What is voice teaching, whither shame, and gaining entry

What is voice teaching, really? My definition is: voice teaching is the act of helping singers gain facility in creating expressive sounds that suit their vocal goals derived from their artistic aesthetics. Both halves of that definition are actually pretty complex, and both will certainly be the subject of another blog.

In many ways that definition is a 10,000-foot view. Voice teaching is countless little gestures that serve that larger idea. But I want to look a bit higher still, at what it means to gain entry into the student’s neural pathways.

So, let’s start by thinking about what singing is from a neural/mechanical point of view. A trigger of some sort cues the singer’s neurons to start the process of singing. Think of the rhythm of a piano accompaniment that cues the entrance of a vocal gesture. At this point, and from here on out, the outcome of the singing is already determined. That’s a lot to think about, but as far as we can tell, it’s true.

A stimulus sparks an action potential, setting off a chain reaction from neuron to neuron. Eventually it zips down the motor neuron, acetylcholine gets released, calcium floods the fibers of muscles in coordination, and sound is on its way. There’s no wiggle room in that chain—every step has to follow the rules! To be sure, during the activity the singer’s brain is sorting through new input, but those are traveling down premade neural pathways as well! The singer might detect they are unlikely to execute the next note, or the tone needs

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adjustment, or the sensations are good, but all those reactions are already pre-wired. There is no room for anything to change!

That means all those mid-phrase adjustments singers feel like they’re making—the little tweaks of vowel, pitch, or breath—are still just their brain running along pathways it already built before. No new instructions can sneak in at the last moment.

So what’s our role as teachers? We craft environments and experiences that help students form new neural pathways—pathways that will guide future performances. We can’t rewrite the one that just happened.

How do we create that environment? Importantly, the same principle that determines the moment of singing applies to the act of accepting voice teaching. This is a profound concept. A student's openness to feedback depends on their state before they walk into the studio—states that we can’t control, and we didn’t create. We can’t override that in the moment. As the old saying goes, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”

Now, let’s talk about shame. Shame has been a quick-and-dirty tool of voice teaching for centuries. If you want to force entry into someone’s pathways, public humiliation will do it. Many of us carry stories of friends—or ourselves—being shamed in a rehearsal or lesson or on stage. And not by nobodies, either. Some of the most famous, successful teachers in history leaned on shame as a teaching method.

But let’s be clear: shame might be effective, but it doesn’t build confident, resilient students or healthy teacher-student relationships. We have to gain our students’ trust, and we can’t do that by claiming all the artistic authority. That’s where I’ll pick up as this blog series continues: what is teachnique in a deterministic world, what is learning, what is teaching, and how we might gain trust and put some of these principles to work.

I’d love to hear your thoughts below.