Your voice is unique to you. It grows as you grow. It changes as you change. If you’re curious about the relationship between your voice and your body, your heart and your mind, welcome. My name is Michèle Voillequé and I can’t wait to hear you. 

So today I woke up with a sore throat and you can probably hear it in my voice. I started recording this five minutes ago and forgot to turn the microphone on. So I actually sound significantly better than I did five minutes ago, and I’m bummed that you’re not going to get to hear that.

Well, I wanted to record today so that you can hear a recovery process, so that if you’re ever in this position, which if you’re a human, you probably will be, you can help yourself through it.

So I woke up this morning with a sore throat. Yesterday I had a sinus headache, and the day before I noticed that I, my throat, I had a lot of phlegm. I haven’t had a fever. I haven’t had any other symptoms of a cold.

I had a strange allergic reaction, or it wasn’t a strange reaction, it was an unexpected allergy on Thursday, and I wonder if that just sort of sent my, my immune system is more sensitive.

I don’t feel like I’m actually sick in any kind of contagious way. I just feel like my upper respiratory system has been impacted by something. And what could that be?

It could be anything. there’s been a lot of rain in Northern California, so there are new things growing and even actually blooming in February. Outside my window, my camellia has little buds on it, and my neighbor’s magnolia tree has buds and it will probably, it could bloom by the end of the week.

So there’s a lot. There’s always something to have an allergic reaction to, for me it seems.

So, I woke up with a sore throat and I brushed my teeth and I gargled with Listerine, and the gargling with Listerine took the sore throat pain away. So my throat doesn’t feel, my throat felt like it had hard edges, if that makes sense. Anyway, the gargling helped that.

And then, when I thought my microphone was on, I recorded some lip trills. I’m going to do that again so you can hear how they’re going.

(Lip trill)

You’ll have to take my word for it that that’s already much improved than my first ones. You can hear, I think, I can hear that there is a ceiling. My voice cannot go as high as it normally would. Let me do it again and see if you can listen to when it gets fuzzy or stuck, or when the pitch stops going up.

(Lip trill)

This is already so much better than when I first started. But you can hear that there’s a, there’s a limit. And what’s going on there, why I sound like I do, is because my vocal folds are swollen.

So, my throat hurting, that’s something happening in my pharynx, that’s above my vocal folds. When we say we have a sore throat, our vocal folds don’t have nerve endings in them. It’s not the actual vocal fold that is hurting, it’s the tissue around it that’s hurting, that’s around the back of your throat.

That’s the part that feels sore, raw, knife-y, shards of glass. I’m trying to think of all the words my students have used to describe their sore throats. You know, just not good.

The vocal folds themselves, the little bits of muscle that are vibrating, are bits of muscle covered with three layers of mucosa and like with any mucous membrane, it can be swollen and when they’re swollen, they’re not able to stretch as well. That’s what they need to do to reach a higher pitch, is to stretch.

And, they’re puffy so they’re not able to adduct as well. They’re not able to come together as well. So my voice is lower and huskier because my vocal folds are literally bigger because they’re swollen. And I’m not able to hit high notes because they’re not able to stretch because they’re swollen, but they’re already doing better.

I’m also drinking some warm decaf coffee that’s helping keep things lubricated. So I’m going to drink some more, come back and do a couple more lip trills for you.

So I’m going to do another one that starts low and goes high. You can already hear how drinking helps, right?

So, from low to high:

(Lip trill)

That’s pretty damn good. That’s not as high as I can normally go, but I’m impressed with myself at how smooth that was.  And how, I hope you can hear, there’s interference the higher I go, but it’s better than it was before.

Now I’m going to start high and go low, see what that sounds like:

(Lip trill)

Yeah, so I don’t have my very highest notes, but the whole thing is smoothing out and I want to emphasize that I started this process 12 minutes ago.

The first five minutes, I thought I had my microphone on and I didn’t, so I had to stop and start over again. So what you’ve been hearing is like seven minutes of work to get from hardly functional to kind of functional.

And my speaking voice is already less frightening. I’m going to drink some more. “Frightening.” What do I mean by frightening?

I mean, the kind of voice that somebody hears and they back away because you are, you’re clearly ill. You’re clearly under the weather.

Part of the thing about the vocal folds having mucous membranes over the top is that that makes the hydration balance in our body really important. Drinking water, non-caffeinated beverages, regularly and often, like, staying hydrated is the best thing that you can do for your vocal health, really, really and truly.

And I’m going to drink some more and you’ll hear when I come back after I’ve had a drink, it’s better.

So here I am back. I think we might have reached the limit of improvement for the immediate time being.

Now, you may be asking, “Michèle, that’s great that a lip trill works for you. I can’t lip trill. What am I supposed to do?”

If you can roll an R,

(Rolled R)

that will help as well.

You can also try an exercise called The Blowfish where you fill your cheeks with air and let a tiny amount of sound come out your mouth.

(Blow fish sound)

Your face is big and puffy the whole time.

You can also try a hum, which may be less likely to work just because, lots of people I know have a lot of tension built into their hum. So you, you go to make an M and your teeth kind of chomp down. But if you can make a hum where your teeth are apart and your lips are barely touching,

(Humming)

That might feel not so bad. And just aiming for gentle sliding, gentle gliding, from low to high. Stop when it gets uncomfortable and you really don’t have to do that many. Really, two to four ups and downs. Drink water, and then if you’re needing to speak. Try to aim your speaking voice a little bit higher than you would normally.

So if I just wanted to let myself, let it all hang out, you know, and like kind of relax everything, this is the kind of voice I have today.

My vocal folds are swollen, so I’m capable of a lower pitch. This feels really low effort and it also feels like it’s going to be tiring. So this is an option that is low effort.

I’m not actually sure if it’s going to be tiring now that I think about it. Maybe I could do this for a long time, but the problem for me, actually more with this voice is that it doesn’t sound at all like me normally. And I’m going to have a hard time relating to people through my day when I feel, when they expect me to sound, when this is going to be utterly unrecognizable.

The other thing about using the voice at the very bottom when things are already swollen is that part of the healing comes from encouraging the voice to stretch and to thin out a little, just ever so gently.

So the difference between me talking down here and me aiming for a voice that’s a little bit higher pitched, that has a little bit more forward momentum, forward placement, this sounds more like me normally.

It’s, me, obviously, in some vocal distress, but I feel like this is going to get me further through my day and I can even play around with pitching my speaking voice even higher and seeing just how does that feel when I ask my vocal folds to stretch?

So I’m not going to – and there’s some phlegm – so I’m not going to go through my day trying to sound like a really strange person when I’m talking to other people, but I can spend some time, use my voice out of that completely collapsed position down here and, try to see what being, sounding like “normal me” is more like.

So what I’m going to do now is have another drink of water, and then I’m going to try some simple sirens, and see how that goes.

Okay.

(Siren from low to high)

I hear the rickety. Do you hear the rickety? I hear rickety. I hear, “Don’t make me stretch, Michèle.”

Okay. Going to try that again. Starting high.

(Siren from high to low)

Much less rickety.

If you’re doing this yourself, you want to make sure that you’re starting from an easy place. So as I just did that descent, I wasn’t aiming for a hard onset. I wasn’t trying to begin the sound like, uh-uh, you know, with pressure in my throat.

If you’re in this situation and you’ve got a sore throat and you’re trying to vocalize, you don’t want to feel like there’s any effort happening in your throat.

You want to feel like your throat is as open as it can be, as receptive as it can be, and that there’s just going to be air coming through and you’re interested in what it’s going to sound like. You’re not trying for any particular goal. You’re honestly just interested in, “What kind of sound can I make today? What’s there?”

And by backing off in that way, by not striving for a particular thing, but just remaining curious, “What’s possible today?” – that’s a much better place to approach this than from trying to make something happen.

Because the last thing your swollen vocal folds need is tension in the muscles around them. That is not going to make phonating any easier. Phonating is the word for when your, your vocal folds vibrate and make sound.

That’s not going to be good for them. I’m going to pause, take another drink.

And I’m going to try a siren again. High to low.

(Siren sound)

How I started that, I made my mouth in the shape of an ooh, and then I just let air come through that shape.

(Siren sound)

And I’ll do the same thing going from low to high.

(Siren sound)

I’m pretty sure when I’m going from low to high, I’m not able to ascend as high as I am able to when I start high. Right? I’m not able to get up to that pitch that I started from. That makes total sense. That again is down to how the vocal folds are swollen, how they’re able to respond to the flow of air in their current state. And this is not a problem. This is literally 16 minutes in, well plus five when the microphone wasn’t on, right?

So we’re 20 minutes into my day. It’s not all going to be connected. It’s not all going to be great. But I think if you go back to the beginning of this recording, I’m already, like, almost sounding like myself.

I think I could record an actual podcast today with the explanation that I’m struggling, vocally, but maybe even give myself another two or three hours of being up, moving around, lightly vocalizing, lip trills, sirens, easy things, drinking plenty of warm liquid, and also continuing to gargle.

Some people really hate the gargling, and it’s okay if you don’t like to gargle. And I tell you, gargling with Listerine is kind of messy because it foams up, you know, so how I – a pro tip, is I put a washcloth over my mouth, because it, it bubbles as you’re gargling, and that gets really distracting. But when I have a washcloth over my mouth, the washcloth catches those bubbles, and it’s less distracting.

I don’t time my gargle. Some people say you got to do 20 seconds, 15 seconds, whatever. I do as long as it feels good. And you can gargle every hour. Listerine, salt water, they’re both good.

Salt water doesn’t really appeal to me at all. I have a much easier time with the Listerine. But you do you. It really does help soothe the pharynx. That again is the body part, that’s the back of your throat body part. And that’s the part where the nerve endings are that are telling you that you have a sore throat.

So there’s some talking. I’m going to pause, drink a little bit more and come back with a final thing before I take a break from recording.

Okay, so I’m going to do another lip trill.

(Lip trill)

I’m going to do another siren.

(Siren sound)

You can hear how the stretching is still hard.

I’m not back to my normal self, but I feel a lot more functional than I did 20 minutes ago. So, I’m going to take a break for now and maybe plug the microphone back in later in the day and see how my day went.

Okay, so here I am a few hours later, let’s see, almost five hours later. I haven’t talked very much today. I’ve done a couple more lip trills. Let’s see if I’ve got any more notes than I did this morning.

(Lip trill)

And starting from the top. (Lip trill fail) Oops, that got stuck.

(Lip trill)

I think I’m about where I got to this morning.

I’m about to teach, so I’ll have more voice use in the next few hours, and we’ll see how I’m doing after that. If I make just a (Siren sound). I can hear the huskiness in that as I go up. Let me do that again. Maybe you can hear it too.

(Siren sound)

There was less of it that time.

So that’s a good thing to remember that when you repeat something, like, “practice makes better.” Often the second, third time uh, will be clearer than the first. Let me do high to low that way.

(Siren sound)

You can hear how my vocal folds don’t want to stretch at the top, right?There’s a little, it’s kind of squeaky.

(Siren sound)

And again, that was better than the first time.

So, did I expect to sound like a diva by the end of today? No, I didn’t, but I’m super happy that I haven’t gotten worse, that I’ve maintained where I was in the morning.

So I’ve been drinking lots of fluids. I haven’t been talking that much. I haven’t tried to sing. I haven’t yelled at anybody. And, here I am five hours later, and I’ll check in, later today after some teaching. We’ll see what it’s like then.

Okay, so here I am, eight hours later, with my voice that has held up pretty well today. Um, let’s check in with a couple of lip trills.

(Lip trill)

That’s pretty smooth and you can hear I am able to reach higher pitches than I was this morning. Let’s do a top-down one.

(Lip trill)

I’m pretty proud of that.

So I’ve had a day of not very much talking, some teaching, and some singing happening in the teaching. I wasn’t able to demonstrate as I was teaching everything that I wanted to, but I was still able to give good lessons.

So I was paying attention to not overtaxing my voice. I have a couple more lessons left today, and I feel like I can do that.

It felt important for me to record my journey today, because I want to give you hope. I want to show you – all the time, not just today, but all the time, I want to show you that despair need not be permanent.

You can wake up very little voice and get yourself into a functional state of being. It takes a little effort, a lot of compassion, a lot of patience, a lot of not rushing anything, just letting yourself be where you are right now.

And try not to waste a lot of time on, “I wish it were different.”

That’s really hard. It takes discipline and practice. Unfortunately, we get to practice that when things are going wrong. But, just not rushing, allowing yourself to be where you are right now.

I’ve drunk a lot of warm liquid today. I have talked not so much. I’ve used my voice pretty carefully, but I haven’t spent the day whispering.

Whispering is like the worst thing to do when you don’t have any voice.

I did play around with this idea of speaking at the very bottom of my voice, since this is possible. I mean, I was doing this in the lessons as sort of, you know, to demonstrate what’s possible at the very bottom.

And it’s kind of fun because it sounds like a totally different person, and I don’t know who this person is, and I kind of, I want to hang on to her, or him, or they. I’m not sure. It’s a very, it’s a very different sound than I’m used to making.

But I didn’t really spend any time talking down here for any significant amount of time. So, I spent most of my day trying to sound like myself, trying to sound what I think is normal for me.

There are a bunch of resources on my website and elsewhere in the podcast feed about how to take care of your voice – home remedies, things to try, what to do when you’re feeling goopy. Those will all be linked in the show notes.

Before I go, I want to show you another option if you’re not good at a lip trill and you can’t roll an R. What you can do is blow bubbles with a straw. We’ll see how this sounds. So, this is blowing bubbles without using my voice:

(Blowing bubbles)

This is just a regular old drinking straw in water. I have paper straws. You can use a metal straw. If you’ve got a plastic straw, it doesn’t matter the straw. It doesn’t matter how big the straw is. I mean, it shouldn’t be huge, but, you know, use what you’ve got.

And here’s what it sounds like when I turn my voice on:

(Blowing bubbles with a pitch traveling from low to high)

So what I’m doing when I’m, what I’m focusing on when I’m doing that is making a sound, but really giving my attention to the bubbles in the water. I want the bubbles to be consistent. And the resistance that is provided by the straw, so as you’re blowing into the straw, the air is being forced through a small tube, right?

That’s creating resistance and back pressure, which is helping to balance the vocal folds and is helping them to figure out how they’re going to work now, given that they’re so puffy.

That resistance and back pressure is the same that’s created when you do a lip trill, only instead of having the air forced through a small tube, you’re forcing the air past some sizable pieces of tissue, your lips, and, the space in your, between your lips where the sound is leaving when you’re doing a lip trill is also pretty small. You can feel it with your fingers if you can lip trill.

Anyway, this is one of those scientifically proven things that help restore the voice. And so I made, I made an ascent.

(Blowing bubbles with a pitch traveling from low to high)

I went comfortably up and comfortably down. You can make a little melody.

(Over the Rainbow while blowing bubbles)

Again, I’m listening for the bubbles to be continuous.

The goal of singing through a straw is not:

(Over the Rainbow in short bubble bursts)

That’s not so helpful when you’re trying to restore vocal function. Same thing with a lip trill:

(Over the Rainbow in short lip trills)

Not so useful if your voice isn’t working very well. You to connect all the notes together. You want to slide around. You want to sound scoop-y and sloppy. And when you’re in the state that I’m in today, we don’t care about hitting notes, like aiming for the “right” note or you, you try to sing a tune and it goes off the rails. That’s not the point.

The point on a day like today is not to lip trill or bubble a tune perfectly. The point today is to use your voice gently, effectively, efficiently, so that it can recover more quickly.

I hope this was at least entertaining, if not helpful, even if you’re feeling great today. And please let me know.

It can be a challenge to sit with ourselves when we sound like crap, but I hope the message of today’s podcast is that it doesn’t last. We do sound better. We can sound better throughout the course of the day. And I believe that I sounded better faster for having done lip trills and semi-occluded vocal tract exercises.

So, lip trills, rolled R’s, blowing through a straw, those are semi-occluded vocal tract exercises. I think they really help. There have been clinical studies that show that they help. Whether you believe that they help is something that you’ll have to prove for yourself.

Anyway, I wanted to offer my hand to you for the days when your voice isn’t working so well and let you know there is a way out.

I don’t know what I’m going to sound like tomorrow. I might be back to where I was this morning. I don’t know how long this could go on. There are no guarantees, right? We can only do the best we can with what we have.

And what we have are simple exercises, treating ourselves kindly, drinking a ton of warm fluids that are not caffeinated, not drying to the voice, and giving ourselves grace.

Thanks so much for listening.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, please rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new people find the show. Subscribing ensures you’ll learn about new episodes as soon as they come out. If you have a question about singing or speaking or being, please send me an email at letters@mvmusik.com.

That’s letters at M as in Mary, V as in Victor, M U S I K.com.

Transcripts and show notes are available on my website. You can subscribe to my newsletter there, too. Can’t Wait to Hear You is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media. I’m your host, Michèle Voillequé. I can’t wait to hear you.