It's Hard
It’s hard.
And with these two words which I heard the summer of 1985, Miss Harshaw meant the sensation of voice placement in the mask was hard to wrap one's brain around—being ugly to the ear: too nasty, too buzzy, just way too much, especially for those who speak with no resonance whatsoever.
One of Harshaw's students recounted these same words to me years later; noting that he had studied with the indomitable vocal pedagogue as a graduate student for over a month before he dared listen to his lessons tapes. He was afraid to listen to them because—even though his voice felt incredibly good—he didn't think he sounded very good. His ear told him she was making his voice positively ugly. And then he got up the nerve and listened to his tapes and nearly fell off his chair. The tone was not just good, but really good: professional, exceptional, career-ready.
Feels good, sounds nasty.
She would say that too.
It's the nasty part that's hard. Curiously, the whole matter has made a lot more sense to me since my tinnitus onset, if only because I know what it's like to become aware of a sound and have the mind blow it up until it fills the universe. The mind can do that you know. The tinnitus signal is only 15 decibels, but the mind can make it 80 or 120 decibels.
Isn't that interesting?
What do you think the mind does with a new sound like squillo it's never heard before?
I'll tell you what: It makes it big, huge, out-of-bounds—off the charts.
It took me a long time to get used to the ringing of my ears. So it makes perfect sense to me that it can take a long time to get used to correct voice placement.
I recently taught a lesson to a one-off student [this being a student who came for one lesson] who was able through instruction—and his own good ear—to find correct voice placement and it scared the bejeezus out of him.
[I actually don't teach placement as much I have the student use vowels in a particular way which results in voice placement.]
Guess what? It scares everyone.
It’s hard. Get used to it.
