What would you consider to be the main focus of your career, or your “specialty”?
Given my combined background of speech and voice science, clinical experience, and performance experience, I consider my specialty to be making voice science accessible and helping to bridge the gap between rehabilitation and habilitation for the professional singer.
In terms of making voice science accessible, much of this looks like demystifying the voice for singers and helping them to understand voice science in a practical way so that they feel empowered to coach their own voice outside of sessions.
At the professional level, the vocal demand is often compared to the demands of a professional athlete, and professional singers are at a higher risk for injury. I specialize in proactively incorporating vocal health and rehabilitation-minded strategies in a habilitative setting for the professional singers that I work with. The majority of my clients perform professionally in musical theater and opera, but I also work with several recording artists and even the occasional rapper.
One additional passion area for me is helping singers with unique technical challenges. Between working with many uniquely presenting voice disorders as a speech pathologist and my own personal experience with atypical muscle tension patterns, I find it extremely rewarding to help singers who have previously faced a lot of challenges in voice lessons elsewhere.
How did you discover your calling for your specialty? How did it start?
I always say becoming a voice teacher was a dream I didn’t even know I had until it was already happening.
I began my musical career by pursuing an opera performance degree in college, but faced significant technique issues during my junior year and began re-evaluating my career path. I didn’t have a vocal injury, but I had become very discoordinated and tense in my technique, so much so that I was creating two tones simultaneously in my first passaggio. Years of pushing through sinus and allergy problems, along with naturally asymmetric vocal folds, contributed to this. My presentation stumped many vocal professionals, one laryngologist even misdiagnosed me with a form of spasmodic dysphonia exclusive to singers (singer’s dystonia) and told me I could never be a professional singer.
Fortunately, when that was said to me, I had already begun my degree in speech pathology at Northwestern University and I had found a voice teacher at the music school there who was able to help me get my voice functional again. A lot of the techniques she used overlapped with what I was learning about in my school studies on voice therapy, so it was this cool crossover of seeing my voice rehabilitated while also learning about voice rehabilitation in my degree.
After graduating with my speech pathology master’s, I accepted a clinical fellowship position in New York at Mount Sinai’s voice center and practiced clinically there for about 5 years. I specialized in rehabilitating injured singers, but I also worked with a fair amount of general speaking voice disorders, chronic cough, and swallowing therapy too. This comprehensive clinical background deeply informs my understanding of vocal anatomy and physiology.
During the pandemic, I happened to pick up a few private singing students on the side while I was still working clinically. One professional level singer encouraged me greatly and referred a number of his friends, leading to a growing network of students. The majority of my professional level singing students can be traced back to that first student, and I will forever be thankful for that kismet! Concurrently with the growing clientele, I began posting educational content on social media to fight misinformation. The positive response expanded my professional network and demand, prompting me to take on associate teachers. Ultimately, this growth led to the establishment of SKB Voice Studio, allowing me to leave my clinical position and dedicate myself full-time to private voice teaching and clinical practice.
What do you love the most about your work?
One of the most rewarding aspects of my work is helping people find the joy again in singing. I know very personally what it is like to lose that joy and to rediscover it, so to help others do the same is so fulfilling. I feel a big factor in this is giving people specific tools that actually work for their individual voice. Tailoring the vocal training specifically to the person in front of you and grounding it in scientific principles, seems to be a winning formula for helping others to enjoy singing again.
While I loved my work when I was primarily a speech pathologist, I have grown to love voice teaching much more. In comparison with SLP work, I love the long-term relationship that you develop with voice students. SLP work is short term and rehabilitative; it lasts on average between 3-4 months. Of course, you see a lot of progress in voice therapy during that time, but the progress you see with singing students at the year mark and beyond is really gratifying.
In your opinion, what qualities do you feel make an “excellent” Vocal Pedagogue?
There is of course a foundational level of competency in voice science, anatomy, and physiology required of a vocal pedagogue. However, what takes a voice science nerd and makes them an excellent singing teacher are a few specific qualities:
1. They must be able to take complex concepts and make it practical and repeatable for the specific student in front of them. This requires an incredible amount of adaptability on the part of the teacher.
2. They always continue to learn, and they stay curious and humble. I strongly believe voice teachers should continue to learn not only through formal courses, but also by continuing to sing themselves and growing their own voice. It helps to prevent teachers from becoming out of touch with their students.
3. They must know how to work with people, how to motivate them, how to support them in their journey as an artist, not just as an instrument. They must be kind and know how to build their singers up so that they walk into a room with confidence. They must be able to make their voice students feel seen and feel safe to make mistakes. I think so much vocal freedom can naturally come when teachers create this dynamic.
Many of these qualities overlap with facilitating key motor learning principles such saliency, repeatability, accuracy, positive reinforcement, and knowing how to dose feedback appropriately.
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?
Many mentors have guided me to where I am today, even when I didn’t realize what was happening at the time.
One of my voice teachers, Margaret Dehning, saw in me the desire to learn how the voice worked, and saw the potential in me to go into voice science. She also taught me how important kindness was in building the voice. She continues to be one of my biggest supporters and encouragers to this day.
I worked with Pamela Hinchman intensively while I was in speech pathology school at Northwestern. She taught me the importance of always continuing to learn as a voice teacher – she always was learning something new from voice scientists. It was her continued curiosity that helped me work through the unique muscle tension patterns I had developed that had previously stumped over a dozen voice professionals. She was the primary person in restoring function to my voice.
I have had a number of speech pathology mentors and role models such as Nathan Waller, Christine Martin, Leanne Goldberg, Jonelyn Langenstein, Sarah Schneider, and Elle Holiday. I was also lucky to study voice with Joan Lader for a number of years.
Some other notable mentorship includes my interdisciplinary clinical work with Mark Courey, laryngologist, opera training with Derrick Goff, Bel Canto technique specialist, and musical theater training with Dr. Joey Harrell of BroadwayVox Studios.
In addition, I have many peers and colleagues who I continue to collaborate with and learn from, and I am so thankful for them.
When it comes to breathing, what are the most influential tips, insights or research findings that you would like to share with our audience?
There is no one right way to breathe. Breathing strategies vary greatly by the genre and the individual singer. It can be helpful to explore the spectrum of breathing options rather than prescribing one school of breath training.
These are my top five considerations for breathing that can be applied across genres:
1. Only take in the breath that is required for the phrase. Don’t take too much air in, don’t take too little air in. With the professional level singers that I work with, I often see a pattern of over breathing, likely because so much of their early training was perhaps too breath focused.
2. As much as we can control breath through direct breath training, vocal efficiency with balancing of the 3 subsystems of voice can also regulate how our breath is managed. I often prefer to work on vocal efficiency through vocal tasks first, and then reverse engineer breathing strategies to support that vocal efficiency.
3. Physical alignment and functional body mechanics seem to be an important component of breath freedom. I often will refer out to body specialists if this component seems to be an area of concern for a singer.
4. I speculate that half the battle of breath support is mental support. When the mind is tense, breathing can become tense. Or, if the mind is hesitating or anticipating having to sustain a long note, that can also interfere with how the breath flows. I think performance anxiety training, imagery work, and character/acting work can be a key component of keeping the breath feeling free when singing under pressure.
5. One of my favorite ways to train breath support is through respiratory muscle strength training devices, such as the Breather device. This trains both the inspiratory and expiratory muscles of respiration separately from singing. I like this method of separation as it trains the force-generating capacity of the respiratory muscles without accidentally applying over-breathing to singing.
When it comes to the larynx, what are the most influential tips, insights or research findings that you would like to share with our audience?
Much of the training surrounding larynx function has to do with adjusting the laryngeal position or height in the neck. First and foremost, it’s important to understand that the proper laryngeal position in a singer is going to depend on the singer, the genre, and the pitch range that they are singing in. A lower position is not always better, but of course excessively high will not feel great either. Some genres require more laryngeal stability and others require more laryngeal flexibility.
I think laryngeal positioning is one of the harder concepts to train in singers, because it can so easily become overly manipulated, when really, we want to find appropriate laryngeal position through vocal freedom. For example, with many of the opera singers I work with, they often fall into the trap of over depressing their larynx with the base of their tongue because they have been verbally cued to “lower their larynx.”
As a voice teacher, I have found more success in finding appropriate laryngeal position through first targeting the articulatory structures that influence laryngeal freedom such as the tongue, jaw, and soft palate, as sometimes that is enough for the larynx to find its appropriate position. I also will use facilitative exercises for releasing the larynx such as gargling water with phonation (Albuquerque, 2022), manual feedback of the larynx position during vocalizing, grounding techniques, and laryngeal massage. Emotional freedom seems to also be a key component of laryngeal freedom given that the sensation of feeling “choked up” has a lot of overlap with larynx tension.
When it comes to the vocal folds, what are the most influential tips, insights or research findings that you would like to share with our audience?
While appropriate resonance and airflow can help to maintain vocal fold closure in an efficient way, training a singer how to approximate their vocal folds in a balanced manner at the onset and offset of phonation is also a key component of vocal efficiency. Over-adduction can lead to a pressed sensation and contribute to eventual injury, but under-adduction can also contribute to sensations of strain, fatigue, and instability. I have found that directly targeting the concept of efficient vocal fold closure can be a game changer for singers in terms of acoustic output, efficiency, vocal control, and registration exploration.
When developing a singer’s conceptual understanding of vocal fold closure, the key piece is teaching a singer to recognize the spectrum of sound quality from breathy/air leaky to clear tone to pressed tone. Even though stylistically, clear tone may not be the ultimate goal, training a singer to have a baseline function of clear tone is the most efficient starting place, and then they can modify across the spectrum of closure as they see fit stylistically.
Some more direct facilitative methods may include onset and offset work, creaky voice, registration balance and yodeling, and inhalation phonation prior to onset. One of my personal favorites is having a singer demonstrate excessive airflow/under closure into efficient closure on the same sustained vowel. This exercise seems helpful in training vocal control and awareness of this concept without excessive pressure. Beyond these examples, auditory feedback is a helpful way for singers to develop their conceptual understanding of this. Examples of augmented auditory feedback include putting books in front of the ears, cupping the ears, or singing into the corner of a room.
When it comes to acoustics/resonance, what are the most influential tips, insights or research findings that you would like to share with our audience?
Maximizing resonance strategies is a key component for vocal health and efficiency as it offers increased volume for less effort. The work of Ingo Titze has also shown vocal tract shaping can help with self-sustained vocal fold vibration. However, finding appropriate resonance strategies varies greatly by genre and individual.
These are my top considerations for resonance and vocal tract shaping:
1. Are they singing amplified or unamplified? While I believe all singers in all genres benefit from overtone work and harmonic tuning, in opera it is a requirement that every note have the “singer’s formant” so that the singer can be heard over an orchestra without a mic. In contemporary singing, there is a much wider spectrum of possibilities as so many more qualities can be picked up on a mic.
2. Helping singers body map or kinesthetically become aware of their moveable articulators and other structures of resonance empowers them to coach themselves through resonance strategies. This aids singers in separating the function of the tongue, palate, jaw, larynx, etc. so that these structures can function relatively independently when adjusting resonance.
(As a side note, control of the tongue often seems to be under-addressed in the demographic of singers that I work with. The tongue must be active during singing both to produce diction and to help shape resonance, but it can also quickly become overly engaged. There are many simple vocal exercises to free this up and help a singer develop awareness and control of their tongue. This is a major area of exploration in my initial work with any singer.)
3. Vowel modification and exploration can be an incredibly helpful acoustic strategy for both function and style reasons. It can also be helpful in a singer’s process of calibrating their speaking dialect with their stylistic goals for singing. For example, my sung Italian opera “ah” is nothing like my dark Californian spoken “ah.”
4. As described in the above section on the vocal folds, I believe appropriate vocal fold closure and resonance go hand in hand for maximizing the acoustic output.
When it comes to registration, what are the most influential tips, insights or research findings that you would like to share with our audience?
Registration may be one of the most controversial topics in singing voice science and is not fully understood. Voice science has not been able to universally determine the appropriate anatomical nomenclature and the language surrounding registration is highly disagreed upon. This is in large part because as much as registration is affected by laryngeal and acoustic changes, it is also informed by the perception of both the singer and the listener, and an individual’s sensations are unique to themselves. I also believe that historically registration was overly gendered in its language, leaving lots of room for disagreement.
In light of this, I think it is essential to find the language that works for the individual in front of you, keeping in mind that registration exists on a spectrum. Some singers do well with focusing on the spectrum, others do well with specific labels as it helps them to process what they are experiencing. In the current musical theater industry, I do think guiding a singer to get specific about different registration options can be very helpful as they are so often asked to suddenly shift genres and such a wide range of sound qualities are required. Identifying specific registration coordinations, combined with understanding how moving the structures of resonance alters vocal color, can help with adapting to specific genres quickly.
Regardless of labels and gender, I believe cross training the full spectrum of registers, colors, pitch ranges, and dynamics is incredibly valuable in singing training. By doing this, singers improve the range of motion of their instrument, agility, vocal fold pliability, and laryngeal stability across the pitch range.
When it comes to vocal health, what are the most influential tips, insights or research findings that you would like to share with our audience?
Vocal health is not one size fits all! Every person has a different vocal load and tolerance level. For example, the vocal load of an 8 show Broadway week is different than a one-off concert. There are well established principles that do apply to everyone such as adequate hydration, sleep, not over-using or under-using your voice, proper warm up and cool down, and avoiding obvious vocal irritants such as smoking. However, what an individual can tolerate really depends on their body.
Of note, there are many historical vocal health recommendations that have been shown to be myths, at least to the extent that they must negatively impact everyone. Consuming dairy and coffee for example were historically thought to cause vocal issues. While some may be sensitive to those substances, research has shown moderate intake for regular coffee drinkers is not dehydrating (Killer, 2014) and there is not reliable evidence to support that dairy causes harm to the vocal folds.
In terms of voice use patterns, many singers are surprised to learn that speaking voice technique can often be the culprit for vocal injury more so than the singing technique. At the very least, vocal injury is usually multifactorial and even if the singing technique is a part of the equation, it is not usually the only component contributing to injury. I like to encourage singers to track their vocal health variables because so many things can negatively impact the voice such as loss of sleep, dryness, allergies, reflux, emotional well-being, physical well-being/body use patterns, quantity of voice use, etc. It can be helpful if your voice is feeling off on a given day, to check in with your variables to get a picture of what specifically may be contributing.
I deeply wish for our industry that we could destigmatize vocal injury. It’s very rare that I’ve seen a professional singer with perfect vocal folds; often there are some subtle irregularities. Most professional singers will likely go through vocal troubles at some point in their career (at the very least returning to singing after being sick with a cold!) and taking the shame out of the equation would so greatly help singers in recovery. It can feel very career ending to have a vocal injury and it is not! In general, I think singers benefit from proactively caring for their voice and understanding what their voice needs individually, but injuries can happen even in the most diligent of singers.
When it comes to style, what are the most influential tips, insights or research findings that you would like to share with our audience?
Understanding how style and function interact is crucial. There are times when style serves function and vice versa, but also times when they contradict each other. Helping a singer to find the level of efficiency they need for their vocal demand without sacrificing their unique sound is a large part of any artist’s technical development.
Even though many of our favorite singers likely have a lot of intuition when it comes to style, style certainly can be taught and developed. You can learn a lot about what style options already exist by listening to singers across genres and voice types. This is something I frequently work on with musical theater performers who are asked to change styles of singing between contemporary MT, traditional MT, pop, rock, R&B, and more. It can sometimes feel like putting on a costume when you’re trying on a different style, which singers can be intimidated by. They expect style to be entirely natural and intuitive but exploring your options and “putting them on” is what helps style to become more natural over time.
Regardless of genre, singers benefit from training vocal control in terms of dynamics as well as agility in order to maximize their choices for vocal expression and vocal function. They also benefit from guidance on vocal pacing which not only helps their stylistic choices and climactic moments to stand out, but also their vocal health.
When it comes to posture, what are the most influential tips, insights or research findings that you would like to share with our audience?
Per The Vocal Athlete, “the role of the skeleton is to provide origin/attachment for muscles and it is designed to efficiently distribute weight and work so that we can move freely without significant effort. When imbalanced, this can affect the voice negatively” (Leborgne and Rosenberg, 2014). While I don’t believe perfect alignment is required for great singing (trying to maintain a rigidly straight posture can have profoundly negative effects on the voice), having access to dynamic and functioning body mechanics is important to continuously evaluate in a singer.
Exploring the different ways for the body to lengthen, engage, and release can help a singer find the strategies that work for them in which contexts. I like to have singers explore their alignment from the bottom up as well as the top-down. The bottom-up approach can often feel more grounding, the top-down approach can feel more buoyant and flexible. Feeling your body through movement while singing is also very practical; dancing, blocking, and posture-altering costumes are often involved in live performances!
One area of misalignment that I commonly see that does seem to impact the voice quite negatively is “tech neck” or forward head posture. So many of us struggle with this due to increasingly sedentary and screen-based lifestyles. Given that the larynx is situated along the cervical spine and has many muscular attachments within the neck, neck alignment is huge for laryngeal freedom. Sometimes this is addressable in voice lessons and sometimes it requires a referral out as there are many areas of postural alignment that can negatively impact head posture.
On that note, knowing when to refer a singer out for specialized body help is crucial. There may be anatomical limitations that are beyond the scope of practice of a voice teacher and may need to be evaluated and treated by a body specialist. Depending on the nature of the singer’s presentation, referrals may be made to physical therapists, osteopaths, laryngeal masseuses, bodywork practitioners, and fitness professionals. Some of my frequent NYC referrals include Tara Thompson Bodywork, Visceral Voice Massage, Mims Method PT, and Neurosport PT.
When it comes to teaching methods or communicating complex ideas about singing, what are the most influential tips, insights or research findings that you would like to share with our audience?
Understanding the basics of motor learning principles, exercise physiology, and motivational interviewing are pillars of my teaching method. I also am thankful for my speech pathology training in learning how to establish client goals and measure progress over time through clinical documentation. In teaching singing this is not something I track as formally as in my SLP work, but being able to set specific goals, observe progress, and adapt your methods when needed is critical.
When communicating complex ideas about singing, some singers may benefit from technical explanations and mechanical explorations while others benefit from metaphors and visualization. I would argue that most singers benefit from a combination of approaches. I often like to give multiple perspectives and options for the same concept, and then I follow what types of cues the person in front of me is responding to best in that given moment.
I have found that sometimes simplicity is better than being in the voice science weeds, but many singers feel more empowered when they feel like they understand how their voice works and the mystery is taken out of it. This helps them to help themselves; when they understand their vocal mechanics in a practical way, they will have more capacity to troubleshoot their voice outside of lessons. The most important part of practicality is finding a facilitative method that helps the singer either feel or hear a specific change. If they can feel or hear the change, they can start to process it and can more likely repeat it.
As much as I like to be specific and anatomically informed when possible, I feel it’s important to maintain an open dialogue with singers that not every aspect of vocal production is understood or agreed upon. Voice science is not black and white and most of its concepts exist on a spectrum. There’s a lot that we don’t know and there are always new things to learn. Including the student in the conversation about how they are processing the concepts personally is a key part of finding an individual student’s shades of grey in their voice. Language can then be adapted appropriately to what the individual understands.
Final Thoughts (Words of Wisdom, Books, Resources)?
I have learned over time that one of the most important aspects of free singing is learning to love your voice, especially since the industry is filled with subjective criticism and singing is so connected to your personhood. If you love your voice, if you feel good about your voice, you will sing so much more freely than if you are held hostage by a negative thought spiral (or by a discouraging voice teacher!).
My advice to singers wanting to learn how to love their voice:
- Learn to admire others’ voices, not to compare.
- Talk to your voice the way you would talk to a friend about their voice.
- Spend more time appreciating your voice’s strengths – kind words are key.
- Reframe “problems” as areas for growth.
- Moments of vocal difficulty are just “data points” for us to observe and learn from.
- Make peace with the nonlinear process of progress.
- Celebrate all of the small wins along the way.
Some additional resources:
The Vocal Athlete by Wendy Leborgne and Marci Rosenberg
Manual of Singing Voice Rehabilitation by Leda Scearce
The Owner’s Manual to the Voice by Rachael Gates, L. Arrick Forrest, and Kerrie Obert
