Do Singing Teachers & SLTs Do the Same Job? Overlap, Vocal Identity & Weird Exercises

In vocal health and voice rehabilitation, where does the speech language therapist's role end and the singing teacher’s role begin?

In part 2 of this conversation, Jeremy Fisher and Dr Gillyanne Kayes go deeper into the relationship between the singing teacher and the SLT/SLP, exploring where the overlap is helpful, where boundaries matter, and why referral is sometimes the most professional thing you can do.

They unpack some of the practical questions raised while teaching SLTs on a recent course in Northern Ireland, including breath management, phonation, pressure and flow, resonance strategies, vocal identity, and the challenge of helping singers transfer healthy voice function into real speech and singing.

This episode also gets into the human side of voice work. What happens when a change in speaking or singing function feels like a change in identity? Why can the right exercise feel completely wrong to a vulnerable singer? And how can both professions work together without overstepping their expertise?

You’ll also hear some wonderfully odd but effective voice exercises, including pitch-play, negative practice, conversation training therapy, and toothbrush intelligibility work.

If you heard part 1, this episode takes the conversation further, into the real-life overlap between professions, and why mutual respect, collaboration and clear boundaries are essential for healthy voice work.

In this episode:
00:00 Teaching vocal function to SLTs
02:01 Breath, phonation, registers, pressure and flow
04:32 “That’s not me”, identity and singing sound
07:45 Registers, chest voice, fluty soprano, and bridging mechanisms
09:18 Why a new vocal setup can feel out of tune
13:42 Weird exercises that actually work 
14:56 Permission slips, silliness, and experimentation
16:04 Humming, inner hearing and finding pitch 
19:10 Meaning, melody & “Feed the dog”
20:13 Starting with real speech, not isolated drills
24:37 The toothbrush exercise for intelligibility, jaw release & tongue freedom
29:05 What singing teachers can learn from clinical practice
31:15 Respect the boundary, keep the collaboration

Listen if you’re a singing teacher, SLT, vocal coach, choir leader, voice trainer or singer who wants a clearer sense of who does what, and why it matters.

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Transcript

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

Jeremy: Hello and welcome to This is Voice Season 12, episode 10 

Gillyanne: the podcast where we get Vocal about voice. 

Jeremy: I'm Jeremy Fisher. 

Gillyanne: And I'm Dr. Gillyanne Kayes. 

Jeremy: And we're back. We're back on the tobject. Tobject?. We're back on the subtic 

Gillyanne: T'object. 

Jeremy: We're back on the topic of singing Teachers versus SLTs? 

Gillyanne: No. Oh, this is such a blooper.

Gillyanne: The singing teacher and the SLT. 

Jeremy: Yes. Basically where are we doing the same job? Where are we doing different jobs? Where are the boundaries? Where are the markers? Where are the red flags? 

Gillyanne: Two complimentary professions. 

Jeremy: Yes. 

Gillyanne: Helping voices to do their thing. 

Jeremy: You are so kind and I'm so not. 

Gillyanne: Mm-hmm.

Jeremy: Uh, Just to set the scene, a couple of weeks ago we were in Northern Ireland giving a course called Vocal Skills. 

Gillyanne: Applied 

Jeremy: Vocal skills, applied Vocal skills 

Gillyanne: for speech and language therapist 

Jeremy: for client,

Gillyanne: oh, what 

Jeremy: was it called?

Jeremy: Oh, what was it called? You've got it. 

Gillyanne: It's, oh look, it's on here. Applied Vocal skills for client relevant strategies. 

Jeremy: Right. It was called Apply. No, it's not gonna happen. Okay. What Gillyanne said. 

Gillyanne: Yeah. 

Jeremy: And so what we're talking about today is some of the questions that came up from that course, some of the things that we did, some of the understandings and the realizations that we had on the role of the speech and language therapist and the role of the singing teacher in Vocal health.

Gillyanne: Yeah. Where we went after this business of, client lands in your caseload, how are you thinking about them? And so on forth. We got to really what it, the meat and potatoes of what it was that we had to offer. 

Jeremy: Yes. 

Gillyanne: So we're talking about what problem am I trying to solve? What's gonna matter the most for this client?

Gillyanne: And what we deal with mostly are the Vocal function domains. And we chose to talk about breath and breath management because nothing much happens if we can't deal with that. Phonation, including phonation modes. And a little bit about two of the, three of the register mechanisms that might be heard in speaking voice.

Gillyanne: Yep. Pressure and flow, which are which is one of the most important and undiscussed topics, I think, in singing teaching. And I think it was quite a revelation for them as well to understand the relationship between hyperfunctional or hypofunctional voice and the pressure and flow rates and how those can safely be adjusted.

Jeremy: Yep. And I have a chart of exercises that demonstrate different types of pressure and flow, and also four areas that you can change pressure and flow. 

Gillyanne: Yeah. In body you're very good on awareness and I want us to talk about raising awareness. 

Jeremy: Yes. 

Gillyanne: And obviously also talking about resonance strategies.

Jeremy: Yep. 

Gillyanne: And we did quite a bit as well of putting things together. We had people, dealing with playing with pitch, so prosody and pace. So speed and also putting in pauses because what we want, as a singing teacher, you want to have everything you're doing with the the singer in the room to translate into the material they want to sing.

Jeremy: Yes. 

Gillyanne: And what you will need as an SLT or SLP is for that to translate so that the client can eventually generalize their behavior into the situations in which they need to use their voice. 

Jeremy: And that could be conversational, it could be presentational, it could be talking on the telephone clearly, it could be all sorts of things.

Gillyanne: There were a number of areas that I think fall under the idea of identity. 

Jeremy: Yeah. 

Gillyanne: I want to say something about this, and I know you, you have ideas and we might riff around some of the things that we did. Sometimes when you are working with someone who sings either a professional singer or a very keen avocational singer who's landed in the clinic because they have a functional voice problem, it will be the job of the speech and language therapist to improve their function in speech. 

Jeremy: Yes. 

Gillyanne: And that may well be working extremely well. And then quite often an experienced speech and language therapist might say, do you wanna have a bit of a sing?

Gillyanne: And you might hear something and think, goodness me they're not applying this in this domain at all. And that can be challenging because singer, people who sing often have a singing identity. 

Jeremy: Yes. 

Gillyanne: And when you start messing with their speaking voice, they get very upset that you might, change their singing identity.

Gillyanne: And that has to be handled carefully how you map across. I have had to deal with that many a time. 

Jeremy: Mm-hmm. 

Gillyanne: Particularly it's usually with older females, postmenopausal who perhaps have been singing in their treble voices. So more in a mechanism two, for nearly all of their lives. And suddenly things aren't functioning as well as they should have been.

Gillyanne: They might even have been speaking in their mechanism two. And you are having to start addressing this by encouraging them to use a little bit of chest voice speaking voice behavior or mechanism one in their singing voice, just to get the function working better overall. 

Jeremy: And that can be quite startling.

Gillyanne: Mm-hmm. 

Jeremy: For people. If you've had, in, in that circumstance, if you've had somebody singing in a very good choir for 40 years, a second soprano

Gillyanne: or first soprano

Jeremy: or first soprano. Mm-hmm. And you are now telling them that in order for them to get back to where they were, they have to use a start singing in chest voice.

Jeremy: Yeah. 

Jeremy: And they've never sung in chest voice because it doesn't match a choral sound. And so they're saying, but that's not me. And it's in a way it's so interesting because you just go, well, it wasn't me and there's only two of us in the room, so I dunno who it was, but you know exactly what they mean.

Jeremy: It's like, that's not my identity. That's not who I hear myself being. 

Gillyanne: Yeah. It's also that's not my voice. And of course they worry that they're going, that's not where I want to sing. They worry that they're going to lose those top notes by working on the bottom notes. And when i'm working with someone on that, I will explain what we're doing is we're getting a little bit more muscular behavior just like it's actually very helpful for people to be doing a bit of strength training. Yep. Bit of lifting weights or, isometric strength training, particularly as we get older. We need to do that with the Vocal folds as well.

Gillyanne: And eventually you will find it in enormously helpful both in your speaking and singing voice. 

Jeremy: There's something also very interesting in that particular scenario where the training, we assume, the training or the instruction has been that you shouldn't feel anything in your throat. It should be complete flow from lungs outwards.

Jeremy: And that is what gives you that column of air type of singing sound. And when you get somebody into an M1 vibration for the first time, they go, but I can feel it. But that's terrible. I can feel something in my throat.

Gillyanne: Must be wrong. 

Jeremy: It must be wrong. And so there's sometimes there's a lot of reassurance that goes on going, no, it's absolutely fine.

Jeremy: Mm-hmm. And we had a quite a long conversation with the speech therapists a couple of weeks ago, which was all about registers and how do you deal with that very strong dark chest voice thing going suddenly into a flutie soprano. And so we were doing sort of exercises. We were doing slightly leaky sounds, we were doing breathy sounds.

Jeremy: We were making something happen in an M1 version, which is going to match the M2 sound a bit better. And one of the fascinating things, and this is just a by the way, is that when you use a leakier or a breathier M1 sound, you will often find that your, what you think is the place your voice changes, your gear change, moves. Because you are no longer doing a dark, heavy pressurized M1.

Gillyanne: And I think the other thing that came up, which was quite interesting is that obviously there are shared neural pathways between speech and singing, but we do have some distinct pathways to do with how we process melody in singing. And I think it could be for people in this situation that we're speaking about, that there is a pathway that's already there.

Gillyanne: They open their mouths to sing. Ah, that arrives. 

Jeremy: Yeah. 

Gillyanne: And the idea that they would do anything else can feel weird. We're having to, I always talk to my own clients about, okay, we're changing the route on the Google map. And that takes a little bit of practice. 

Jeremy: There's something else as well, which is if you are a singer and you're asked to sing in a different mechanism, then your sense of where tuning is suddenly goes haywire. Mm-hmm. Because you are producing a sound in a, in a different way and you're producing a different sound and you don't know how to tune it. And so suddenly that be also, that becomes an excuse for you not to do it anymore. It's like I can't possibly sing like that. It's not in tune.

Jeremy: And again, you might need some patience to say to people it is in tune. It's just a different harmonic setup. Yeah. It sounds different to you, but out here you are fine. You are in tune or yes, that's not the tuning that you are used to. Let's sort that out. Let's find the tuning in that version.

Gillyanne: And this of course is where a speech and language therapist might want to refer on to a singing voice rehabilitator. 

Jeremy: Yes. 

Gillyanne: And it's great that we have more of these people now available, who come from a singing background. I quite like the term singing informed habilitator or singing informed rehabilitation, because then what we can do is we can start mapping any of the work that's been done in a clinical setting, in a medical framework with these vocalists and help them map it across into their singing.

Jeremy: Yes. 

Gillyanne: Can we talk a little bit more about, a voice is not just a load of functional coordinations. Yeah. It's also our identity. We just mentioned identity a little bit there. The, the person of the voice and how perhaps people have adopted from habits, social situations they've adopted a habitual setup, if you like. 

Jeremy: Yep. 

Gillyanne: And that when you change it. It can feel deeply strange even if perhaps functionally it's helpful, which is what we were talking about just now. Everybody laughs because if Jeremy asks me to demonstrate speaking in a falsetto female false setta or mechanism, two, I have to channel one of my relatives, and she really did speak like this.

Jeremy: She really did, 

Gillyanne: which you do sometimes hear some British women doing. And it's very weird because I find I'm taking I'm moving differently. I'm shaping my vowels in a different way, and suddenly I'm feeling like I'm this rather old fashioned person who's a little bit prissy. And, that's the persona change.

Gillyanne: It's it's not me. Fortunately, I did love this relative very, very dearly. But she could be quite bossy. 

Jeremy: You don't say, 

Gillyanne: am I bossy? Well, and, and of course we make as listeners and people interacting with that person, we will respond in different ways, which is, and we have to be careful not to do it judgmentally.

Jeremy: I think it's, 

Gillyanne: Am I off-piste?? 

Jeremy: No, not at all. I think it's really interesting the whole business of identity and, and voice and sound. And you have to remember that if people are crossing your path because of a Vocal problem, they are already feeling vulnerable. Yeah. And so when you present them with an exercise that makes them sound completely different mm-hmm.

Jeremy: That they've never necessarily sounded like before. Mm-hmm. And they're already vulnerable, they're going to look at you and go, do you really know what you're doing? Because this feels so far away from what I want to get to. And again, there's going to be some explanation, there's gonna be some reassurance, there's going to, and also you then check your own stuff to go, was that the right exercise?

Jeremy: Am I on the right lines? And it becomes that relational thing again. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So it's, I think it's one of the reasons why we mentioned in the last episode that singers will often come to their singing teacher with a voice problem before they go to a voice clinic. 

Gillyanne: Mm-hmm. 

Jeremy: Because you have a relationship.

Jeremy: And the two previous episodes we did with Michelle Robinson is talking, they're both talking all about the relational aspect of a singing lesson with a between a teacher and a student. So yeah, somebody can be, feel very vulnerable and so they don't recognize necessarily that what you're suggesting is going to be of use to them, which is quite interesting. 

Gillyanne: And that, that is a process of negotiation.

Jeremy: It is. But it also brings me so beautifully to weird exercises. 

Gillyanne: I was hoping we were going to go to weird. Introducing Mr. Weird 

Jeremy: introduce. Hello, my name's Mr. Weird. I am well known for doing weird exercises and I know perfectly well they're not weird, but to somebody who's never done an exercise like this before is just you get the face, it's like, Really? 

Gillyanne: Do you want me to do that?

Jeremy: Yeah. Are you sure? 

Gillyanne: Mm-hmm. 

Jeremy: And occasionally I will do some explanation and occasionally I will say, just do it and find out later. And it depends. Again, that depends on the person in the room. But we did a very interesting exercise using a spoken voice passage. 

Gillyanne: Mm-hmm. 

Jeremy: Where we did a few things some of which I've done before and some of which we hadn't.

Jeremy: So one of the fastest changes I've found when you are wanting somebody to change what they do is to do the extreme version. And it feels ridiculous. And it sounds ridiculous, and it's like nobody would ever do it like that. But by doing the extreme version, you're sort of laying the boundaries to go anywhere within this is absolutely fine.

Gillyanne: Mm-hmm. 

Jeremy: So that what you are doing, I'm going to talk about permission slips. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You are writing somebody a permission slip to go. I want you to be silly. I want you to experiment. I want you to try things out. I want you to do something that may feel and sound extremely silly to you right now, but will actually help you get more interest in your sound.

Jeremy: It will get you more variety, will get you more communication skills. There are all sorts of things that this will get you, so you're gonna have to trust me on this one. Do it. 

Jeremy: And one of the ones that we did was extreme pitch. So if I was to talk to you in the way that I would normally not do, then I've already covered two and a half to three octaves in that.

Jeremy: Now normally I wouldn't speak that high. But occasionally I do. And occasionally you hear people in the street speaking at extreme levels, and it's absolutely fascinating. 

Gillyanne: Yeah. I just want to share something specific I did on that because a lot of this weird behavior is about raising awareness, isn't it?

Jeremy: Yes.

Gillyanne: And it also relates to the joy of wrong, which a, again, we spoke about wrong in inverted commas, obviously. Yep. Negative practice is really what I mean. Yeah, where we went was with this pitch awareness. Now obviously people who've had a music training are very, very aware of pitch change. But you know, the average person in their speaking voice may be not that aware, and in particular, they won't be aware of what they're doing themselves.

Gillyanne: We used, I think it's a Christina Shewell exercise, isn't it? And it's also in our This Is A Voice book where you read a passage in your head, then you read it out aloud, and then you do it with your lips closed So Hmm mm mmm mmm mm mmmm mmm mmmm 

Jeremy: Let me do a demo of the whole, that whole sequence. 

Gillyanne: Okay. Go. 

Jeremy: So weird is not random. It's often a shortcut to awareness. Mm-hmm hmm hmm hmm. Hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm and then I did an extra little bit, which is I am separating all of the words with h's. Mm-hmm. And then I said, let's not separate, let's do one continuous thing. So I'm going, gonna go from the spoken words to the, 

Jeremy: to the continuous. Weird is not random. It is often a shortcut to awareness. Hmm.

Gillyanne: Now this is important. First of all, we know that consonants interrupt the airflow and so do onsets. And that's how it should be for natural speech. But often what's happening if we're wanting to change people's speaking behavior, is to get some kind of flow so that, we're getting sufficient sub glottal pressure underneath the Vocal fold so that we can continue the flow, get to the end of the sentence, and then let go and breathe in again and start over.

Gillyanne: So what's so nice about those two steps, Jeremy, is that you're starting to map in the flow. 

Jeremy: Yes.

Gillyanne: Now this is very interesting because I hit a stalling block when I was doing this with my group because one person said, but I can't feel the pitch when I'm doing. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And so I just thought quickly outta the box, which is, well, if you were reading something in your head, you're hearing it in your head, aren't you?

Gillyanne: Some people when they read, they actually move their lips, so it would be, what were you reading? 

Jeremy: From there. 

Gillyanne: Strong takeaway. Weird is not random. It's often a shortcut to awareness. Mm-hmm.

Gillyanne: As soon as they'd got the idea that they were reading in their head. They could hear the pitch. 

Jeremy: Oh, that's so interesting. 

Gillyanne: And then they could mess with the pitch. 

Gillyanne: Yep. 

Gillyanne: And I think you just need to be aware particularly as any kind of person, making an intervention or raising awareness that something that seems obvious to you.

Gillyanne: Oh, now just do it on hmm, 

Jeremy: yep. 

Gillyanne: May not be obvious at all to someone else. 

Jeremy: Yes. 

Gillyanne: Well, hang on. I was saying words now I'm not saying words. Hang on. I was reading, now I'm not reading. What am I doing in fact? 

Jeremy: Yeah. 

Gillyanne: And you just have to be creative. 

Jeremy: We started that exercise with feed the dog. Which is in the This Is A Voice book.

Gillyanne: There was no dog in the room. Just so you know. 

Jeremy: It's, and 'cause we were talking about pitch and meaning and pitch and in excitement and pitch and emotion. And so we use the phrase "feed the dog", which is an exercise in This Is A Voice and you say, feed the dog. Just an ordinary, just feed the dog.

Jeremy: And then you change the meaning behind it. So you say, look, I've asked you more than once, feed the dog. So we've changed the timing, we've changed the consonant use consonant efficiency, and we've changed the melody, the prosody. And then it'd go, oh, it's so sad. Feed the dog. So you have a downward curve and then a little upward curve at the end.

Jeremy: And just using that phrase and using different meanings gives you different pitch patterns. Really interesting way of just helping somebody notice that pitch is part of speech. 

Gillyanne: I like this because. Is it possible that we could segue a bit to talk about conversation therapy? 

Jeremy: Yay. Conversation therapy. 

Gillyanne: Do we have the name of the person who's put it together?

Gillyanne: We should have, 

Jeremy: we will put it in the show notes. 

Gillyanne: Yes. 'cause there is research on this. There is a good evidence base for it. It was something that actually I'd been reading about on the internet as I was mentally prepping for this course. And I came across a reference to conversation therapy.

Gillyanne: And it so happened that I was having a conversation with Laura later that day to um, talk about her input that she was going to give in the afternoons. 

Jeremy: I've just checked it. It's Jacqueline Gartner Schmidt. 

Gillyanne: Okay. Jackie Gartner Schmitt. 

Jeremy: Jackie Gartner Schmitt. 

Gillyanne: Conversation training therapy. 

Jeremy: Yeah. 

Gillyanne: Oh, it is Jacqueline?

Gillyanne: Yes. Okay. And Laura said she'd, she'd done a course on it. And the goal of it is it's a way to support carrying over from voice exercises into everyday speech. And the way that it works is it actually starts with connected speech. 

Jeremy: It's almost it reverses the process of Yeah. Of function.

Jeremy: Mm-hmm. So you start with a connected speech, and you are listening carefully, and then the practitioner feeds a couple of sentences back to the person, the client. Mm-hmm. Whoever, whatever they've said. You just feed a couple of sentences or a sentence back or a phrase back, and you might, for instance, when you feed a phrase back, you might just emphasize the consonants a bit more.

Jeremy: You might just change the pitch shape a little bit more. You might emphasize a little bit more. So you are starting from something that is already in flow. 

Gillyanne: I'm just wondering, could we find a sentence just to show just an example? 

Jeremy: Well talk to me. 

Gillyanne: Well, at the end of this week, we're getting ready to pack and 

Jeremy: we are in fact packing.

Gillyanne: We are in fact packing. Yeah. 

Jeremy: And where are we gonna go? 

Gillyanne: We're going to Norway. 

Jeremy: We're going to Norway. 

Gillyanne: Norway on a Norwegian fjords cruise. 

Jeremy: Excellent. 

Gillyanne: And we're hoping to see the Northern lights 

Jeremy: Correct. 

Gillyanne: So he guided me to focus on the N sound. 

Jeremy: Yeah. 

Gillyanne: Now it may be if you choose to do that. And again, really honestly, I'm just blagging my way through Laura's presentation.

Gillyanne: It may be that you need, may need to stop and say, okay, so that nnn sound, where do you feel the nnn sound? Let's play with that nnn nnn sound and maybe use some words. So the the client gets used to doing that, and then you start going back into, into having a conversation and guiding them to focus on that.

Gillyanne: And you can change pitch that way. Of course, if you focus on things like nasals, which are, are based on, on flow, airflow, then you are encouraging airflow awareness. You are likely with Ms and Ns to be encouraging the sound to arrive forward in the mouth. So a number of those things that you might have previously done in isolation, now you can do them with connected speech and it'd be very interesting to see how this work develops.

Jeremy: I think it was so interesting for us because this was new to us. 

Gillyanne: Mm-hmm. 

Jeremy: And yet I recognized almost everything in it as something that I do Yeah. In a session. Because I will always want to put a technique into context. So what will often happen is that I'll do the context first. So I will get somebody to sing a part of a song and go, okay, so where do we want to be? What do we want to do? And you reflect back to somebody what they're doing and how to change it. And I thought it was so interesting. It's like, wow, I didn't know that what I did already had a title. 

Gillyanne: And it also, it's good for focusing on the one thing rule that we talk about, which is you can give someone one thing to focus on within a song.

Jeremy: Yep. 

Gillyanne: And that's the only thing they focus on. And then you explore what happens as a result of that outcome. 

Jeremy: So this is very much leading into becoming more self-aware. Becoming more aware of what you do, becoming more aware of what you don't do, becoming more aware of your own habits. And habits, the very thing about a habit is that you don't realize you do it until it's pointed out to you.

Gillyanne: Do you know what? There's one more thing I'd like to share with people. It may even be backtracking a bit, but can we share about the toothbrush? 

Jeremy: Yes. 

Gillyanne: Do you want me to go and get a toothbrush? 

Jeremy: Yes. Just pause for a moment. Yes. While Gillyanne gets a toothbrush,

Jeremy: Gillyanne's back with her toothbrush. 

Gillyanne: This is a child's toothbrush because after all, we don't want our clients to be damaging their gums. 

Jeremy: Absolutely. 

Gillyanne: Can I say that I first learned about this exercise from reading the work of the late Angela Caine, who put together an approach to singing voice use.

Gillyanne: It was largely to do with singing voice called Voice Gym. And Voice Gym still continues. And she was quite a pioneer in terms of understanding the relationship between the oral cavity, particularly from a dentistry point of view and tongue behavior and tongue thrust. And the importance of nasal breathing over mouth breathing.

Gillyanne: And these exercises came from her. 

Jeremy: So this is from, This Is A Voice. Here's our battered old copy with all the markers in it. Mm-hmm. If you're watching on YouTube. And this one is page 83, exercise 25 toothbrush Intelligibility. 

Gillyanne: And I think this was quite a revelation in terms of ways to get people to release their jaw and to move their tongue around, because it's based on the idea that, first of all, most people can brush their teeth.

Gillyanne: Secondly, most people know how to get their tongue out of the way when they're brushing their teeth, which means you're going to get mobility and you're also going to begin to isolate the jaw, the lips, and the tongue when you're speaking. 

Jeremy: So, by the way, this is, By the way, this is a, can be a big problem for people is that they use the tongue and the jaw as a single unit almost.

Gillyanne: Yeah. 

Jeremy: Or they don't move their lips or they don't move their top lip, or they don't move their bottom lip. And this is very useful for being able to separate all of those out. 

Gillyanne: Yeah. Because a tense jaw, a tight jaw, and a backed tongue or sometimes a sort of a flaccid tongue were all things that were identified in the course.

Jeremy: Yep. 

Gillyanne: So sometimes you need one of these just in case, which is a 

Jeremy: tissue. It's 

Gillyanne: a little dribble alert. 

Jeremy: Yep. So I'm gonna read the instructions out for Gillyanne. Use a toothbrush without paste to brush the chewing surface of your molars on one side of your mouth, and then the other, 

Gillyanne: Ooh. Okay. 

Jeremy: Pronounce this phrase several times as clearly as possible while you're brushing your teeth.

Jeremy: Sarah Perry was a veterinary nurse who had been working daily at an old zoo in a deserted district of the territory. 

Gillyanne: Sarah Perry was a veterinary nurse who'd been working daily at an old zoo in the deserted district of that territory. 

Jeremy: Take the toothbrush out of your mouth and say the phrase once more.

Gillyanne: Sarah Perry was a veterinary nurse who had been working daily at an old zoo in a deserted district of the territory. 

Jeremy: Now say this phrase once more. Make the movements slightly smaller and more efficient, but still aim for clarity. 

Gillyanne: Sarah Perry was a veterinary nurse who'd been working daily at an old zoo in a deserted district of the territory.

Jeremy: Really fascinating exercise. Mm-hmm. Love that one. 

Gillyanne: Mm-hmm. And you can do it singing. People can sing a nursery rhyme or something they know well. Of course, the moment I mentioned this, they wanted me to sing. It was just like, can it be done? It was, I didn't I? Yeah. It was quite fun. Did. So singers, I would recommend that as well for articulation and for releasing the jaw.

Gillyanne: So that's a really good fun thing. And it's, again, it is just so practical. Ask the client to bring in a toothbrush. Yeah. And make sure it's soft, the softest you can get. 

Jeremy: It's really interesting. Half of our work, I think, is helping people to raise their awareness 

Gillyanne: mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

Jeremy: Of what they already do.

Gillyanne: Yeah. 

Jeremy: And then you as the teacher can work out whether what they already do is efficient.

Jeremy: If it can be more efficient, if it's fine, you leave it alone. If it can be efficient and you can do something about it, fine. If it's efficient and you can't do, if it's not efficient and you can't do something about it, refer on.

Gillyanne: Mm-hmm. 

Jeremy: I think it's really interesting because many people are not necessarily doing it wrong. They just don't realize what they're doing at all. So that's in sort of education part of both of our jobs, both the SLT and the singing teacher. 

Gillyanne: Mm-hmm. Can we just say something in terms of wrapping about why the overlap is important, but also why boundaries matter?

Jeremy: Yes. 

Gillyanne: So we as singing teachers have a lot to learn from the clinical precision, the observation and carry-over thinking. Yep. From the medical profession. 

Jeremy: Yes. 

Gillyanne: And I will say that a lot of our knowledge about Vocal function comes directly from, that side of the voice profession, 

Jeremy: it really does.

Jeremy: Mm-hmm. Some of the best courses that we've been on ourselves for our own education have been things like the British Laryngological Association. Mm-hmm. 

Gillyanne: Mm-hmm. 

Jeremy: And the speech and language therapy people, we learn so much from how they deal with voice problems 

Gillyanne: and the union of. European Phoniatricians.

Gillyanne: Yes. That was a standout three days. Conversely, SLTs can gain a lot from practical singing based tools in terms of resonance, Vocal fold, fold coordination, register mechanisms if needed, because we do use them in speech. And also being able to adjust, identify I adjust identity. 

Jeremy: Yep. 

Gillyanne: And that's where resonance is super, super helpful. 

Jeremy: Yes. 

Gillyanne: And understanding the performance context. 

Jeremy: There's something very interesting, particularly for it with musical theater singers who have to change their style and genre and often the sound that they make in order to inhabit that particular actor in that particular musical 

Gillyanne: mm-hmm.

Jeremy: That people are much more used to finding an aspect of themselves, but still sounding different. Yeah. That's a very useful piece of information to have. And it is not something that a speech and language therapist would even think about because the idea that you can hold more than one resonating shape and still make it work is really quite alien.

Jeremy: So we had a lot of fun doing some demos where we were speaking in different, 

Gillyanne: different 

Jeremy: shapes, 

Gillyanne: different settings. 

Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah. And also the difference between somebody's speaking voice and their speaking voice can work reasonably well. And then they go in, into an entirely different setup for their singing voice, because that's their singing persona.

Jeremy: And all the things that they were working quite well in the speaking voice don't work

Jeremy: in the singing voice. So that's a, another sort of disconnect that the singing teacher can help with. 

Gillyanne: Overlaps matter. 

Jeremy: Yes. 

Gillyanne: And so do boundaries. 

Jeremy: Yes. 

Gillyanne: We singing teachers, we don't need to become clinical therapists.

Jeremy: Nope. You don't have the training.

Gillyanne: No. 

Jeremy: You can do it. You can do the training if you want to. Yeah. But it's not part of your training. 

Gillyanne: And a good therapist doesn't need to become a singing coach. 

Jeremy: Similar. 

Gillyanne: We need a mutual respect for each other and for the boundaries. 

Jeremy: Yeah. 

Gillyanne: But both of us can understand more about the instrument and the person and the goal in front of us if we allow overlap.

Jeremy: I think the most important thing is that you recognize your own abilities and your own gaps. 

Gillyanne: Mm-hmm. 

Jeremy: Because there's something very powerful about recognizing where your skills lie and where your gaps in the knowledge are.

Jeremy: And not saying even to yourself, "this singer in front of me has a problem. I am the only person who can solve it. Mm-hmm. I must solve it. I must be the person that they come to. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. We can't pass them onto anybody else." The SLTs are so used to working in a team where everybody has input and everybody has their skills, and everybody has their levels of expertise and their areas of expertise, and we can learn from that.

Gillyanne: So we need to keep these conversations going. 

Jeremy: Yes. It's not about showing off, it's about choosing the right tool and the right person. 

Jeremy: That's it. 

Gillyanne: I'll be done. 

Jeremy: We're done. 

Gillyanne: Okay. 

Jeremy: We'll see you next time. 

Gillyanne: Bye. 

Jeremy: Bye.

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