Yap Sesh #5: Happy World Voice Day!

In this episode of Yap Sesh, Anna and Maurice celebrate World Voice Day with reflections on voice education, clinical growth, and as always, their favorite tools of the week in TOOL TIME! VoiceProEd's upcoming course is on documenting the singing voice, so our yappers share information about the course and reflections on how they listen to the voice.

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Transcript

Anna: Welcome to Yap Sesh with VoiceProEd. We're your hosts—I'm Anna Diemer.

Maurice: And I'm Maurice Goodwin.

Anna: And we are excited to announce our April course! It has officially launched, and y’all are already buzzing about it. It’s called Voice Notes: Practical Documentation for Voice Clinicians. Maurice, why don’t you tell us all about it?

Maurice: Yes! So, every time we’ve given a course over the last year and a half, we’ve gotten a ton of questions like: "How do I document my voice goals?" or "How do I describe what I’m doing in a session in a way that’s clear for others?" Especially when working with singers or clients with complex voice issues, documentation can feel confusing.
 This course is all about that. We're giving you the tools both of us use—especially tools I rely on as a clinician working in a medical setting. I’ll be sharing the language I use when advocating for care, even advanced treatment, with laryngologists. It’s packed with practical strategies you can start using right away. We’re very excited to finally dig into this topic!

Anna: Yes! And this one’s short and sweet—just one hour. But don’t be fooled—we’ll be packing that hour with everything you need to know. Honestly, even our two-hour courses move fast.

Maurice: Oh, totally. I think the one-hour courses are even more intense because people show up ready to absorb as much as they can. And the great part is, Voice Notes will be available to stream through April 2026 on the platform we use—Asmari. So, you’ll get access to the replay and all course materials for at least 12 months.

Anna: Exactly. So even if you can’t attend live on April 27th, you can still register and watch it later. It’ll go from a live moment to an asynchronous one. And if you do come live but miss something, you can rewatch it, slow it down, and take your time with the content. This is a new format we’re trying, so let us know what you think.
If you're ready to join us for Voice Notes: Practical Documentation for Voice Clinicians, you can register at voiceproed.com/courses. The live course will be held on Sunday, April 27th at 12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time.

Maurice: EDT. See, I don’t keep up with the clock changes—thank you for the reminder.

Anna: The perks of being the website editor! We’ve got it set for you, no matter your time zone.

Maurice: That's right.

Anna: I think everyone’s clocks have shifted again. Why do I even know this? But shout out to our international learners in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand—we see you and appreciate you!

Maurice: Yes, and the great thing is, you no longer have to be up at strange hours. If you can’t join live, the replay is there for you.
 This course really came from the feedback we’ve gotten from all of you.

Anna: Truly.

Maurice: It was birthed from your suggestions—filling a gap in the current continuing education landscape. So, it’s not just a course we thought would be useful; it’s something you told us you needed. We’re excited to offer this one and to keep building content based on what you’re asking for. If there’s something you want to learn that’s relevant to your clinical work, reach out. Who knows—maybe you’ll see it in an upcoming course!

Anna: Slide into our DMs or send us an email at info@voiceproed.com. Let us know what’s on your mind—we’re here for you. Like we said in the last episode, we’re working in our zone of genius.

Maurice: True.

Anna: We love this work, and we love teaching it. But it only matters if it's truly helpful to you. So…

Maurice: Let’s make it a dialogue.

Anna: Speaking of dialogue—let’s talk about clinical documentation. You and I are both full-time clinicians. This is what we live and breathe—working with voice and singing voice clients. When it comes to listening to the voice and documenting what you hear, what are some tools that helped you develop that skill? Or maybe even just—how do you define that skill?

Maurice: Great place to start.

Anna: For me, one of the first tools that comes to mind is actually from my grad school voice pedagogy class. We listened to what felt like 100 different YouTube recordings of students singing Sebben crudele from the 24 Italian Songs and Arias. I swear I couldn’t listen to that piece for another decade.

Anna: What we did was listen to these singers, and then our assignment was to write down what we heard—both from a “what are we hearing?” standpoint and also, “what would we maybe suggest as an intervention to work on with that singer?” And so I think—

Maurice: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anna: Step one, when it comes to learning how to write stuff down, is really going all the way back to the listening. Like, how are we listening to singers? What are we listening for? And how do we start to accumulate the language with which we talk about that?

Maurice: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is so very true. Even as you were saying that, I was reflecting on—how did I first learn how to listen to voices?

So I’d mentioned a couple episodes ago how I grew up in the church. And I grew up singing primarily gospel music and contemporary Christian music in choir settings. I sang with my sisters, family, friends—and we did not have a background in vocal pedagogy, right? There was no one with master’s degrees in speech pathology or voice training who was working with us.

And yet, we had achieved this level where we were touring and recording and making albums. And all of that was built off of what we were hearing, and the sounds we were trying to make.

So I really grew up in an environment where listening to voices and learning how to describe them—even if it wasn’t technical language—was a skill that was necessary for producing the types of sounds we wanted to produce.

And then, as a musician, I grew up playing piano without reading music first, right? So you play a lot by ear. You hear someone singing, and you just sit down and figure out what notes go with it. And then you go from there.

Yeah—listening to voices and using your language and your reference points is the place to start when it comes to describing what you hear with the voice.

And then moving to clinical work, I didn’t really understand that there was even a language for describing what we’re hearing until I had become a speech pathologist. That’s when I was introduced to things like the CAPE-V or the GRBAS or more clinical terminology.

For you, in your training, did you ever interact with a system or a framework for defining the sounds that you hear in voice? Or was it always just kind of… whatever language you had access to?

Anna: Ooh, that’s a good question. So the book for that class was Diagnosis and Correction of Vocal Faults by James McKinney, right? So—

Maurice: Wow, huh! How about that.

Anna: I don’t think there was any sort of official framework for listening to—well, in this case—Western classical voices. That’s what my pedagogy training was in, in that particular degree.

But going into it with this idea of, “something is wrong, and we need to fix it,” was kind of the framework for how I started learning about pedagogy.

And if you’ve been to any of our courses or listened to this podcast at all, you can probably guess that that is no longer—

Maurice: Mhm.

Anna: —the framework with which I listen to singing or think about singing.

But there was this emphasis on identifying what was out of balance. I think that’s a way I can reframe it now that’s adjacent to how I think about the voice today.

Like, what am I listening to that could potentially be more balanced, that could help the singer?

I’m trying to think—I don’t think there’s really any… I’m racking my brain for any—
 We don’t have a GRBAS for singing.

Although, you know, when we’re listening—especially depending on genre—if we have knowledge of that genre, we do have kind of a mental checklist of what that singing should sound like.

Maurice: Hmm.

Anna: Plus what you and I always talk about—what the client has said their goals are. So that gives us two frameworks to work within.

Like, if you come see me and you’re singing in Western classical style—because that is my background and I’ve trained in it—I have a framework that says, okay, I’m listening for probably an even vibrato, that’s about 6 to 8 oscillations per second. I’m listening for resonance that has a particular kind of warmth and roundness to it.

And maybe also like, that squeal or that kind of “cut” that we get from classical voices.

And then I’m also listening to you—as you tell me, “I’m having issues moving into my higher pitches,” right? So that gives me an additional framework to apply to what I already know about the genre that you’re singing in.

Maurice: Thanks, yeah. You know, my colleague Stephen D’Amico, during his clinical fellowship here, had considered a lot—still considers and talks about—how we don’t really have a framework for describing what we’re hearing in singing.

And then from that, we also haven’t necessarily or significantly invested in describing when the singing voice is not working as expected. Like, what is the language we use to talk about that?

And there are so many different types of sounds and skills involved in singing that can make that process… complex.

You know, I had mentioned that in the speaking voice world—and specifically in clinical voice pathology—we have the CAPE-V, which is a framework with specific stimuli that help us collect auditory-perceptual data on the voice.

And then there’s technically a form that you can fill out that helps you quantify the sound you’re hearing.

We also have the GRBAS, which looks at overall severity of a pathologized voice quality, including roughness, breathiness, weakness, and strain.

But even that language—when we’re talking about the voice—is rooted in finding pathology. And it’s like… if any of those qualities exist in a voice, they must exist under the umbrella of something being wrong.

And I just find it really interesting that even the frameworks we have for describing voices are rooted in this idea that something is wrong—as if there can’t be about a million things that are great, and that we should also have formalized language to describe those.

Anna: Yeah.

Maurice: So it’s something I think about a lot, too. Right?
 Like, something I do with students when we’re listening to voices is I’ll ask them, “What are you hearing?”

And that’s not a positive or a negative question—it’s open. And students will list off, like, a million things that aren’t going right.

As if that doesn’t also sit in balance with things that are going right.

And especially, again, in a clinical voice pathology setting, we’re constantly listening and describing what’s not working correctly—and we can end up doing that to the people we work with.

Anna: This is so interesting to me, because I think the client is often doing that with their own voice as well. And I mean—that is also part of why clients seek out voice training, voice rehabilitation, voice habilitation. It’s because something is not working the way they would like it to, and they’re asking us for help.

And I know people are terrified of this because they’re like, “What if someone sings for me and I don’t know what to do?” That’s, like, my favorite thing! When someone comes into the studio and they sing and it’s beautiful, and I’m appreciating it as a person who appreciates art—like, I’m enjoying the things that are wonderful and beautiful about it.

And then they finish singing, and I’m like, “Great, that was gorgeous. Why are you here? How can I help you?”
 Which also is the best question that you can ask, right?

Speaker: Yeah.

Anna: OK. And sometimes that’s so validating to them, right? To be like, “Well, ain’t nothing wrong!” That’s good. Then what do you feel is not working? How can we narrow in on that?

And sometimes that gets my brain ticking. But I think sometimes it’s just nice to remember that we also get to listen to voices and enjoy them. That’s part of why we got into this work in the first place—because singing is so cool.

Maurice: Yeah. One thing that we’re going to be discussing in the course is how do we do some of that work of—not translating, but—correctly documenting what someone perceives about their voice, and making it meaningful to us.

And I’m not just speaking from the perspective of a speech pathologist. Even when I’m not working with clients under my license—like when I’m working with a singer or someone who lives in another country—I’m still making notes based on what I’m hearing, what they’re describing, and what I notice in their voice.

And it’s important to hold space for both—what the person is perceiving, and what I, as someone trained in listening to and working with voices, am perceiving. Both of those can exist in the same space, even if—and often when—they differ.

Anna: I have a fun new toy related to this that I’m excited to dive into. Ian Howell just released a book—literally called Hearing Singing: A Guide to Functional Listening and Voice Perception—and I feel like… I’m excited to get into this because I think it’s going to be so helpful for new clinicians who are starting out and want to have—

Speaker: Have—

Anna: A resource, right? I don’t think anything like this has really existed in our field before. So I’ll come back once I’ve read it and let y’all know what I think.

I rarely pre-order things. I’m still behind on work reading—

Maurice: Yeah.

Anna: Because I’m usually reading fantasy novels. But I did pre-order this one. So I’ll have to put down the fantasy novels for a bit and let you know.

Maurice: Just a little bit. Right? A resource that I’m really excited about—and that was the topic of our April research review (which, by the way, if you’re not subscribed to our VoiceProEd newsletter, it comes right to your inbox)—

I had already mentioned the CAPE-V—the Consensus Auditory-Perceptual Evaluation of Voice—which was developed a few years ago. I was just going to try and get the exact date, but I may not be able to.

Recently, Gail Kempster, Kathleen Nagle, and Nancy Pearl Solomon published The Development and Rationale for the CAPE-V Revised.

And for clinicians who are used to using the CAPE-V form—the non-revised version—there are a few pretty significant changes to this new version.

Probably the most prominent are the sentence stimuli. So if you remember the original CAPE-V sentences, there are six of them. The first two were:

1. “The blue spot is on the key again,” and
   
   
   
2. The second, often controversial one: “How hard did he hit him?”
   
   
   

That second one has now been changed to:
 2. “He helped her hurry home.”

And then the fourth sentence used to be: “We eat eggs every Easter.” That’s now been changed to: “I eat eggs every evening.”

So I actually appreciate the more neutral stance in these updated stimuli.

They’ve also changed the form itself to help you consider how pitch, loudness, resonance, and nasality may be different from just overall voice quality—or even absent of pathology.

And the new form leaves space to make notes on inconsistencies at the vowel, sentence, and spontaneous speech levels.

This is exactly the kind of clinical info we’ve been collecting—and the kind of process we encourage newer voice clinicians to follow, especially when working with voice pathology.

I’d be very interested to see if something like this eventually gets developed for capturing what's going on in the singing voice.

And these tools—they’re not meant to be…

I think it’s important to say—they’re frameworks that help us consider a lot of information at once.

What I’ve never seen them as are shackles that tell me what I can or can’t do as a clinician.

That’s important as we keep developing our skills as a profession—especially when it comes to describing the singing voice. There are going to be a million opinions. And a million of them are valid.

Because your personal experience matters. The way you run your practice impacts how you engage with a concept or tool.

What we can all advocate for is that these frameworks are meant to help us. Not to prevent us from doing something that feels right or good for us and our clients.

They’re meant to help us consider things more thoroughly than just saying, “I don’t know, here’s what I do.”

It also helps us develop a shared language. One of the difficulties with describing singing voice is that we’re often using really different language to talk about really similar things.

And because of that, you’ll see people on Facebook or Instagram getting into language wars—nomenclature wars.
 Like, “Well, I call it this.”
 Or, “I call it that.”
 Cool. Great. Awesome. Call it whatever you want.
 Here’s what we’re actually talking about.

Anna: Maybe VoiceProEd will be the ones to come up with a singing voice listening framework.

Maurice: Voice fro red!

Speaker: If you want to—

Maurice: Here we… here we go again.
 Yes, listeners, you are currently listening to two people with buckets of audacity.
At any given moment. At our lowest, we are each holding two buckets.

Anna: The audacity! Oh my goodness.

Well, if you want to check out that research review on the revised CAPE-V, you can go to voiceproed.com/blog, along with all of our other research reviews.

We literally have so much content. Please go—

Maurice: We have so much content.

Anna: Go read our blog. Go, you know, keep listening to this podcast.

Come to our courses! If you want to learn more about documentation—Sunday, April 27th, 12:00 PM Eastern Time—voiceproed.com/courses.

We want to see you there.

Maurice: Well, we’ll see you there. We’ll see you there. And—excitingly—coming up in just a few days is World Voice Day.

Anna: Happy World Voice Day, everyone.

Maurice: Happy World Voice Day. And if you're waiting until April 16th to listen to this, then you got it.

Anna: Live—woohoo! Or if you're listening later, happy belated World Voice Day. So... I have never done anything to celebrate World Voice Day before, because the history of it is more rooted in clinical practice, versus being a “voice teacher” thing.

So I didn’t even hear about World Voice Day until I had met—

Maurice: Hmm. Yes.

Anna: —you. And I remember one year, we prepared for you to have a performance at the hospital.

Maurice: Yes.

Anna: For World Voice Day. And I think that was the first time I ever heard of it.

Maurice: World Voice Day! A recital with my colleagues Teresa Proctor—who's a speech pathologist at the hospital—and Abby Dupin, also a speech pathologist at the hospital as well as Lamar, and a PhD student at the University of Houston.

And then Bethany Self was our accompanist from Rice University. So we had prepared this like, 45 to 50-minute recital to celebrate World Voice Day. That’s a pretty common thing—you’ll see clinicians popping up and doing recitals or events like that.

So—how do you plan on celebrating World Voice Day this year?

Anna: What day of the week is it?

Maurice: It’s a Wednesday.

Anna: I will be teaching voice lessons. I will be working. I think I’ll probably pop in and say something for VoiceProEd.

Sometimes for things like this, I’ve done a “Hop on and warm up with me” kind of thing—like I’ve done before for Make Music Day. So maybe I’ll do one of those: “Come vocalize with me on World Voice Day.”

Speaker: Yeah.

Maurice: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s awesome.

One thing I wanted to ask you, when we were talking about World Voice Day, was—I think these moments, while yes, they can feel a little cheesy, also give us a chance to reflect on the current state of the quote-unquote voice world.

And we’ve been working diligently at VoiceProEd to provide educational opportunities for clinicians who want to be better—at the work they're doing now or the work they want to do.

So I was wondering: Are there any things in the voice world that you're looking forward to seeing evolve, grow, or change over the next year or couple of years?

Anna: Ooh, that’s a tough question—for a good reason.

Because I think the singing teaching world has already been doing a lot of evolving since I took my first pedagogy class back in 2010.

Like, even using the book about vocal faults—we are moving away from that. With things like the revised CAPE-V, we’re moving into more neutral language.

Especially in what’s considered formal singing voice training, we’re moving away from everything being based in Western classical technique, and we’re holding space for all the different ways singers may want to use their voices—and how to find efficiency and sustainability in doing that.

So I don’t know if I’m excited about anything new happening, but I’m excited that I get to be a living, breathing part of where this field is going.

And that the work I do with my clients contributes to that. Even though I’m not at an institution, I’m not making institutional policy or teaching undergrad pedagogy courses—

Maurice: Mhm.

Anna: —but I am doing the work. With clinicians. With clients. Helping people with their voices. Touching people’s lives individually.

And that gives me hope. And I need a little bit more of that in life right now, so I’m glad that my work is one of the ways that lifts me up.

Maurice: Yeah. That’s awesome. I would agree.

When I look at the singing voice world—how things have shifted over time, and how quickly they’ve shifted—it’s really encouraging.

And then I look at the speech pathology world... and I’d love to see that shift happen faster.

I can think of a few ways I’ve been tirelessly working toward that shift, and it feels like the change has been minimal.

You know, when I think about myself as a Black, Brown, queer speech pathologist—
 I was hired for my fellowship eight years ago this month, actually. Or maybe it was last month.

And since then, when it comes to major voice center fellowship programs, I could count on one hand the number of non-white clinicians who’ve gone through those programs.

And I know that because... I know all of them personally.

And that’s wild.

So when we talk about how to advance the field, yeah—representation matters not just because it “looks good,” but because it impacts how we do the work.

The life I’ve lived, the identities I carry—how I’m perceived and how I identify—
 all of that impacts how I work. And that perspective has shaped what I’ve contributed to the field.

We deserve more perspectives. More diverse views shaping this work. Because then we help more people.

And that’s it.

Anna: Mic drop. That’s it.

Maurice: Mic.

Anna: Mic drop. I have so—

Maurice: Who’s Mike? Just kidding.

Anna: I feel like this has gotta be its own podcast episode. Because—yeah. For sure.

Maurice: Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

What’s so wild is that when you get people in a room who get it—who see it, understand it, are also a little tired—we all just look at each other and we’re like, “Yeah.”

There’s not much more to say.

Anna: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just... acknowledging. Being seen.

Hey—if you’re out there, and if you’re like us—or not like us—but you’re feeling... yes. We see you.

Maurice: Yes. We see you. And you see us. Hi.

So—we’re going to move into our final Yap Sesh segment, called...

Anna & Maurice: TOOL TIME.

Anna: I love how we do all this stuff and we still have like, a sound that goes with it—but we are our own special effects.

Maurice: We are our own sound design.

Maurice: We’re also—we are sound editors. We are podcast producers. Wow. I’m ready for another career.

My Tool Time this week: I was working with some higher-voiced tenors—baritenors and tenors—and nothing, to me, feels more helpful for some of these folks, especially when they start working on that sort of higher chest /ah/ voice passaggio, lower head voice area, than them becoming more aware of what the musculature is doing.

So my tool this week is just kind of setting the thumb in that soft tissue under the chin. I just take these clients through a bunch of different tasks as they monitor their own muscular activity and action.

I really try to stay away from the word tension, as if tension is inherently a bad thing. I want them to attend to action—and then define for themselves whether that action feels helpful or constrictive, or restrictive in a way that doesn’t allow them to achieve what they want.

Instead of saying, “Yeah, that’s because it’s too tight,” I immediately ask, “Can it feel a different way when you try it again?” And you just help them explore their own body through action and tactile, kinesthetic feedback.

Anna: I am obsessed with “attend to action.” Totally borrowing that.

Maurice: Mmm. I say that a lot. I’m like, this is about attention and action—so let’s do those things.

Anna: Oh yeah. Because the first time you even mention the tongue—not even tongue tension—people are like, “But the tongue!”

Maurice: Yeah. Yeah. “Ohh I know my tongue is tight,” and I’m like, “Well... what if you just had a tongue and it moves?”

Which is what the tongue does—it contracts, it releases, it relaxes—like any other muscle. So yeah, I hope you have tongue tension. You said your name correctly? There was probably some tension involved in that.

Let’s attend to the action to figure out if it’s actually helping you get where you want to go.

Anna: I love this so much.

Maurice: We are... the bombs are—the, the, the—

Anna: Truth laughs.

Maurice: Truth bombs. The clinical nuggets are dropping today.

Anna: I love that. I’m imagining them as water balloons filled with paint. And they’re just like—

Maurice: I was thinking Mario Kart! Since that new Mario Kart World announcement just came out with Nintendo, and it’s like—you get one of those squares dropped right on your head.

Anna: Ohhh nice. And that’s your knowledge drop. It’s actually a blue shell.

If you didn’t know, VoiceProEd listeners—we are also both gamers.

Maurice: Gay-mers.

Anna: Our wonderful listeners—ever learning new things about us!

Oh my goodness. I don’t have a hugely applicable tool this week, but I was working with a lot of trouble belters.

Maurice: Yeah.

Anna: There’s always the question of what sort of resonance balance we’re going for as we get into that belty mix—whatever we’re calling it—as we get into the like A4, B4, C5 area.

And both of these folks happened to be doing a lot of spreading that wasn’t really working. So I had them do a pitch glide on—

Maurice: Mmm-hmm.

Anna: —the syllable “way,” with an /eɪ/. And sometimes, I love a kinesthetic tool. So, if they feel comfortable, I’ll have them touch their cheeks—even move them around a little bit—to encourage some sense of neutrality, some sense of release.

I love that “attention to action”—like, what is the action there? Is it serving you in getting the sound you’re going for in that particular phrase or pitch range?

So we were really enjoying that sort of belty-but-neutral flavor.

Maurice: I love that.

What’s tough sometimes—again, because we all use different language to describe a vibe, a sound we’re aiming for, or a space—is that, especially as a teacher who works a lot in function, I feel space is necessary.

And space can be interpreted so many different ways.

This type of exercise helps shape the necessary space without necessarily telling someone, “That’s wrong,” or, “You’re doing this incorrectly.”

It’s more like—let’s just shape the space in a way that helps us get where—

Anna: —we need to go. Yeah. And just exploring where that space is, what that feels like for that particular person.

Maurice: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice work. That’s great.

Anna: I love it. Thanks.

Maurice: Thank you all for joining us again for this Yap Sesh. I think this might be one of my favorites so far, TBH.

Anna: Yeah, this was a really good discussion.

Maurice: So many discussions! If listening to a conversation between Anna and me means we end up with like, six other conversations we want to have again—or could yap about for a very—

Anna: —long time. I know. I’m always like, “What are we gonna talk about in this podcast?” And then I remember—oh, that’s why we made this podcast. Because we can.

Yeah, we are professional yappers.

Maurice: That’s why we made it.

Anna: We can talk about anything. And again, it just comes down to—we love what we do. Working with the voice is so cool, and we could yap about it all day.

So we’re just keeping it to these 30-minute chunks for you to digest.

Maurice: Yeah. Yeah. Perfect.

Come yap with us. We’ll see you on April 27th! We super look forward to it.

If you’re listening to this after April 27th—feel free to come check out Voice Notes. The replay of the course will be available through at least April 2026, and the replay is also available for ASHA CEUs for those of you who want those registered.

We are so thankful for you and look forward to being in your ears again soon.

Anna: Happy World Voice Day—and see you soon! Bye!