Tiny steps count, too.
And consistency is a kindness. At least, that’s what I tell myself when I don’t want to practice!
This week, my students are recording just a few measures at a time of the songs they are working on, with thanks to @bulletproofmusician for the inspiration. The idea is to get them more comfortable not just with their own sound, but to see that small consistent steps really do add up. They’re quieting their inner critics and extending their focus. And I’m doing it with them - I have a lot of music I’m working on right now and it’s so easy to feel overwhelmed…
Here’s the problem: I hate it. I have always, always hated listening to myself. My family will attest that I have been known to run out of a room covering my ears or break down in tears when forced to hear myself sing, which is really hard on people close to me who jut want to be supportive. I’ve gotten better at it over the years, but barely. How on earth, you may well ask, is it possible to be a singer who can’t stand the sound of their own voice? This must be what it was like for the train with the square wheels on the Island of Misfit Toys. And I’m not alone. The actor Adam Driver walked out of an NPR interview with Terry Gross when she was about play a clip of him singing in the movie “A Marriage Story.” Not sure I’d walk out on Terry Gross, but I get his pain.
One doesn’t have to be a performer to have trouble; cringing at the sound of your own voice is standard, it seems. In 1966, psychologists Phil Holzemann and Clyde Rousey introduced us to “voice confrontation:” not only do our voices sound very different than we assumed (usually higher in pitch), but when we listen back we expose ourselves to the reality of just how much of our true selves we reveal through our voices - emotional state, personality traits, inner life - and it’s easy to be overwhelmed by this.
To quote Holzemann and Rousey:
“The disruption and defensive experience are a response to a sudden confrontation with expressive qualities in the voice which the subject had not intended to express and which, until that moment, [s]he was not aware [s]he had expressed.”
In short, our voices make us vulnerable. But isn’t that the point?
Preparing music thoroughly is, as any musician can testify, intense. It’s more than just learning the melodic line and getting each note, each moment into your voice; it’s digging deep into why the composer and lyricist wrote it the way they did, what they were trying to say and most importantly discovering and communicating what it is you yourself want to say with the piece. But the thing that makes it all come together in performance, the secret ingredient? Vulnerability. I tell my students in a million different ways that singing is not about sounding “good” or making “good” sound - it’s about learning to sound like YOU. And that can be scary.
It’s heavy lifting, it’s the best work I know, and it seems to me that getting real with myself, being vulnerable about how I sound is the least I can do when I’ve required exactly that of my students. I’m recording my practice and listening back as I prepare for my next gigs, and I might even share here if I feel brave enough. I hope to share my students’ progress as well, if they’ll let me, To ward off the overwhelm, I’m taking my tiny steps; I’ve shown myself kindness by staying patient, trying not to completely hate it, and being consistent. I’ve said it before - if I want my students to be willing to be vulnerable with me, I have to do the same for them.
I’d love to hear about your tiny steps so I can inspire these kids. And myself.
Ok, thanks for reading - gotta go practice…
If you want to know more about the science of hearing yourself and why it’s hard, watch “Why I Don’t Like The Sound Of My Own Voice.” So fascinating.
And throughout this project, I’ve been thinking of the work of the experimental American composer Pauline Oliveros, who dedicated her long career to exploring “the difference between hearing and listening.” As she put it in this TED Talk in 2015, the year before she died, “To hear is the physical means that enables perception. To listen is to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically.” She was a profound talent.
