Voice and Performance Coaching
Tension is who you think you should be.
Relaxation is who you are.
–Chinese Proverb
How can science make me sound better?
Do you lose your voice, or frequently experience vocal fatigue (hoarseness)? Have you noticed changes in your voice, like roughness or breathiness?
With the innovation of the laryngoscopy, (a long, thin tube with a camera at the end, that allows us to see your larynx and pharynx), science has now revealed what was previously thought of as mysteries of an invisible instrument (your voice). As we can now identify the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of most vocal issues, we finally have science-backed answers for definitive diagnoses and problem-solving solutions for these concerns.
Let Sarah show you how to improve your sound and maximise your vocal health and safety today.
Do people often have trouble understanding you and ask for you to repeat yourself?
As an expert in vocal coaching and pedagogy, Sarah knows several approaches to improve your articulation and will promptly discern the best (and most effortless) exercises to help you enunciate clearly.
Have you, or others, noticed how often your voice is creaky?
While vocal fry, or creaky voice, has been used in the past as an aesthetic choice by certain singers, there has been much discussion recently about its growing use in routine speech patterns.
A 2014 national study of American adults found that speakers with vocal fry were negatively branded. Frequently using this sound, or social dialect (sociolect), led others to assume you were lazy, bored, less trustworthy, educated, and competent. The creaky voice is a very taxing sound to the ear, so is a particular setback in the job market.
Has this sound been holding you back professionally? Sarah excels in showing you how to promptly reform this bad habit.
Are you a professional speaker, who struggles with a monotonous tone and too many hesitation sounds? (ums and ahs etc)
Explore specific exercises to improve the variety of your vocal expression and emphasis. This includes attention to pitch, intonation, tempo, rhythm, volume, timbre, stress, and the power of the pause!
Also, make immediate improvements to your enunciation so that your audience does not miss a single word of your important message.
Are you a singer, wanting to enhance your tone and expand the range and dexterity of your voice?
Sarah supplements established vocal practices with tapping techniques to promptly enhance resonance, pitch range and tone.
Most singers will improve their range by two semitones in the first session (though some performers have reported an increase of six semitones to their range after their first tapping session with Sarah).
Are you an actor who has received particular advice from teachers or casting agents to “work on your voice”?
Learn how to identify aspects of your voice that you would like to improve and be directly guided to the most beneficial exercises for your personal growth.
Begin immediate improvement on your enunciation and learn how to stop falling into ‘vocal fry’.
Also, learn how to maintain vocal health and safety when using extended vocal techniques (e.g. growling, screaming, crying, shouting).
Have you frequently been told that practice makes perfect?
Well, this is an outdated saying which we know now is completely inaccurate.
What we have come to realise, is that practice makes permanent.
Permanence is about creating and repeating habits. As most people live such busy lives in the 21st century, it has never been more important to learn how to do this quickly and efficiently. After all, it is considered to be far more difficult to reform a bad habit than to establish a healthy new one.
Living in this new COVID era has forced many industries and businesses online. More than ever before, people who consciously (or sub-consciously) avoided careers that required them to work in front of a camera, are now thrust into the world of Zoom meetings. You can no longer hide at the back of the room. Far from it.
So instead of dedicating hours a day to maintain bad habits, learn how to quickly establish new voice and performance habits through neurological attractor states. These science-backed methods will help you to improve the health, quality and potency of your voice.
Let Sarah also show you many tips on how to embody material that you are learning (or memorising) and how to create and sustain a great rapport with your audience.
As Clarice, with Ed Wightman and Jerry Hearn in, Servant of Two Masters
