LYDEN AV OSS - Course in voice use for psychologists.

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Course instructors: Vocal educator / voice artist Ruth Wilhelmine Meyer and Psychologist specialist Per Johan Isdahl. 

 

The course is approved by NPF as an 18-hour maintenance course and as a course in 
specialization.

 

BACKGROUND, METHOD AND OBJECTIVES

Psychologists live an intensely vocal life. Our profession requires us to speak.  We are listened to in contemporary culture and have key societal functions.  Meyer and Isdahl want to offer a unique profession-specific course with practical training in developing and maintaining our most important tool for professional meaning and interaction. The voice as a voice. 

Our goal is to help the individual participant learn to recognize the bodily sound basis of their unique speaking voice. Such experience can contribute to a relevant further development of a healthy and creative use of voice in the midst of a demanding everyday life in and out of therapy sessions. This will be done with up-to-date knowledge from the sciences of voice perception.  At the same time as multidisciplinary science has opened up an understanding of the brain's holistic involvement in the functions of the voice for us humans, contemporary culture has highlighted the role of sound in the political transformation of society. Not least, methods from the arena of sound art - the arena of song and music - will be directly accessible to the individual participant.

Individual guidance will be provided in a desired atmosphere of recognition and good humor. The working atmosphere is created by exercises that provide joyful new vocal experiences. These will be framed by joint reflections after theory-based lectures. The course is adapted to the knowledge assumptions of psychologists and psychotherapists. In principle, therapy rooms can be understood and experienced from the angle of acoustic position.  We want to inspire reflections on the theory and practice of listening in well-known psychotherapy traditions.  Course participants who have experience with voice and sound in therapy or research will be invited to shape the conversations along the way. There is a rich psychotherapy tradition in which language comprehension, voice and listening methodology are explicitly included. For example, as part of Gestalt therapy, of psychoanalysis by Jaques Lacan and Theodore Reik and other psychodynamic therapy, and in psychodrama, transactional analysis and psychosynthesis. Existential and phenomenological therapy and psychology bring speech and voice into focus. Vocal psychotherapy is part of music therapeutic therapy directions. In hypnotherapy and mindfulness traditions, understanding the therapist's voice is a key element.

In what way can knowledge from the resonance of therapy models enrich the course participants' development of a good professional and attractive voice?

We will also reflect on how our voice unfolds such a sublime yet powerful capacity. A vocal power based on its developmental crucial role for human connection across the life span with its intersubjective appeal. We believe that views on relational phenomena can be developed and changed by clarifying one's listening position. A position based on a resonant body and the voice's capacity for use.

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Meyer will lead exercises that will make it possible to experience aspects of one's own voice based on listening as it suits the individual. Meyer will focus on the relationship between inner/outer listening. She will explore anatomical awareness as a prerequisite for healthy sound production and exercises to follow timbre, respiration and vibration. An optimal resonant body can arise from people's musical capacity and life history.

There will be room for the use of examples from studies of the relationships between personality, emotions and the voice as an arena for performance phenomena and fantasies. The body is in the voice and the voice in the body, and based on this assertion, we present views on the importance of the mouth, i.e. oral life, in the process of becoming a self.

We will dwell on studies of the healing and embracing qualities of the voice in both women and men. The framework is studies of the effect of trauma on the individual tone of the voice.

We will contribute to a conversation about relevant vocabulary for and describing the qualities of the voice.  Will the vibratory healing power of sound, which has been part of human societies' own survival, provide ideas for the development of psychologists' own care today? It's about developing listening practices.

 In the conversations, we want to use the tension between the phenomenological experience of reality (here sound as a moving phenomenon) and neurobiological research's presentation of "third person" narratives of the same reality.

 

Quotes from research and cultural change debate on the voice: 

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From Jody Kreiman and Bruce R Gerratt's chapter "Reconsidering the nature of voice" (S. Fruholz and P Belin; Oxford Handbook of Voice Perception. 2018) (p. 176-177)

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"Simply put, laryngeal biomechanics and aeroacoustics can be studied as interesting physical problems, but voice production is impossible to understand without seeing it in the context of voice perception."

"For this reason, it is impossible to understand voice production in a general way without taking into account the dynamic factors that shape actual utterances."

"We therefore conclude that perception cannot be understood independently of production and acoustics, just as production cannot be understood without considering the listener."

 

From Adriana Cavarero.  For more than one voice. Towards a philosophy of vocal expression.

(2005) (p. 97-198)

 

"In fact, in terms of the reciprocal communication of speech, there is nothing that communicates uniqueness more than the voice. This occurs not only in speech, and even earlier in the infantile vocalizations that precede and reinforce speech, but above all in the relational resonance that the musicality of any (living) language maintains. From a vocal perspective, the mutual communication between speakers lies in the symphony of a double relationality. One relates to the uniqueness of a voice that exists for the ear, the other resonates with the musicality of language itself. Both have a physical, bodily substance. The logos common to the voices (-) is a logos that vibrates in the throats of the flesh."

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The course will require a time frame of 18 hours.

The evaluation of the course will be based on narrative methodology.