Teacher with dysphonia, named Mary.

My student who is a teacher with dysphonia has made some legitimate progress.  Let's call her Mary.  Mary's breathing coordination is much clearer, but she still has to think actively about it.  She went ahead and had a mini-botox shot (half dose), so she could function at work; so now she has a breathy, but non-spasming vocal sound.  This gives us a little room to work on other issues.  We took a look at how she forms her words with her tongue and jaw.  She's used to pressing her jaw forward and blowing extra air through her vocal folds to try and get sound out past the spasming and it's become a habit - a coordination that happens all the time.

We began to experiment with making sound, hums and oo's mostly, while keeping her jaw and tongue loose and relaxed.  A loose tongue is generally soft and curved in the jaw.  It's curved the highest for the "oo" and "ee" vowels, with the tip of the tongue resting against the back of the lower front teeth.  Think like a softly rounded hill from back to front.  She experimented successfully with the new tongue shape on her hum and "oo" vowel, but when we went to the "ee" vowel, the tongue flattened hard and the jaw thrust forward.  It took a while for Mary to figure out an "ee" vowel with the same tongue shape as the "oo" vowel and, when she found it, she was surprised that it actually sounded like "ee" because it felt so different.  We noted other things that changed as we remapped her tongue:  it became easier to inhale because her throat became more relaxed, her jaw was looser and moved more easily, her sound had more resonance and carrying power without more effort.

There's often a moment in a lesson when the teacher (me) has a learning moment.  I noticed Mary was more efficient with her air on the hum and less efficient when her mouth was open for a vowel. As mentioned before, she generally pushes a lot of air through in an attempt to overcome the dysphonia.  Her air efficiency improved even more when I asked her to pay attention to the air movement at the edge of her nostrils during her humming.  Then I asked her to open her mouth and say a sustained "ah" while paying attention to the air flow at her lips.  Again, she became more efficient, with less air flowing out to sustain the sound and more resonance as a result.  Here comes the surprise part: I asked her if she noticed a difference in the air/sound relationship.  She said, yes, there was more air flowing when she paid attention to her lips.  Objectively, there was much less air flowing when she paid attention to her lips, but I realized that she had no way to monitor her air flow and had no idea how much air she was pushing out normally.  Paying attention to the air flow at her nostrils or lips gave her feedback that she otherwise did not have.  We are going to pursue this idea for a while longer...