Rethinking the future: Vocal workouts can keep your voice young

Last week, I began to tell you about my experiences at the Dorian Choral Retreat. Today, I would like to share what I learned in a seminar about the aging voice.

Our leader was Karen Gesme Brunsson, Luther class of 1975. Karen graduated a few months before I began.  She will be president of the National Association of Teachers of Singing for 2018-20. She has edited a book on vocal production from birth to old age.

When we are born, many of our bones are supple to allow passage through the birth canal. The larynx is really just a gelatinous structure that ossifies as we age. The cooing and gurgling that a baby does help the gelatin of the vocal folds begin the process of becoming collagen and muscle.  The stress of making sounds transforms the cells.

Children are still developing the muscles for singing when they are younger, which is why children really don’t sing very loud. How does the gelatin begin to turn into muscles? Karen put it very bluntly. The vocal folds are sex hormone receptors, and the effects of estrogen and testosterone are what transform the vocal folds into instruments. The female voice will approach maturity around age 16, while the male voice takes longer, generally around 27.

Babies do not have a working diaphragm and it takes a while for this piece of the vocal operation to connect. As we age, the diaphragm continually changes. We have less capacity as we age which manifests itself on the need to take more breaths to make it through passages. This is just a change in the machinery; it will happen to all of us. Choristers know about stagger breathing and this explains why we get to do more of it!

Karen had us working on our resonance and vocal placement with several exercises.  She told us about a phenomenon she called by the scientific term “tucky wucky” and pointed to me during our practice of the exercises when she noticed me doing a “tucky wucky”! It was simply a deep dropping of the diaphragm to increase capacity.

Her most poignant plea was to keep singing even as we age. If we don’t sing, our voices begin to revert to the voices we had in youth. I think of it as reverse ossification; gelatin takes over where bone should be. Virginia Means, a member of the Voices of Experience when I was its director, insisted that I give her voice lessons, despite her being past 80. The vocal workouts she did helped her preserve her vocal abilities and kept her voice young and supple until she died years later.

I was contemplating entering into vocal retirement this fall. Karen’s presentation has me rethinking my vocal future. I am not ready to hang it up vocally. I should be doing more singing and more vocal workouts. I adjure you also to sing more and do more vocal workouts to keep your voices as young and supple as possible all your lives.

Richard Tiegs, age 61, is a local musician whose best years are still ahead of him. Let’s hope he is right!