Yap Sesh #1: How We Got Here

Anna: Hello and welcome to the first episode of Yap Sesh. We're your hosts—I'm Anna Diemer.

Maurice: Hey, everyone. I'm Maurice...Goodwin. Because there's other Maurices.

Anna: Out there. Other Maurices. You're the only Maurice in my heart. So we are the cofounders of VoiceProEd—Voice Professionals Education—is our professional development, our continuing education company for people that work with other people on voice.

Maurice: Yeah. And so we are super excited to be launching into this new thing. Although, you know, yapping is certainly not new for the two of us. Anna and I also have master's degrees in Yap, so we are super excited that you've joined us and are just excited to share more about ourselves, more about VoiceProEd, as we all kind of learn together more about the work that we do.

Anna: Since we are new to the podcasting world, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your professional background?

Maurice: Sure. So I am, by profession, by clinical training and licensure, a speech pathologist practicing currently in Houston, TX. My background is both as a singer and a performer, and yeah, now a speech pathologist. So I primarily specialize in working with folks that have voice problems, and that's kind of across the spectrum of voice disorders in the scope of speech pathology. And I also get to do stuff like this where I help educate other clinicians and work with folks who want to do this work a little bit better. What about you?

Anna: I am a voice teacher. I own a private studio in Asheville, NC, and mostly work online. Most of the work that I do is with folks who don’t necessarily have voice problems or any particular diagnosis, but who are unhappy with their voice in some way and want to make changes. Whether that is, "I'm aging and changes are happening to my voice—how can I work through that?" or folks who may be seeking gender-affirming speaking voice work. I also work with trans singers. So in many different areas of voice, I'm working with people navigating times of vocal transition. Pretty cool.

Maurice: Cool. Yeah. I think you've described that in the past. It's like, how do I help folks through any sort of voice transition? And I love that language because I think it encapsulates a lot of teachers and folks, coaches, and people who work with the voice for sure. Things are in flux. What do you think was your primary inspiration for the work that you do or maybe even how you do the work? Because I don't think any of us are unfamiliar with what it means to be a voice teacher or voice coach. We may have this idea in our head of what that is. But for you, maybe in the way that you teach voice or the approach that you have, what's your primary inspiration?

Anna: Uh, yeah, honestly, it's rage. So I was reminiscing a little bit, and I thought I was going to be a musical theater singer. Then I show up to college, and my voice teacher is like, "You're not allowed to belt anymore because it's going to mess up your voice." So that is deep within my soul—like, wow, I don't want anyone else to have this experience that I had of being told that I can't use my voice in the way that I want to use my voice. That's super huge to me. When people tell me how they want to use their voice, then I say, "Great, I'm going to help you do that." Or, if that's not within my scope of practice or expertise, I'm like, "Great, I'll refer you to someone who does specialize in that."

Maurice: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We see this a lot actually in my clinical practice, right? I rely so heavily on people telling me what they want from their voice because it's easy for a teacher—especially someone with a lot of knowledge about voice—to tell you how it should be used or what you should be doing with it. And that model is, again, common when someone comes into a voice studio, right? "Tell me what I should do with my voice to be a better singer. Show me how to sing this. Show me how to hit this note." And so it's kind of a constant negotiation between, "What do you want?" and "How can I use this knowledge to help you get there?"

Anna: Yeah, I mean, I always give the option of, "Yes, I can guide you. Yes, I can tell you what to do." But mostly, my answer to that is no. People come in and say, "Tell me what to do," and I say, "No, tell me what you want to do, and then I can help guide you." And I think, for me, the language around that and even just describing the work that I do is important as well.

Maurice: Yeah.

Anna: And I think that helps me find the kind of folks that are more looking for that, or I get to hold their hand as they move into the scary territory of, "What do I actually want my voice to do?" and, "How can I change my thoughts and patterns around how I'm treating my voice?" Being the client in this case.

Maurice: Yeah. Oh, there's three more podcast episodes in that short dialogue there. I mean, I got into this work from a voice function and physiology perspective. I was always super interested in why my voice wasn’t doing the things that I wanted it to do, and especially when I was in my undergraduate training. I had this background in singing more contemporary music—gospel music, jazz, R&B-styled music. And then when I got into undergraduate, I was singing a lot more classical music, and I had no idea what I was doing with my voice. I felt like I was hitting a lot of blocks that I understood but couldn’t do.

And so I remember taking a voice pedagogy class with Doctor Green, who’s at Shenandoah University—still is. And it kind of opened my eyes to, "These are muscles, and these are tissues that work together to create the sound of our voice." It felt like a math problem. It felt like a solvable problem. And that kind of piqued my interest. From there, I went to graduate school to become a speech pathologist and then thankfully got to continue my work in an area that I had a lot of interest and expertise in. And now—now my days look like they look.

Anna: Let's give a shout-out to undergraduate voice pedagogy courses, which did not exist widely. That was not added to the voice curriculum until I was a sophomore, so I barely got in on that in my undergrad. But that also sparked a lot of my interest in the voice—like, "Oh wow, I get to know what I’m doing," instead of, you know—I think voice teaching historically has been more based on vibes than science.

Maurice: Yeah.

Anna: Well, you know, voice science is kind of a young field, right? It only really started in the 1800s with Manuel Garcia, and then we picked up again in the 1950s with folks like Richard Miller and Burton Coffin studying vocal acoustics. But universities having voice pedagogy as a standard part of the curriculum is a pretty recent thing. So shout-out to all those classes that helped us nerds figure out what we wanted to do.

Maurice: It's pretty interesting that even, you know, you think like a generation ago, even when you're thinking about graduate voice performance work or DMA work. Now it seems implausible that you would finish with a graduate degree in voice—anything—or a DMA in vocal performance and not have taken multiple pedagogy classes or classes about voice science and voice health. Things are certainly different.

You know, it's interesting, 'cause I think there's actually room for all types of voice teachers and even vocal coaches. There are some people that do performance coaching, and there are some people that teach songs and help you learn music. And I think there's a huge, huge role for people that are experts in vocal function—who either help build and train voices or help singers get through a challenging or tricky spot. And I think we have examples of this in sports coaching and athletic training, and it's just kind of making its way over to voice training too, especially when you're working at a professional level.

Anna: Yeah, I have a lot of clients who played sports, do some kind of movement practice, or have been to physical therapy before. And I always see the dawning of recognition and understanding on their faces when I say, "Oh, some of what we're doing is very similar to physical therapy"—learning how to move your body in the motor learning sense.

Maurice: Sure, sure, sure.

Anna: The difference is that these muscles are just really small, and we don't get to see them while we use them. This again could be like three more podcast episodes, right?

Maurice: I know! It could be. It could.

What if we take everyone back to how VoiceProEd started? Because you and I—you know, our nice relationship—began when I first moved to Houston, which at this point was a little over six years ago. I had taken some time off from training with a voice teacher professionally. I had sung during my fellowship in Wisconsin but did not have formal voice training for a little while.

And then someone had recommended—I think it was a patient who had come into the voice center—and I had reached out. At the time, I didn't have a car. Do you remember the first session? Do you remember this?

Anna: I remember Maurice showing up at my door, completely drenched because it was raining that day, and you had to walk from— I mean, it was possible to walk between our two places, even though walking in Houston is not great.

Maurice: But it was a neighborhood apart.

Anna: It was a neighborhood apart. And so even walking from the bus station, you were just drenched. I just vividly have this image in my brain of opening the door. And you had much longer hair then, so your hair was wet and just kind of dripping.

Anna: Like, not even being apologetic about it. And I’m just like, "Dude, come in."

Maurice: Here’s this wet human. I just remember taking off my shoes, having very wet feet, and thinking, "OK, here goes."

Anna: It was the start of a beautiful partnership. Is it like— it's good luck if it rains on your wedding day? This is like the—

Maurice: Oh. Oh my gosh, that’s perfect.

Anna: The voice clinician equivalent, apparently.

Maurice: And so I was taking lessons with Anna, and for me, it was honestly the first time that I felt like— It’s interesting because I wasn’t training as a singer. I was able to produce sound regardless of the quality and really focus on how things felt to me. And it was the first time that I considered more, "How does this feel to produce this sound? And can I create a better feeling, which will naturally, probably, likely create a better sound?"

And it’s something that I had guided my clients in as a speech pathologist, so it didn’t feel foreign to me. I had just never been through the process myself.

Anna: Yeah, it was a fun challenge for me working with you—working with a tenor with the kind of voice that you have. It kept me on my toes because I was still kind of a baby voice teacher at that time. I had just started my studio as a significant part of my work and my income.

Even though I had graduated a couple of years before that with my master’s, I really considered that moment as the, "Oh, I’m seriously being a voice teacher now." And every single person that walks in my door is a learning experience for me.

Not that the studio environment should be like that, but in my brain, I was like, "Cool, I still have a lot to learn about how to work with all different kinds of voices." I think I was growing with you in that way. You were discovering more things about your voice, and I was also discovering more things about your voice and voices in general, as well as the ways that I wanted to teach and create this environment to explore.

I feel like you were one of my first clients where we had this vocal playground of, "We're just gonna noodle around with this exercise and feel it out," really getting into motor learning concepts before I had the knowledge of them. Creating that space was cool for me as a teacher.

Maurice: Yeah, but then, you know, being a speech pathologist, it's not very often that you think about, "What are the things that I do that feel really natural to me just because of the way that I was raised, but maybe aren't natural to other people?"

And it wasn’t until I was working with Anna that I was like, "Oh my goodness. Yeah. Speech pathologists get no training in actually creating a vocal playground. We get no training in how to build exercises that are unique to the person we're working with. We really get no training in how to apply those exercises to function." But it was my job expectation that I would know how to do those things as a speech pathologist.

Again, I had a background in music and performance training, but that is very different from being a speech pathologist, from being someone with training in vocal pedagogy. Those are just very different things, right? Being a singer does not mean that you can then teach and train singers—especially singers that maybe have challenges with their voice.

And so that's really kind of where the roots of VoiceProEd are.

Anna: Were grown—the seedling.

Maurice: Regret is like—trying to think.

Anna: We planted the seed, and it grew roots. Yeah, because we taught our first course together in 2021, which was our first run of Singing Voice for the Speech-Language Pathologist. And I'm pretty sure you brought up this dilemma that you just mentioned to me and said, "You know, maybe we can teach a course about it."

And then fast-forward a couple more years—almost two years ago, it was in the early fall—I remember you saying, "Hey, can we—"

Maurice: September.

Anna: We set up a call. "I have a business proposition for you," and I was like, "OK..." But I think because that first SVSLP was such a success, you know, we—

Maurice: Yeah.

Anna: We sprouted from there—if we’re going with the plant metaphor still.

Maurice: Sure, sure, sure. It’s also really— and you know, maybe this will be its own podcast episode—but the journey that we have gone on, from having an idea to start an education company to training other clinicians while continuing to learn and grow ourselves, takes what we'd like to call audacity of the highest level.

And we just reached a point where we were like, "No, we're going to do this thing because this work is important." Because we believe in clinicians first and foremost. We believe that clinicians have a really impactful, meaningful role in singers' lives, and we wanted to make sure that out in the world, we were all doing the best work that we could.

Because we know that it makes us feel good when we do good work—and we help other people while doing it too.

Anna: Mic drop. That's beautiful. Yeah, it's the audacity that got us. We're figuring it out as we go, and that's also why we're here sharing our yapping. Because—maybe it's the audacity—we have good things to say. Like, why shouldn't people listen to what we're doing with the voice if it could potentially help them in their practice?

Maurice: Yeah, yeah, yeah. For you, what do you think is one of the coolest things that you've seen or reflected on in your own life? Or as the business continues to grow, what is something where you're like, "Oh, that's neat," or unexpected?

Anna: I am always sort of gobsmacked when I do a live demonstration within our courses with a client I've never met before. And we just—it's not magic; it's science and theory and the things that are in my brain—but even though I am the expert in that situation with the knowledge, it sort of feels like making magic together. And then other people get to watch that, and I think those moments are always super cool and make me really glad that I’m doing this work.

Maurice: Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Anna: What about for you?

Maurice: I think one thing that I’ve had the opportunity to reflect on now, and have seen examples of along the way, is that I think you and I are building not only a business but also demonstrating the type of relationship that we want to see other clinicians have with each other and with their clients.

And we've really tried to model that in the way that we treat each other, in the way that we work together. And, you know, everyone doesn't see behind the scenes, but you and I have both been a big support for each other. It's a place where my ideas feel safe and protected, but also grown and challenged. And that’s very fun—I mean, that is a relationship.

And as we continue to build this thing, I think we see the growth of that in the way clinicians interact with us, and in the way they tell us they're interacting with their clients as a result of their interaction with us. And so it’s been nice to see how much of a business—this thing that is not alive—actually has real impact.

Yeah, it's just, you know, an LLC on paper, but in action, it creates change. And I think that’s—it's cool. I don’t know. It’s cool.

Anna: It's cool. Yeah. And I think the whole field—both of our separate fields as well—are all moving in this direction of collaboration, of finding this partnership and support with each other.

I think you can probably agree that when we both started out in this field, it was not like that. And there have definitely been some toxic clinician relationships that I have known about.

Maurice: Mm.

Anna: And it feels really good to be a part of that wave of saying, "No, this is actually how we want to work with each other and how we want to work with clients." And maybe that is, again, the real audacity—like, "Thanks. We're going to do it this way."

Maurice: Yeah, yeah. I'm grateful for maybe having seen how those things have existed in the past, because those are lessons to me, right? "I don't want my practice to look like that, and I don't want my relationship with other clinicians to be built on keeping knowledge from each other or feeling like we have to protect something proprietary"—when it's voice exercises. So how can we help people?

Anna: I love that.

Maurice: It's—it's a—it's deeply—OK, everything's OK.

Anna: But I feel like that phrase is something we say a lot: "This information is not proprietary. It only hurts us if we don’t share this."

Maurice: Yes, yes, yes, yes. One more time?

Anna: This information is not proprietary.

Maurice: Yeah.

Anna: Yeah, I feel like—

Maurice: Yeah.

Anna: If you're starting an eventual drinking game of "this could be a whole other podcast episode," that would be a drink. Have a sip of your coffee. And then also, "This information is not proprietary."

Maurice: Oh my goodness. If we're recording a St. Patrick’s Day episode, we’re gonna be—God.

What I think, even in the world of pedagogy and vocal health, is how often that information is used to almost poke and jab at clinicians, right? "You don’t know this? You're not as good as XYZ." We do that to speech pathologists and singing teachers. And I was seeing a lot of that from the speech pathology world—"Well, that singing teacher doesn’t know what they're talking about," or, "That speech pathologist who works in a regional community center, not connected to a major academic medical center or voice center, doesn’t know what they’re talking about." Quote-unquote bad clinician.

Well, why are we not doing more to help people? It feels fun to some, maybe, to call that out and just be like, "Oh well, give me all the voice patients." But I just didn’t feel that way. I didn’t feel like that was the best way forward. The goal was getting information into the hands of people who just want to do good work.

Anna: Yeah. And as a clinician—here’s another thing for the drinking game—being OK with saying, "I don’t know that yet," right? "Let me research that and get back to you." And being able to normalize what you were saying earlier about how we are learning as clinicians constantly—and that’s OK.

Because everybody benefits from that, and nobody benefits from shaming someone for not having knowledge. We all get better when we all have the capacity to say, "I’m going to get back to you on that. That’s something I’m excited to learn more about. Stay tuned." Like—referral. Because we, again, are creating this collaborative environment.

Maurice: Yeah. You know, kind of born from that, a lot of what we do at VoiceProEd is continuing education content, courses, and classes. And we are now in our second year of running full steam—pumping out the jams. The jams being the courses.

And so we actually have a course coming up in just about a week.

Anna: A little over a week from the time of recording. Maybe a week by the time we publish this. Are we just—

Maurice: A week by the time we publish this. We got this. We got this, we got this.

So Bridging the Gap: Glottic Insufficiency in Singers is a course kind of focused on—yeah—glottic insufficiency when working with singers. And that can come from all sorts of things, like atrophy and aging voice, vocal fold sulcus, paresis, and paralysis.

It’s a case-based learning course where we're going to be looking at case histories, laryngeal exams, audio examples, and really putting on our clinician hats. How do we use the tools provided to us—in the literature, in the data—and then apply them within the context of a session for both evaluation and treatment?

Anna: Do you have anyone that you've worked with recently who is experiencing glottic insufficiency?

Maurice: Oh my goodness. I feel like I work at the Vocal Fold Paralysis Voice Center of America. And I think it’s because we’re in the Texas Medical Center—the largest medical center in the world—and there's just a lot of surgery happening there.

So there’s a lot of vocal fold paralysis, either post-thyroidectomy, post-carotid endarterectomy, or other procedures where things are happening externally to the neck. A ton of intubation-related vocal cord weakness and even tissue issues.

So yes, I see that a lot. There's probably not a day that goes by that I'm not working with some level of paralysis or paresis. And then, you know, we have an aging population out and about in the world, and that population continues to desire an active social life. Some folks are even working past retirement, so having tools to keep their voice healthy—this is certainly a population I see very frequently. What about you?

Anna: Yeah. So most of the clients that I work with don’t necessarily have any kind of pathology going on. But again, working with aging singers and beginner singers in general, I deal with a lot of insufficiency in those ways.

I had someone this week where we sang one pitch the entire hour. They were trying to learn the experience of coordinating breath and voice. They asked me when I first logged on, "I don’t know what balance is supposed to feel like. I don’t know when I’ve found equilibrium. I don’t know what’s too much. Anything kind of loud feels like yelling."

So we just hummed and sang "Oh" on different vowels—all on one pitch—to work on balancing. Like, how do you get the right amount of breath to activate the vocal folds in a way that prevents glottic insufficiency? That balance you want.

And I think that was a cool and humbling experience for me because I’m used to working with folks who have been singing their whole lives. But when I have someone new who’s like, "Hey, actually, how does voicing work?" and they’re frustrated because they can’t feel that in their own body yet—it’s a completely new coordination for them.

So being able to help them explore and learn and say, "Yeah, I hear you. It’s totally frustrating. And the only way we’re going to figure this out is by doing it, getting used to it, and figuring out what it feels like in your body. So come along on this adventure."

Maurice: Yeah. I really appreciate the opportunity to help folks completely understand how their voice works. And there are some situations where that information isn’t necessary for improvement, but so often, just describing how the vocal cords work—what it means to have glottic insufficiency—really impacts how they feel when creating sound.

How does that impact the power they’re able to generate? How does that impact things like pitch and tone? Just being able to describe that and help folks understand more about their voices is a fun part of my job. I like that part a lot.

Anna: I like that part.

Maurice: I like that part.

Anna: So you—

Maurice: Oh, that chorus.

Anna: Oh, the same thing. I’m going to leave this in because that’s—

So, if you are listening to this before the end of March, you can sign up for Bridging the Gap on our website, voiceproed.com/courses.

We are doing the course live on Sunday, February 23rd, at 12:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. It’s a two-hour course where you can earn ASHA CEUs by attending live or by watching the replay.

If you’re listening after the 23rd but before the end of March, you can still catch the replay of the course, earn your ASHA CEUs, and hang out with us on Zoom while diving into some cool case studies about glottic insufficiency.

Maurice: Cool case studies. So come—come join us.

Anna: Come join us.

So, I think we’re going to wrap up each episode with a special segment. And we are calling this Tool Time.

Maurice: Tool time.

Anna: If we have any Home Improvement fans out there, maybe we're just showing our age.

So in this segment, we’re going to talk about exercises that we are enjoying using or that have been particularly helpful to us with our clients recently. Maurice, you want to kick us off?

Maurice: Ooh, you kicked it to me first, so I'm going to kick it back to you.

You know, you can hear me say this every time, so I apologize, but I’m really into the lip trill—with a super far-forward tongue. And I picked that up from Anna. In terms of, "How do I shape resonance while also getting the benefits of an SOVT task?"

Sometimes we think those things can’t be shaped, but I was doing a lot of my lip trills with my tongue super posterior. So it would sound like this—I had this sort of resonance space while doing it. And I’m finding that adjusting the shape of the tongue can really impact how the SOVT obviously feels and also sounds.

So with a lot of my clients, I have them bring the tongue far forward. And the tongue and resonance almost sound a little bit more like this—as opposed to this.

I just continue to have fun with that—bringing the resonance forward, helping folks feel and hear a change in the resonance as they shift the position of their tongue. So that has been my go-to tool—not necessarily on a super complex pitch pattern, maybe just a 1-2-1 or 1-3-1, just kind of across the range. It’s been fun.

Anna: Fantastic. I love a lip trill. I warm up with lip trills every day. So—big fan. Did that before we logged on today.

For me, I've been working with folks a lot on legato this week. And this is where you get the cool perspective of a speech pathologist and a voice teacher recognizing our scope of practice. If you’re an SLP, you may not ever have to work on legato with any of your clients. But if you're a voice teacher listening to this, you probably will.

So, thinking about—how do we create smoothness by making shifts between vowels in the text as seamless as possible, and feeling like the smallest change?

Even though the tongue, lips, and maybe jaw opening are changing to make the different vowels that we use in speech and singing, how can we streamline that so that the voice comes out smoother?

Doing a lot of ee-eh-ah-oh-oo all on one pitch and asking, "Okay, how can we make even smaller changes between those vowels? Can we maybe move the jaw less in those situations to get things really smooth?"

And then the level up of that—the application—is: "Okay, now sing your song, but only sing the vowels. Can you make them as smooth as we did in that exercise?"

Maurice: Mushy vowels—in a good way. Mushy good.

Anna: Mushy good. Yeah. Easy good.

Maurice: Mushy good. Easy good.

Anna: Well, thank you all for listening, for tuning in. We are excited about what Yap Sesh is going to be, and we look forward to all the many, many, many, many future episodes of being in your ears.

Maurice: Yeah! If you have any suggestions on what you want to hear us yap about, let us know.

Anna: We would love to see you for a future course, and you can hang out with us on Instagram and Facebook. Slide into our DMs.

We will see you on the interwebs. Bye!

Outro: You’ve been listening to Yap Sesh with VoiceProEd, with your hosts Anna Diemer and Maurice Goodwin. The information shared in this podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only and should not be considered medical or clinical advice. If you are experiencing voice or communication concerns, please consult a licensed professional.