Norman Doidge, MD has written two of the more important books of this century. His careful, researched understanding of brain plasticity actually pales next to his ability to communicate the subject with clarity, simplicity, and such enthusiasm as to bring the reader to the point of wanting to begin to define their personal understanding within the context of their changing brain maps. For voice users, this book reinforces why science and understanding the voice can lead to easier learning, and more fulfilling performance. Doidge lays at our feet a chance to understand in concept what voice users have long experienced, but been unable to define. He opens our understanding away from the "I don't know how to explain it, but you know what I mean, you just have to feel it" toward meaningful, direct adjustments based in cognitive research, and all without the layman's challenges of reading scientific research journals. |
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To the seemingly endless contention around breathing for voice users, Hixon brings a lifetime of research and significant informational girth. This book is certainly an important step in the respiration debate, if only to set a bar for technical discussion. Though interpretations will certainly abound, Hixon offers enough critical data to help settle some questions. Still, his viewpoint is decidedly of the twentieth century. As such, some of the contextualizing language (e.g. "control", "hold", "fix"), and even some of the driving questions (e.g. "how much should the rib cage expand"), beg to be reborn in a twenty-first century paradigm that includes significant laryngeal, acoustic, neurological, physiological and body mapping research and experience. In a concise document, Hixon has summed up the breadth of understanding of a century or more of “breath wars” among well-meaning pedagogues and practitioners by offering decades of research data to support and refute the principal claims that drove those conflicts. It has also opened a door for refreshed thinking on the topic of respiration, and more user friendly, community-supported consensus on the topic.
Although His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop Desmond Tutu don't cover vocology in The Book of Joy, it has significant interest to vocolgy enthusiasts. The book, dedicated to exploring “the goal of avoiding suffering and discovering happiness”, frequently references scientific research on the topic. Alongside the sage wisdom of the combined 165 years of spiritual leadership that these two men bring to the conversation, collaborating author Douglas Abrams helps to guide the reader’s experience by including contemporary neuroscience’s understanding of emotion, spirituality, and human interaction. The book reads like advice from the best friend that we all wish we had, and each page is notable and quote worthy.
In a field populated by avid researchers and skilled practitioners, the most common academic contributions tend to be those that advance the field in baby steps, offering a little more clarity to well-trodden paths. It is rare to find a radical shift in thought, one that opens considerably new opportunities for everyone. Ian Howell’s “Parsing the Spectral Envelope” is just such a work, however. Howell has tackled one of the longest-held, and most unsatisfying, concepts in musical science, namely, that sound is a combination of loudness, pitch, and timbre, with timbre being “everything else”. Not only has he tackled it, he’s given us definitions to work with that astound the imagination, and charts, graphs, and videos that so easily bring us into these new definitions that, after working with them for a few minutes, it’s hard to imagine how we’ve functioned without them until now. At VoiceScienceWorks, we’ve been using several of his definitions for almost a year, having been privy to his thought process in development, and they have profoundly altered the ways that we explain singing. Ian has opened the doors, now we all have the joy of walking through them to see what brilliant discoveries await. This relatively short piece may have just changed the way we understand the voice, forever. We can all be pleased to have lived to see such a moment. For now, at least, you can download it for free (video links are listed in the body of the paper) here. ~David
This is an important book. Although I disagree with Olson some of the time, she has organized her writing in a way that brings clarity and focus to the great choral director/singing instructor divide that has so plagued the voice habilitation world for all of my life, and presumably for long before. The conflict that she exposes creates a wonderful conversation for choral practitioners and voice teachers alike. Her attention to voice science and its role in helping to create options for singers can not be underscored enough. So much of the perceived need of the soloist community to define boundaries around their choral experiences comes directly from the actions of choral practitioners who, though they mean well and know much about their craft, continue to operate without requisite knowledge of the vocal instrument. They, therefore, create expectations on singers that force them to compromise their own understanding of their voices, or worse, to make unknown adjustments that habituate unpredictable patterns.
The highlights of Donald Miller's "Resonance in Singing: Voice Building through Acoustic Feedback" range from his philosophical treatise on why voice teachers can and should adopt technology into their practice to his explanation of how to utilize two specific technologies (VoceVista and the electroglottograph) to promote healthy and advance acquisition of vocal acoustics. As a reader, I felt as if I were sitting at the foot of a benevolent and wise father, garnering patience and focus along the way. If you're going to use the EGG, it's a good place to start. If you've never considered vocal acoustics before, however, you might want to give Ken Bozeman's book a read first.
Wendy D. Leborgne and Marci Rosenberg have produced a book that is well researched, carefully crafted, and meaningfully put together. Their love of teaching, sharing with others, and application of science is evident throughout the piece. Highlights of the book include the brilliant bibliography (which will act as a potent resource for the avid reader of vocology), their even-handed discussion of approaches to breathing instruction, their attention to phonotrauma and health questions (stemming from their SLP backgrounds), a crisp history of vocal pedagogy, and their intention to present research on belting in as complete a manner as possible, giving attention to several of the key players in CCM research over the past few decades.
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