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. 

“Is change possible?” is a really interesting question to me because on the one hand, obviously, yes. We watch children grow. We watch plants grow, we watch the coastline erode. We watch glaciers tumble and fall. We watch rivers cut through rock over the course of time. We can see where mountain ranges have appeared on the earth, right?

We know that change is possible and especially political change because it’s happening right before us, right? Not just in this time, but you know, in many times. Like, there are things that change, and so “Is change possible?” Of course! It’s happening all the time.

But I feel like “Is change possible?” is a question that we’re also asking ourselves all the time, and I see the question in my students, maybe not expressed out loud, but there’s just this sense that, you know, “I’m coming for voice lessons because I want to believe that change is possible, and I don’t always feel like that’s true.”

Often, often, I myself go into my own voice lesson feeling like, “Ugh. Nothing I’m doing is working. I’m just never gonna get anywhere.” And then I have a teacher who lovingly reminds me how far I’ve come and it isn’t that bad. And I do know how to make different sounds and really, it’s all fine. I’m just fine.

But that, “Is change possible?” question, when it’s about ourselves, it falls very quickly into all-or-nothing thinking. Like, the question “is change possible for me?” is almost automatically answered, “No” by our inner critic brain, by the part of our brain that wants to keep us safe.

So as a teacher and also as a student, I spend a lot of time thinking about how do we change our voices? What actually does the process of change involve? And it’s my job and my mission to get clearer and clearer about how I articulate that.

I want to get better and better at explaining how change is possible because I believe deep in my bones that it is. I have seen it happen with my own eyes and ears in more than one person, not just myself.

And I think that if we can embrace the truth, that change is possible for us as a species, we’ll all be much happier, much sooner, and we’ll be more productive, I think, and better inhabitants of the planet.

Is that too lofty? I hope that’s not too lofty.

Over the last 20 years I’ve figured out that changing the voice, changing my own voice, helping my students change their voices really boils down to three things.

First, learning how to notice yourself, and then learning how to open yourself – opening up new interior spaces, opening up your mouth and throat, opening up your torso, opening up your shoulders, your back, your hips.

And the third thing is learning how to deepen your breath, lower your larynx, lower your center of gravity, taking effort out of your throat and moving it lower into the body.

So more compactly said, changing your voice boils down to learning how to notice, learning how to open and learning how to deepen your relationship with your body.

This is all of course easier said than done because our voice, if it works at all, it’s working automatically. How we go about making sound is something we just think about, and then it happens.

This is true for most people. If you have to think about how to speak, it’s probably not working very well. And so when it comes to changing the voice, it really is about slowing things down and the “learning to notice” can feel not very fun.

It can feel slow and tedious and difficult because we’ve never had to notice this before. So many students say as we’re doing this part of the work, we’re exploring what does the voice feel like? Where is your larynx? What is your tongue doing? How’s your jaw feeling today?

Questions like that are really important for learning how to use your voice differently. My students will say, “I have never thought about this before,” or “I have never thought so much about this before.”

And of course they haven’t thought about it before. They’ve been busy talking and going to school and getting jobs and falling in love and and being generally a success at life.  And if you’re generally a success at life, you haven’t had to think about how your voice works.

But now as we want to change it, we have to slow down and pay attention and say things like, “Brain, I know there are nerve endings in my mouth and I would like to know what the sound feels like as it passes through my mouth. I really wanna know what my voice feels like as it travels through my mouth. Would you be so kind as to turn those nerve endings on so that I can feel that?”

Put that way I, maybe I sound a little loopy, but that, really is the case. I’m sure I’ve said elsewhere on the podcast that our voice primarily is a survival mechanism.

We’re born, we cry out so that we can be found and fed and cared for. And if a tiny baby were aware of what their voice felt like in their body, they would explode. Babies are very loud.

Babies are importantly deaf to the sound of their own voice, or immune to it, because the, you know, the brain is just, is going to disregard that. The brain is focused on getting help, being heard, being seen, being held, being fed, being comforted.

It’s not important to know what it feels like as the baby is crying. That’s not gonna do anybody any good. If the baby felt the power of their voice, they probably wouldn’t use it, right? Because it would be too loud, it’s overwhelming, and then they wouldn’t be found and they wouldn’t survive.

But we know there are nerve endings because over time, if you continue to ask your brain, “What does this feel like? What is it like for me internally when I’m making sound, when I’m using my voice for singing or speaking? What is that like?” we eventually are able to answer that question.

It takes everybody a different amount of time and in my own experience, the knowledge kind of comes and goes. Sometimes, something that feels really clear and really obvious one week, the next week, I won’t feel at all in the same way that I felt the week before.

But I’ll get feedback from my teacher that I’m doing exactly the same thing. I’m producing the same result. But for some reason this week it doesn’t feel like anything and last week it felt like everything.

So it is a process. I think it’s really fun and I find most of my students, once they get used to the ego blow of not always having the answer, once they get used to being in this state of inquiry and not always getting it right and not always knowing what’s right, once they get used to that, they tend to settle in and really have fun with it.

There have been a couple of moments in my own life of exponential growth when it came to the sound of my own voice, and I want to share those with you because I think it might be helpful to hear these stories.

For a lot of my singing, when I first started taking voice lessons, I sang with a really breathy tone and I sang very quietly. And in retrospect I have come to understand that I was singing this way because actually my hearing is quite sensitive and my voice, when I sang with a fuller tone, was painfully loud to me as the singer.

It actually felt uncomfortable. It felt too loud to me, and I didn’t think it could possibly be nice for other people.

And so I sang with a really quiet, breathy tone that was very internally focused. And I had teachers who were trying to help me with this and maybe we were getting somewhere, maybe we weren’t.

I can see in retrospect how I was difficult to teach because I was so attached to not feeling uncomfortable. I was so attached to this soft quality that I wanted my voice to have. I mean, “soft” in terms of volume, but also soft in terms of squishy around the edges.

I didn’t want there to be any edge in my voice because I thought that was beautiful. I thought that’s what I wanted my voice to sound like. That’s who I imagined myself to be.

And then I got pregnant. And then I had a natural childbirth. And if any of you have had a natural childbirth or who have known women who’ve had a natural childbirth – by that I mean a vaginal delivery and I didn’t have any pain medication.

And, I think I said in the last episode of the podcast, that first labor was 27 hours long. It was a lot of back labor – one of the more painful kinds of labor that a person can have. So it was a thing. That labor was a labor for me.

And when I came back to my voice lessons after giving birth to my first child, all of a sudden I had, my voice had so much more volume and I felt so much more grounded in my body.

Before I had my baby, my singing felt like a very heady experience, which kind of makes sense if I’m singing with a light, really breathy tone that feels very soft to the inside of my body. It was very confined to my head and neck.

And of course my teacher was trying to get me to engage my abs, to have a lower, deeper breath, to really sing from a lower place in my body.

But before I had my baby, I really wasn’t getting it. But this experience of labor, which was so intense and so prolonged, and to finally deliver her into the world I felt a power in my body that I had never accessed before. I had never needed to access it before.

And so after that, when I opened my mouth to sing, all of this sound came out. Like I, I still had that energy left in my body. My body had not forgotten the lesson that it had just learned delivering my daughter and that stayed with me.

That experience got banked somehow into my cellular memory, and I moved forward after that with a deeper understanding of my pelvic floor, of my diaphragm, of just how the whole breathing thing worked and of the kind of sound I was capable of making, because I was not quiet during that 27 hour labor.

I did cry out and I don’t remember if it was that labor or the next one – I was actually told by a nurse that I needed to get a grip. And it was suggested that I, that I shouldn’t make so much noise.

This is in Berkeley, California. In 1999 I was told this, but I guess I was loud. Anyway, my voice has only gotten bigger since then.

But that was a moment of what I would consider exponential growth in the sound and quality of my voice. And I don’t think that the only way to have exponential growth is to have a vaginal delivery without pain medication.

I think any way that you might intentionally stress your body, tax your cardiovascular system, right? – walking up a really big hill, climbing a tall mountain, going on a long run, really feeling your body stretch itself to its limit, doing a kind of yoga where you become really aware of the length of your spine, the length of your torso, exercises that help you to engage your pelvic floor – physical things that allow you to find something deep inside you that is strong and resilient.

That strength and resiliency will help you grow your speaking voice or your singing voice, I guarantee it. You have to know how to use that power you find, and that’s what lessons are good for, but that that power is available for you to use when it comes to your voice.

Another moment of exponential growth is happening right now, has been happening for the last six or nine months. I am sure there have been other moments of exponential growth between 1999 and 2025, but let me tell you about the one I’m in because it’s so top of mind.

Beginning last fall, so in September of 2024, I started having a really interesting problem with my vocal folds, which is that all of a sudden they decided that they needed to close and not open again.

That meant that I was not able to get any air into my body. It sounded something like this [stridor]. It felt like being strangled. It sounded like I was being strangled.

And this thing that was happening with my vocal folds is called paradoxical vocal fold motion. I didn’t know that at the time. At the time, I thought I was about to die. I thought I was choking only I wasn’t choking.

I didn’t know what was going on. I couldn’t get any air in my body. It was terrifying. But I’ve since come to learn that this thing is called paradoxical vocal fold motion, and we don’t really know why it happens, and we haven’t really figured out why it started happening to me, but it has managed to more or less resolve itself over the last few months.

It’s still happening, but not as often, and I’ve learned some rescue breathing so that I at least have something to do to help myself get through it.

Let me just tell you about the rescue breathing in case it could ever possibly be helpful for you. And what that is, is a pattern of sniff, sniff, hiss. So two sniffs in through the nose and then hissing out through the mouth.

And thinking on that, trying to execute that while you’re [stridor sound] not able to breathe helps the brain reset and like get the vocal, gets the vocal folds to open again.

The most important thing I wanna say about rescue breathing is that it doesn’t work until it does.

This is a scary thing to have happen, to not be able to breathe. It’s very helpful to have a thing to do, and there doesn’t seem to be any way around wanting the thing to do to work faster. It just, the rescue breathing just, it doesn’t work until it does.

So, where’s the exponential growth for my singing and speaking voice in all of this? Well, the process of figuring out what was going on with my vocal folds – I first went to my allergist and then I got referred to an ear, nose and throat doctor, and then went to see an otolaryngologist and got my vocal folds scoped, so I got to see them.

I have been more intimate with my voice, with the actual body parts of my vocal folds in the last few months than I have ever in my life. And getting to see what they look like and watch them work has just been really interesting. So I have a deeper appreciation for my instrument and how it works.

I’ve also had to spend a lot of time calming down, learning how to calm down. I learned a bunch of massages that I can do for my larynx and my tongue. The thought was maybe there’s tension that’s contributing to the paradoxical vocal fold motion.

I don’t know. I didn’t particularly feel a lot of tension in my throat, but certainly after these episodes, everything in my body is tense because I’ve just felt like I was gonna die and that stresses a person out.

So I’ve been going through something difficult and I’ve had to learn a bunch of new self-management techniques. And that oddly, or maybe not, oddly enough, the fact that there’s been so much freak-out in my life over the last few months has made feeling grounded, calm, centered, strong, an even higher priority.

And there’s an even bigger difference in my experience now between being freaked out and feeling strong, calm, and grounded. I knew what strong, calm, and grounded was before, but now I really know.

Like the anxiety about my physical self has been even higher, right? Has been higher in my life than it’s ever been. So there’s been a lot of physical exploration and emotional self-management.

And then, I got a cold. And I got a cold that attacked my voice first. And this was really common for me when I was younger. In high school and college often, if I was gonna get a cold, my voice would go first.

That hadn’t happened for a while, but in the last few months it did. And that cold that mostly took up residence in my voice had the effect of deepening it.

I couldn’t sing or use my voice very well at all, but I found this great low register and I think if you go back a couple of episodes in the podcast, you can hear me talking about it.

The episode I think is called “Waking Up With a Sore Throat,” and I actually recorded the podcast while I had this sore throat so that you could hear how a voice can recover. And I was able to recover a bit there. But then after I recorded that podcast, the cold advanced and I was full-on sick and I didn’t have hardly any singing voice at all.

But what happened after that illness? That illness gave me an experience of such a lower, deeper, thicker voice because my vocal folds were so swollen that it gave me, again, a new baseline so that I could try to get back to: how deep can my voice really be?

So these two things together, the paradoxical vocal fold motion that showed me all kinds of things that I didn’t know about my vocal folds, and that created so much stress that I really had to double, triple, quadruple down on my emotional self-management to handle it – that lowering my overall center center of gravity and learning how to be less reactive at a whole other level.

And then the experience of this cold giving me such swollen vocal folds and such a delightful experience of a much lower voice gave me something to strive for, to try to get back to. Like, “What? Wow. What, what does that vocal depth feel like?”

Those two things together have really changed my singing voice. Together with help from my teacher we have been, over the last particularly couple of months, two or three months, have found all kinds of new depth in my singing voice that’s coming literally from a lowered larynx, but also my own ability to hold a deeper sound, to stabilize from a deeper place.

And that has just made the arias that I’m working on right now, so much easier to sing. It’s a new kind of fun, very much like after I gave birth and came back and all of a sudden there was all of this power. All of a sudden there was, I understood where my pelvic floor was, all of a sudden breathing made sense.

I’m having that kind of experience right now with depth and I love it. I’m loving it, and I will not lie, it’s been a difficult time.

Like, this exponential growth has come from medical challenge, emotional challenge, spiritual challenge, and then the physical challenge of being ill, but it sounds so nice now. It’s really very exciting.

So, “Is change possible?” Yes, and it’s happening all the time. And some of it like paradoxical vocal fold motion is change that we don’t want. And I think in every change there is a tremendous growth opportunity. I think there’s always a growth opportunity if we’re only willing to look for it.

If you find yourself in this kind of difficult spot, let me offer my process, which is to notice what’s going on. Notice what you can, and then look for opportunities to open and also look for opportunities to deepen.

Can you take a lower breath? Can you lower your larynx? Can you open your chest? What can you feel physically inside your body?

That process of noticing, opening and deepening I believe will see you through. It has seen me through. It sees my students through, I offer it to you.

Thank you 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.