a friend sent me this clip of andrew garfield talking about his vocal training and i liked it so much i am going to transcribe what he's saying, lightly cleaned up, so you can all read it (but please just listen to the clip)
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"well, it's vulnerable. going back to the vulnerability conversation, i found it to be... another chamber of my self, that i didn't know was there, that i was pretty scared to know existed."
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"i had a great teacher, a great woman called liz kaplan, who basically does what you do, what you just said. it's not about imitating, it's not about being a singer, it's about unveiling *your voice*. how your soul is expressed through your voice."
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"she just kind of peels the onion. she's doing wacky weird woo-woo shit, just to get you in touch with you. and increase your range. i don't know if you found this - i'd never sung before, and i had to increase my range *a lot*."
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"and as i was going up the scale, i would just sob in the middle of her workshop space. just me and her, with her, like, beatles posters and her purple glasses. and she's like, this is good. this means we're doing the work. this is great."
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"and i'm just, like, fully sobbing just because i've reached another octave or another note in my body. like there's a part of my body that had been shut off."
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"y'know, 'cause what she wants you to get to is ultimately that place when you're born and you're just screaming. and there's no tension. it's all, again, going back to total freedom, letting the unconscious come through, letting the dreams come through."
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"like, just being fully wholly completely in touch with the self, which we're never gonna get to until, if we're lucky, the last breath of our lives. and that's what keeps us in that divine dissatifaction place with our voice or otherwise with our craft."
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(some other guy) "sounds like therapy"
"oh yeah, it is. oh no, all of this, this is all therapy."
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this is wild to me. i've experienced exactly this shift from the other direction - unblocked some big tension, gained access to a part of my body i didn't have access to before, and found a *new resonance in my singing voice* that wasn't there before
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idk what exactly andrew garfield was doing with this woman but sounds like there's a chance they were doing it from the other direction - looking for blocks by starting from what notes he couldn't sing. which is fascinating and i might try it. hmm
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very short on details but i found an article
“breathing techniques and stretches,” “moving meditation, moving yoga,” “open their throats, and their respiratory systems, and basically their whole bodies”
hmhmhmmmmmmmmmm
netflixqueue.com/liz-caplan-tra
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found a 90m master class but don’t have time to check it out in detail yet
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retvrn to baby voice
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Replying to @WorriedDenizen and @QiaochuYuan
Told her about this thread and she mentioned an interesting question: How can toddlers and babies scream for hours without becoming hoarse?
Pediatricians say it’s physical, singers say it’s technical - children lack the anxiety and constraint that adults have to unlearn to sing.
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this probably goes here too
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Having one of the most transformative experiences of my life with a new voice teacher. Methodology was developed by a medic from WWI who couldn't stop hearing the screams of wounded soldiers. He cured himself by vocalizing extreme sounds — combo of "catharsis and exorcism."
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Show this thread
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it’s my faaaaaavorite shiiiiiiit
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bioacoustics: tension hinders resonance
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some time ago listening to chants whilst under influence i was like holy shit vibrations.... turning oneself into a tuning fork... vibrations echolocate tension knots but also help loosen them..... producing beautiful vibrations is proof of work of full body looseness
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my AT coach emphasized this precisely when we were talking about singing, saying even holding a guitar with bodily tension can mess with its resonance
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