Guest Speech to the University of Alberta Madrigal Singers

Dear readers,

This speech was presented live on March 9, 2024 at the University of Alberta Faculty Club for the Madrigal Singers Brunch Concert and Fundraiser. 

At the request of some individuals, I have published it below, enjoy!

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Greetings U of A friends, family, and administrators,

Thank-you to Tim Shantz and the University of Alberta Madrigal Singers, otherwise referred to as MAD’s from this point onwards, for inviting me here today to speak at your brunch fundraiser. 

My name is Sable Chan and I am MAD’s alumni from 2008. I currently work as a S-LP with the public school board and run my own private practice where I have an interest in the area of voice therapy. I see patients referred from Ear, Nose, Throat specialists and work with patients diagnosed with vocal nodules, polyps, fatigue, chronic cough and more. I work with everyday speakers and singers. 

I sing with Pro Coro Canada, The Canadian Chamber Choir, and co-founded FEMME Vocal Quartet. In addition, I have been blogging about choir music for the past 15 years on TheChoirGirl.Ca. It was due to a combination of these factors that led to my recognition in Edify Magazine’s Top 40 Under 40 Class of 2019. 

As I began to reflect on my time in MAD’s, I acknowledge that my time was short, but significant, in my professional formation as a singer and health sciences professional. MAD’s was a challenge to fit into a packed Science schedule; however, there was an auspicious alignment of timetable factors in my 4th year at the University. I recall the excitement as I left my Biology lectures on the Engineering part of campus and strolled over to the Fine Arts Building for MAD’s rehearsal on a Monday afternoon. It was my first time singing in a mixed choir, as most of my early choral singing experiences were in treble voice ensembles at Schola Cantorum and Cantilon Choirs. Some highlights from that MAD’s season included singing my very first Handel’s Messiah at the Winspear and competing in the Cork International Choral Festival. 

Growing up as a chorister in Edmonton, MAD’s held this prestige in my mind as one of the most elite groups I could sing in as a young adult. I was elated when I auditioned and was accepted in my 4th year. Suddenly, I was connected to a network of passionate singers from many places and areas of study. There is an incorrect assumption that choristers at the U of A are all Music majors. In fact, singers come from all different faculties. I was delighted to know I was not the only student in Sciences and began connecting with fellow singing friends to strengthen my networks all across campus. To this date, some remain my closest friends. In fact, I just sang at a wedding of two fellow MAD’s alumni who got married to one another this past June! 

I know that when people think: University teams, they may instinctively mention areas such as sports or research. However, I think the artistic contributions of providing rich, creative opportunities, such as University music ensembles, contributes significantly to the ecosystem of the University. There is a significant population of students and staff at the U of A and it is nourishing to have opportunities to engage with a wide range of interests. We need all of these factors: athletics, research, innovation, leadership, arts and more to contribute to a diverse and healthy campus. Singing in MAD’s allowed me an opportunity to represent the U of A at local, national, and even international levels when we went to compete in Ireland at the Cork Choir Festival! 

While in MAD’s, I recall the fun and excitement of the social and performance calendar of MAD’s life: there were fundraisers to organise, Halloween parties to host, early morning radio segments to perform at, Valentine’s Day quartet gigs to sing in HUB, and it was with a mix of the most warm-hearted and loving humans. The opportunity to sing at such a high level, while completing my degree, provided me with an outlet of artistic expression, social connection, and reassuring reminders of self-confidence. 

No matter how much I might have struggled on an Immunology midterm, I knew that when I went to MAD’s rehearsal, my insecurities would lighten as I made music with others. There would be a temporary reprieve from the everyday burdens of life and burning, existential questions like: “what am I going to do with a Science degree?” Instead, we would synchronise our breath, work on musical details in Bach motets, and fall into a musical flow that seemed untouched by external time. 

There is a lightness and heaviness we all carry within us at any given moment. Singing allows us to release and share that. Instead of letting those feelings stay stuck in our body, we can mobilise and release those sentiments with a group coordination of our breath and voice. 

Choir is my means of communication and connection with others. I suspect it may be for some of you, as well. Choir, to this day, allows me to learn about new music cultures and continue to connect with new friends. I continue to write about choral music topics on my blog because I love reflecting on my own artistic choral practice. I also feel like in a world with a decreasing amount of arts media and discourse, it is important to have accessible outlets to share current perspectives on choral music. 

I love how there is always more to learn in singing. I have seen how music-making has changed in my life: it’s more and less important at any given time. However, I have always been singing. I continue to sing. And I will always be a singer. 

I hope you all will as well. 

I am grateful to be sharing this time and space with you here today. Thank-you.

A Laryngectomee Choir

This video came to my attention today:



I'm interested to see how unfamiliar listeners react to the sound of this choir.

Do they recoil in disgust or puzzle in interest over how these choristers voicing?

This choir is formed by laryngectomees (a.k.a those who have had their larynx removed). There are social stigmas against laryngectomees. As if they deserve the removal of their larynx (a.k.a. voice box) because they used to smoke. This is not always the case. In the hospital, I have seen some laryngectomees that have never smoked a cigarette a day in their life; however, they were exposed to second-hand smoke.

Laryngectomees produce voice by using a one-way valve that directs air from the trachea (a.k.a. wind pipe) into their esophagus (a.k.a food pipe). This one-way value is called a tracheoesophageal puncture (TEP). It's a plastic valve prosthesis that is inserted in the wall between the esophagus and trachea. It's a one way valve because air is only allowed to go from the trachea into the esophagus, not the other way around. If it was a two way valve, then any food or liquid going towards the stomach could be channeled through the valve and into the lungs. Food in your lungs? Never a good thing.

On the outside of your trachea is a stoma (aka. hole opening) so a laryngectomee can still breathe by essentially having an open channel to their lungs. When this hole is plugged with a finger from the outside, the air coming from the lungs is directed through the TEP valve and up through the esophagus to vibrate structures in the lower pharynx (a.k.a throat) and upper esophagus. Then using regular tongue, lips, and teeth articulatory patterns, users can then form speech.

In the video, you're probably able to hear a really rough voice source. Well, that's what it sounds like when you're vibrating the tissues in the lower back part of your throat. There is an impressive range of expression and pitch variation in the choir. This is coming from manipulating the resonance of the vocal tract (a.k.a the speaker moves their tongue, soft palate, lips and teeth to maximize resonance).

Regardless of the type of medical, social, or emotional barriers that can handicapp people, everyone has a voice that deserves to be heard. It's empowering to see choristers embrace this fact, even when they have no larynx.

My SLP-Conducting Debut

Greetings readers!

On Friday, I fortunate enough to have the opportunity to lead my very own choir. Not just any choir, but choir made up of persons with Parkinson's Disease (PPD). This is a population close to my heart since my Master's thesis was analyzing data collected from PPD undergoing a Voice Choral Singing Treatment program (if you want to learn more, I'll refer you back to this post for more information). Even though I was petrified at the prospect of leading a rehearsal, I didn't delay in providing my consent to substitute for Merrill, their resident conductor and speech pathologist.

The first thing that I needed to do, in order to mentally prepare for the session, was acknowledge the fact that I am not a conductor. Therefore, I decided to structure my style more like a vocal coaching session. I tried to experiment with some of the techniques which I appreciate when I am under the leadership of a conductor. I attempted to learn the names of my 12 choristers and use them throughout the rehearsal when I was providing positive feedback. I provided a ton of vocal models to illustrate what I wanted. I demanded more from my choristers each time when I could hear they were responsive to my instructions. Even when I felt like they gave me what I wanted, I would ask for more to see if they could do it. I often interrupted them when they did something wrong and made them do it again. Maybe these weren't characteristics that everybody appreciated, but since I had no style, it was important for me to experiment and figure out what my style might be.

In preparation for the rehearsal,  I began by brainstorming all my favorite vocal warm-ups. Then I went through each exercise, thought about the rationale for each of them, and eliminated any redundant exercises. As well, I looked through Merrill's old lesson plans and decided to include some familiar elements but incorporate my own as well. I grouped my exercises by target area: resonant voice, respiratory support, vocal flexibility, speech articulation etc. A major symptom of Parkinson's is muscular rigidity. That includes rigidity of the diaphragmatic muscles all the way to muscles needed for facial expression. I wanted to choose exercises which would be most beneficial for PPD.

Something that I did find challenging was working with a pianist. I am not used to giving instructions to a pianist. I also wasn't used to cueing the pianist to stop playing when I wanted to re-run something immediately or finish off the last run of a vocal exercise. I'm guessing it probably didn't help that the pianist's back was towards me (mental note: fix positioning). Another thing that was challenge was that I couldn't hear my choristers very well. It was because I did something that's not the preferred norm for a conductor, and that was that I was singing while my choristers were singing. It's a tough balance because PPD need a high amount of vocal models. There are studies confirming that there's a change in their perception abilities in themselves as well as others, therefore, all modeling needs to be plentiful and exaggerated. However, next time (if there is one) I would need to find a better balance in providing voice models but allowing opportunities for independent production. Only then can I actually hear what they are doing. One of the most important roles that a conductor plays during a rehearsal is listening. I definitely didn't do a great job of that. This is probably where actual conducting skills would help me because I would be able to visually cue this instead of relying tandem vocal models to achieve my aural vision. Furthermore, it's vocally tiring to be working that hard in a session, which definitely isn't a viable option if I were to pursue more work like this in the future.

My conducting experience aside, the feedback I got from the session seemed positive. At least, the comments to my face were :) Comments spanned from compliments about my outfit to my energy and enthusiasm as I tried to engage them while moving throughout the rehearsal space. One of the choristers asked me if I would record all my voice warm-ups and upload them to Youtube so that he would be able to practice. Perhaps I can be as cool as Ken Tamplin?

I'm just thankful for this opportunity since the Parkinson's choir session allowed me to geek-out pretty hard in terms of merging my choral and speech interests. Also, since I just received my SLP license on Tuesday, my session with the Parkinson's choir was my inaugural debut as an official Speech Pathologist. I think that's a very good sign for things to come.

Until next time readers, take care!

Choral Speech Pathology

An acoustic sample of "Silent Night"

Greetings readers,

I primarily discuss my choral experiences here on this blog, however, I rarely speak about the other dominant area of my life: Speech-Language Pathology (S-LP). In my program, you have the option to choose either a group project or an individual thesis and you need to decide, within the first month, which route you're going to take. Therefore, it's quite a significant program-altering choice. The department held a "research fair" where all of our faculty presented the projects which they were offering that year: studies involving fMRI neuroimaging to look at language processing in the brain, studies investigating the potential of noise-induced hearing loss from high iPod listening levels while exercising, looking at developmental language and vocabulary inventory of children with cerebral palsy... although they were all interesting in their own way... none of them really appealed to me. I knew that I would either choose a project that seemed straight-forward just to get it finished or develop my own thesis project. Since I have never been one to choose the path of least resistance, I chose the latter option. I rationalized that if I am going to spend two years on something--- I better enjoy it.

A year before entering the program, I remembered hearing about an S-LP, Merrill Tanner, from a fellow chorister's parent during a reception. Tanner was known to utilize singing techniques in her S-LP therapy practice. While I was contemplating project options, I googled her name and discovered that she was working on her PhD with the voice disorders professor in our department. I immediately arranged to meet with this professor. I didn't know what to expect when I walked into my soon-to-be-supervisor's office. At that point, I had already visited at least six other professors discussing their thesis projects but I didn't feel moved to accept any of them. This voice professor was interested to hear about my journey which led me to Tanner's research and said that I could formulate a project that that united my two interests. As well, she  knew of a set of unanalyzed data from a study in 2004 where persons with Parkinson's Disease had singing lessons with a music professor. A variety of measures were taken but the data was never analyzed. Five years later, there I was, an eager new graduate student who was willing to take on the analysis job. I spent a good two years designing a standardized analysis method and then analyzing the data.

Within Parkinson Disease, the main voice symptoms that occur are decreased loudness levels, weak and imprecise articulation, and a fast or "blurred" speech rate. Therefore, it can be hard to understand the speech of people with Parkinson's Disease. The implication of this is that a decreased ability to communicate effectively with others can lead to a gradual disengagement with others and with life in general. The muscular system in persons with Parkinson's is extremely rigid, which means that the respiratory, voice, and even facial muscles are stiff and aren't used to their full capacity or range. There's support for therapy practices which engage these muscular systems. Currently, the gold standard of Parkinson's voice therapy is called the "Lee Silverman Voice Treatment" (LSVT), which involves sitting in a room two times a day and holding the word "ah" at a comfortable pitch and volume for as long as a client can and doing this drill 15 times in a row, as well as other voice drills for an hour. While LSVT has great outcomes after 4 weeks, it's arguably not the most holistic or enjoyable way to spend a treatment session. That's why there has been an interest in relating Parkinson's voice therapy back to music since it still trains the same muscular systems as LSVT, however, the tasks are within an enjoyable musical context. Tanner's PhD work has already been noting the positive changes seen in patients participating in singing therapies and the results from my thesis show the same positive trend as well (which I'm excited to be presenting in a poster at the CASLPA conference in May 2012!). There's an argument for the fact that singing/choral voice treatment is a much more accessible (you can almost always find a choir in any rural or urban setting but you can't always find a LSVT certified S-LP) and a lower-cost therapy option for persons with Parkinson's.

I hope my previous paragraphs provided some context for the other things that are on my mind when I'm not singing in choirs. Below is a video of Tanner's research and an interview with some of her current Parkinson participants.

Until next time, take care readers!

Behind the Scenes of Tongue Talk

Greetings readers!

Although this isn't a choral related post, it is definitely a music related post. Recently, in my faculty, they posted a Rehabilitation Medicine Video Contest and I thought it would be fun if some classmates and I made a video for it. I suggested the idea to a few friends to do something like a music video or rap detailing what exactly Speech-Language Pathologists do and they were eager to participate. Our video didn't cover all the disciplines of Rehabilitation Medicine but we thought it was high time we detailed what Speech Pathologists actually do. We feel that the general public knows more about Physical Therapists and Occupational Therapists as a whole and most people still think that Speech Pathologists only correct stuttering.

The project didn't really take off until Candace started brainstorming lyrics to Ke$ha's "Tik Tok" one evening in a Facebook thread and we just went wild from there. I found an instrumental track to "Tik Tok" so we wouldn't have to sing over Ke$ha's vocals and the next few days Salima and Candace figured out the lyrics, we went to Fabricland to purchase foam and pink material to make a tongue costume, and Candace and Christina developed the dance sequence that appears throughout the video. Then we recorded the song using Garageband that weekend and layered the voice tracks to compose our song. We also scripted out a video recording schedule for the next week since we wanted to recruit members of our class to participate and we also wanted to book time to get into the Speech lab to use the equipment and the soundproof booth.

On Tuesday, we shot all of our Speech lab footage and most of the footage around Corbett Hall, which is the home of the Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Alberta campus (it's where we have all our classes and spend most of our time). That same Wednesday we shot all the footage of our class as a whole in the classroom we have most of our classes in and we also taught them the dance sequence. I played the song from my iPhone as we danced on the front lawn of Corbett Hall and recorded the sequence. The next few days we just needed to fill random clips in the video and record the dance sequence in the largest lecture theatre inside Corbett Hall. It's where the Occupational Therapists have most of their classes so we were lucky that it was empty when we decided to film.

The following week was the crazy editing week and Christina did a stellar job. We also had midterms and assignments but I think our fun video project kept us sane. After each day of shooting, Christina was so excited to start working on the footage that after the first day she put together a ton of sequences so we could see the video take shape. We would lose track of the time working on the video since we would start on it after class at 5:30 pm and it would be 9 pm before we knew it! It was meticulous work since we had to splice down the clips and each 0.5 second made a huge difference in the video, especially since we were trying to line up our lips and our dance. I applaud Christina for the amazing job that she did!

We were able to submit our video by the October 15, 2010 deadline and we also screened the video for our class that Friday. From the large amounts of laughter I heard, I think they liked it.

Then we just had to wait. The video had to be screened by a panel of faculty and students before the finalists were chosen to be put on the Rehab Med Youtube Page. We heard back yesterday that we made it into the finals and today the video was uploaded to Youtube. The video with the most views by January 29, 2011 wins $1000 so view the video multiple times and share it with your friends! Often, the Speech students have a reputation for being uninvolved in the Faculty and I hope that this video works to change people's perceptions about us. It was a something we had a lot of fun doing and I hope that people can enjoy the video and maybe learn more about what SLPs do in the process. I just want to say thanks to Christina, Salima, and Candace for being such amazing people to work with! I was often incapacitated with laughter during the filming of this video.

Enjoy the video below!



Lyrics:

Wake up in the morning
Feeling like a speechie
Got my classes, got my books
Gonna help this city
When I leave I will have my Master's degree
In SLP, speech-language pathology

I'm talking, talking all day long
Getting my communication on
Finding out what's wrong
We've got a preoccupation
With speech language and communication
Stuttered speech & swallowing
We so ballin'

CHORUS:
Don't stop keep it steady
Please say 'ah' when you're ready
Pa ta ka as fast as you can
DDK's are the plan
Tongue depressor and pen light
We'll treat you right
Ah-ah-ah-ah
Ah-ah-ah-ah

Don't stop, we're not done
SLPs are so much fun
Visipitch, PERCI
are definitely the key
Dear client see this hose
Please put it up your nose
Pa-pa-pa-pa
Pa-pa-pa-pa

Ain't got a care in the world, but got plenty of peers
I got PTs on my speed dial
And OTs are so near
Now the clients are lining up
Cuz they hear we got skills
Rehab Med's got their backs
Like nobody wills

I'm talking have you had a stroke?
Do you tend to choke?
Is your child talking late?
Call us, don't hesitate
We'll help you get your shout out
That's what we're about
Stutter got you down?
Don't you frown!

Chorus x2

We screen your ears
You raise your hand
Red, Right, Round
Yeah yeah we got this
I put my tongue up
You put your tongue up
You put your tongue up

PURSUING YOUR BEST IS WHAT WE DO!
Phonology
And AAC
Disordered voice
and aphasia
I cue your sound
I slide my snake
You slide your snake

Chorus x 2