development and the wider music industries, and those conversations continually challenge and expand my thinking.

My students do exactly the same.

I learn from students constantly, and perhaps particularly from the student teachers I work with. They ask questions I haven't considered, challenge assumptions, bring completely different lived experiences, genres, cultures and ways of thinking into the room, and sometimes force me to go away and learn something properly rather than relying on the explanation I have always used.

Developing and teaching on the MA in Music Education has made me a better teacher because it has made me continually examine my own educational practice.

I feel incredibly honoured that I get to do this for a living alongside my performing.

I get to spend my working life around people who are creating, learning, questioning and trying to become better at something they care about. I don't take that for granted.

In your opinion, what qualities do you feel make an "excellent" Vocal Pedagogue?

Patience is a big one.

I also think you have to be prepared to leave your ego at the door.

Good teaching needs to be genuinely student-centred. That means being present, listening properly and giving feedback without approaching the singer as something that needs to be moulded into your own preferred aesthetic.

Obviously, particularly within habilitation, there may be functional things that we need to develop. But technique should ultimately give the singer more colours to paint with, or more tools in their toolbox.

It shouldn't become:

“I want you to sound the way I like singers to sound.”

Curiosity is hugely important too.

An excellent vocal pedagogue should have a thirst for knowledge and a willingness to keep engaging with new research. Voice pedagogy continually evolves, and we have to be comfortable with the possibility that something we were taught twenty years ago may now need to be reconsidered.

Perhaps one of the biggest things I have changed my mind about during my career is the idea that I need to know everything.

I don't.

Nobody does.

Knowing the limits of your own knowledge, knowing when to refer, and having a network of trusted colleagues who know more than you do about particular areas are enormously important professional skills.

Can you speak to the importance of having mentors? How have mentors influenced your life/career? Can you tell us about some of your mentors?

I have been incredibly fortunate to have mentors throughout my life.

My first singing teacher encouraged me enormously as a teenager. They were actually the first person who planted the seed that there was a new school in Liverpool connected with Paul McCartney that I might be interested in. Serendipitously, LIPA later came to audition at the college I was attending during my gap year, I got in, and I ended up moving to Liverpool.

At LIPA I had teachers and mentors across both voice and songwriting who helped shape me.

I also encountered approaches to voice that started making me think more explicitly about anatomy and function. That connected naturally with my background in sport and my existing interest in physics, anatomy and how bodies perform.

Later, through my professional teaching work, I encountered SLS and other methodologies. I learnt a great deal from those environments about teaching, even though over time I realised that I didn't want my practice to sit entirely inside any single methodology.

I want to learn as much as I can, from as many useful perspectives as I can.

Dave Stroud was an important influence during that period, and later Line Hilton became both a close friend and a significant mentor throughout my career.

Through Vocology in Practice and the wider voice community I have also been incredibly fortunate to develop professional networks where I can call on people including Jenevora Williams, John Henny, Kerrie Obert and Justin Stoney and all the ViP, PAVA, AOTOS, BVA and BAST networks when I need another perspective or when something falls outside my expertise.

Mentorship for me is therefore not necessarily one person standing above another. It is an ongoing professional community.

And increasingly I include colleagues and students within that idea too. Influence goes in many directions.

Building Blocks - Nine Key Areas Of Voice

The below topics cover key areas of voice. In regard to each topic, what are the most influential tips, insights, or research findings that you would like to share with our audience?

Breathing

My starting point is often:

Don't fix what isn't broken.

Singers can become incredibly preoccupied with breathing and sometimes develop more tension or anxiety because they are trying to consciously control something that was functioning reasonably well before anyone told them to interfere with it.

That doesn't mean breathing isn't important, but for me it's in combination with the other components.

It is enormously important, and general aerobic fitness and respiratory health matter too. But singing is about the relationship between airflow, vocal fold vibration and the changing requirements of the sound being made.

Rather than teaching one supposedly ideal breath for every singer and every sound, I am interested in whether the breathing strategy is appropriate for the task.

Sometimes singers need intervention. Sometimes they need physical conditioning. Sometimes they simply need permission to stop micromanaging every inhalation.

The Larynx

I think awareness is incredibly useful.

The larynx isn't something that has to remain permanently fixed in one supposedly correct position.

It moves.

A singer can learn to recognise what happens when the larynx rises or lowers and understand how those adjustments interact with the sound they are making and how everything is non-linear.

That means we can use those choices correctively or creatively.

That distinction is fundamental to the way I think about technique.

I sometimes compare it with music production. An effect can be used because you're correcting a problem, but it can also be used because you deliberately want that particular creative result.

Vocal technique can work in exactly the same way.

The goal is not always “neutral”. The goal is having choices and understanding their consequences. It can be character voices in musicals or the most distinctive voices in pop. Imagine trying to "fix" Shakira, Begees, Amy Winehouse, Sting or Ethel Merman!

The Vocal Folds

Function and coordination are central.

I'm interested in helping singers experience different coordinations rather than becoming frightened of them or attaching moral values to particular sounds.

We need enough understanding of vocal fold behaviour and degrees of compression to explore different sounds safely and deliberately.

I also think terminology can become unnecessarily confusing.

Across singing methodologies we have different terms for registers, mechanisms, qualities and coordinations. I sometimes call it the vocabulary jungle.

Rather than insisting that everybody use my preferred label, I try to understand what different methodologies mean by the terminology they use.

Ultimately the singer needs a useful map, not a linguistic argument.

Acoustics/Resonance

Acoustics is an area I find endlessly fascinating.

The vocal tract gives us an extraordinary number of variables to work with: the pharynx, soft palate, tongue, lips, jaw, articulators and degrees of nasality, alongside movements of the larynx and the behaviour of the vocal folds.

I like singers to become aware of those possibilities and learn to isolate certain adjustments before putting everything back together into a musical context.

Again, the goal is not to create one ideal resonant sound but to isolate the components and gain control.

It is to understand enough about the instrument that you can make intentional choices.

For me, voice science becomes exciting when it gives an artist more freedom, not when it gives them another list of rules.

Vocal Registration

Registration may be one of the clearest examples of the vocabulary jungle.

Different pedagogical traditions use terms such as chest voice, head voice, mix, modal, falsetto, M1 and M2, sometimes describing overlapping things and sometimes genuinely describing different concepts.

I don't think the terminology should become more important than what the singer experiences and can reproduce. Unless we have MRI, electrodes on the muscles, an acoustically neutral room with a spectogram - we don't know what's going on. Well, even if we did we would only make educated guesses with the current science.

I am interested in functionality across the range, the handover between coordinations and helping singers understand what options are available to them and building a larger repertoire of tools.

I also want singers to develop enough flexibility that a register transition can become either almost imperceptible or extremely obvious depending upon what the music or artistic expression demands.

Once again, that is the difference between something being used correctively and being used creatively.

Vocal Health

Education is probably the most important part of my approach to vocal health.

I want singers to understand why something is happening rather than simply being handed a list of things they must never do.

That includes understanding symptoms, workload, recovery, vocal load, lifestyle, general health and the difference between warming up, exercising and rehabilitating a voice.

When someone is returning after illness or injury, I often use the analogy of training for a marathon.

If you had suffered a physical injury, you wouldn't recover and immediately run a marathon on the first day back. You would gradually rebuild capacity.

The voice is no different.

I also use something I think of as an 80/20 principle.

Human voices can produce an extraordinary range of sounds. Some sounds are perfectly natural human sounds but aren't designed to be sustained endlessly. Shouting is an obvious example: humans are capable of shouting, but we probably shouldn't shout continuously for several hours every day.

If the majority of your vocal life is well conditioned, healthy and appropriately managed, that gives you greater resilience for occasional higher-demand choices.

A slightly cheeky analogy is that the more exercise you do, the more ice cream you can occasionally get away with.

It isn't a literal prescription, obviously, but singers generally understand the principle.

Vocal Style

I think style needs to be treated as much more than simply reproducing genre conventions.

It involves understanding the music, the lyrics, the cultural context, the artist's identity and the choices available within the voice.

I have developed something I call the Style Menu, which uses improvisation to explore vocal choices.

One side is more functional and the other is more creative. Rather than simply telling somebody, “This is how you sing this genre,” it gives them ways of exploring different vocal behaviours and then deliberately pushing themselves artistically.

I don't think the full Style Menu can sensibly be unpacked in a short interview, but the philosophy behind it is important to me.

Technique should create artistic possibilities.

The singer ultimately needs to be able to hear a sound in their head or heart and have enough understanding of their instrument to explore how they might create it.

Posture & Body Alignment

My thinking around posture has changed considerably over the years.

I am much less interested now in finding one perfect singing posture and much more interested in dynamic, task-specific alignment.

We need to understand what the performer is actually going to be doing.

I have worked with musical-theatre singers where we have produced a beautiful belt or full-mix sound in the studio. Then they go into rehearsal and it emerges that they have to sing the same phrase while doing a high kick, wearing a restrictive costume or moving through demanding choreography.

That information rather changes the task!

Likewise, an instrumentalist singing while playing guitar or keyboards has different physical demands from somebody standing still at a microphone.

The goal is therefore not to create a theoretically perfect posture that only works in the teaching studio.

The performer needs a healthy, sustainable way of producing the sound they want while doing the job they actually have to do.

Teaching Methods/Communicating complex ideas about singing

I think one of my strengths as a teacher is unpacking complex ideas and making them accessible.

Voice science is fascinating, but terminology is only useful if it helps the person in front of you.

I sometimes simplify the system into ideas such as vibrator, resonator and articulator, before bringing in the other enormously important element: the brain.

Motivation, perception, learning, emotion, confidence and neuroscience all affect what happens when somebody sings.

The level of scientific detail I would use with a Masters student, a beginner singer, a professional artist preparing for a tour and a trainee singing teacher will obviously be different.

That is part of good pedagogy.

The teacher's job isn't to demonstrate how much terminology they know. It is to find the explanation, image, exercise, demonstration or question that helps this particular person understand.

I also increasingly value Universal Design for Learning and accessible approaches to music education. Developing the MA in Music Education has encouraged me to scrutinise my own teaching constantly.

And my students are a huge part of that process.

I don't have one single story where a student dramatically changed everything I believed. I have hundreds of smaller ones.

I learn from my students all the time.

Final Thoughts (Words of Wisdom, Resources)?

I am probably more comfortable recommending professional communities than declaring one book or methodology essential reading, because the field develops continually and different resources serve different practitioners, and many of my absolute favourites such as Titze, Bozeman, Williams and all the ones I have mentioned in my interview is already on there.

As mentioned, the organisations and communities that have been most important within my own professional development include:

Vocology in Practice

Vocal Health Education

BAST – Be A Singing Teacher

British Voice Association

More broadly, I would encourage practitioners to engage with organisations, conferences and professional communities that bring together voice teachers, researchers, clinicians and performers rather than remaining entirely within one methodology.

For me, some of the most valuable learning happens where those different perspectives meet outside of single marketable methodologies.

Please note that Kaya Herstad-Carney is not affiliated with VocalPedagogy.com and we do not give out contact information. We hope you enjoyed the interview!