Ian Howell

Come work with me this summer!

Woohoo!

This is insane in its face.

Hearing Singing Book Ian Howell — Embodied Music Lab This page shares information about Ian Howell's book Hearing Singing: A Guide to Functional Listening and Voice Perception. Hearing Singing provides a wealth of discoveries at the intersection of voic...

My new book, Hearing Singing: A Guide to Functional Listening and Voice Perception is out! www.embodiedmusiclab.com/hearing-sing...

Acoustic Vocal Pedagogy 2024 — Embodied Music Lab An exploration of acoustic and perceptual voice pedagogy with Kenneth Bozeman, Ian Howell, Chadley Ballantyne, and more. Singers, voice teachers, vocal pedagogy, vocology.

Registration for the 2025 Acoustic Vocal Pedagogy Workshop & Online Course is open! Please share with your singing, voice teaching, choir directing, voice science, SLP friends :-) www.embodiedmusiclab.com/acoustic-voc...

Acoustic Vocal Pedagogy 2024 — Embodied Music Lab An exploration of acoustic and perceptual voice pedagogy with Kenneth Bozeman, Ian Howell, Chadley Ballantyne, and more. Singers, voice teachers, vocal pedagogy, vocology.

@milomawile.bsky.social we just opened registration :-) www.embodiedmusiclab.com/acoustic-voc...

We currently offer a summer course that is both asynchronous online and also has a lot of tutorials, and observed lessons. And also a weeklong in person workshop that covers much of this. I am skeptical that it would work without some real time observations.

I’ll also flesh out a stand alone Hearing Singing course in addition to the ongoing competitive workshop course. /fin

Or… an Intro to Praat and VoceVista for voice pedagogy and Vocology classes/labs. Would start with point and click in the GUI but also explore scripting. /3

Maybe the easiest place to start is Optimizing Online Music Teaching Technology. Not a class about accommodating the shortcomings of Zoom/Facetime/etc. A class that teaches you to optimize what what you have, work toward better solutions, and solve problems with your clients. /2

Hi friends, I’ll be working on my online professional development offerings this month. First up is the web content for my new book Hearing Singing. What should the second one be? Some thoughts in thread. /1

Dumbfounded and horrified following that press conference.

But, this presumes that teacher and student can identify the average performance, that we know it when we see it, and that we can be guided to it when we are not doing it. Those who train in a way that requires them to hold multiple thoughts in their head, /4

It never completely eradicates the errors, and the absolute magic of peak performance is never truly sustainable. But the best performers out there basically have a really strong B game. Their average performance may well be higher than the peak performance of others. /3

..whatever their average performance is.

The nature of what we might call “coordination“ work (“technical” carries so much baggage as a term) seems to me to be work that raises the average level of performance. /2

For everyone keeping up with the EML Research Tools, major updates today for both EGG and Vibrato!

No idea what this is? We make free Praat plugins that enable practitioners to analyze voice signals and output both rich data tables and images.

Sign up: www.embodiedmusiclab.com/eml-tools-si...

I guess I think that you can’t argue someone into singing well. So no matter what, language is representative and abstract. I think it matters more that you hear the function that you actually want so that the exploration guides the singer to the actual coordination needed.

On teaching:

…effective voice teaching involves using declarative language about and demonstrations of a procedural experience in order to generate a procedural experience that the singer may then ultimately describe with their own declarative language… www.embodiedmusiclab.com/hearing-sing...

I remember a week of teaching at NC where I had total laryngitis and just use gesture playing an instrument to teach voice. It was probably one of my better weeks.

Amen

I feel so lucky to have worked with the teachers I did. So many of their voices are captured here.

It really is. Broad conceptual frameworks for how to proceed absolutely work, and ultimately the transfer is from one person’s body-understanding to another person‘s body-understanding. It is the pathways and conduits that you find to facilitate that transfer that seem so difficult to tack down.

I thought it was going to be all of the fascinating information about perception and psychoacoustics and all of the support and underpinning for those phenomena. But honestly it was writing the chapters explaining how I teach.

Bluesky...

AMA about anything.

Or about my soon to be released book about functional listening and voice perception… or about anything

Cover of hearing singing a guide to functional listening and voice perception by Ian Howell

Preorder now available (www.embodiedmusiclab.com/hearing-sing...)

Hearing Singing provides a wealth of discoveries at the intersection of voice perception, voice production, functional voice teaching, and functional listening, while providing exercises and actionable steps for singers and teachers.

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…not whether the ear is highly sensitive to its frequency range. Second formant tuning edge cases not withstanding, almost nothing can touch the physical power of the first formant. /fin

If we are looking for nonlinear interactions between the acoustic forces in motion in the vocal tract and the oscillation of the vocal folds, it is important to understand that we are talking about the physical strength of the pressure pattern, … /5

…the faster (the second formant and higher) and how the ear perceives them. So the slower ripples tend to oscillate with significantly higher acoustic forces then the faster ripples, but the ear is far more sensitive to those faster ripples. /4

If you try to feel the buzz that you hear, you will almost certainly mis-map cause and effect in voice production. The second is that there is a difference between the physical power of the energy around the slowest resonant ripple in the vocal tract (the first formant) and… /3