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Techniques for deaf musicians

Recently I had a bad day in music. My hearing was changing, and I lost all confidence in my singing ability because my mental model of how to sing wasn't working.

When the going gets tough, we go back to basics: Technique. There are many singing and musical techniques out there, but it's rare to find singing instructions for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Time to invent something.

I base my singing/vocal technique on Mandy Harvey's book Sensing the Rhythm: Finding My Voice in a World Without Sound. She is my hero and a source of courage for me. In the book, she outlines the "how's" of how she's able to do this very difficult task: Singing without auditory reference and feedback.

I'm hard-of-hearing, so her exact technique don't work fully for me - I use a variety of methods to keep time, find pitch, and blend. These ideas aren't meant to teach singing (because I'm not a singer by training and have not studied vocal performance), but meant to bridge the gap between a musician and the sound that they produce but cannot hear.

This is a work in progress, and I think I'll be working on this for a long while, but it's a place to start. To contact me to add tips or recommendations, drop an email to me at jlin@winteroftext.ca

Vocal

  • hearing with the eyes

    • lipreading
      • mouth shapes of basic vowels
      • closing and opening of mouth
      • watching for breaths for cutoffs
    • look around and find out where each person of each vocal range is standing in relation to you and understanding how that changes once filtered through hearing loss.

  • sensing vibrations

    • touching the chair or pew where you are sitting/standing
    • take off shoes (Mandy does this)
      • this works super well! It has the added advantage of letting me feel the sound before I hear it.
    • touching the bones of your body. I still have pretty good bone/neural conduction of sound, it's only a -20 db drop so if I have contact with bones, the sound gets through to me very well. I find the bone of my jaw and face to be the easiest, but I try not to do this during performance.

  • breathing

    • coordinate breathing with the person next to you (unless staggered breathing)
    • if you miss a beat or miss a bar, resynchronise at the next bar by watching how people "come back" into a section of music after a rest.

  • finding volume - how do you know if you are singing pianissimo or forte?

    • I had a lot of trouble with this last year - not knowing how loud I was, or misinterpreting how loud I was (I would think I was singing forte, when in fact it was something like a mezzo piano, and visa versa)
    • this is an unsolved issue for me, but I have some ideas, will put in once I think it through
    • when singing properly, the diaghram is engaged in contracting and moving the air in and out. When I am aware of the movement of my own diaghram, that is when I am most "locked in" and able to change dynamics and move my sound with the music. Having an extreme level of awareness of my own body via the mechanics of singing allows me to hear myself more clearly.

  • moving around in the space

    • this one is fun. I've used it in the recent rehearsal where I didn't know what was going on at all.
    • move around so you can see the lips of the director/conductor and section leader
    • don't be afraid of moving closer to certain sections in order to hear how their sounds fit into your section (it's really important to listen to other sections in choral singing - so I say get up and go there)
    • this turns into a dynamic environment where you are creating your own mix for learning.
    • of course, during performance this is not possible but for learning this is one of my favourite ways to help me learn.

Bass/Baritone

  • Notes specific to bass/baritone singing range. TKTK

Hearing Aid notes

  • Hearing Aids have LATENCY! Don't trust them too much for tempo. This means that the hearing aids will have a slight delay (on the order of 100ths or 1000ths of a second) when relaying sound. This doesn't matter in normal situations but in singing and music this can throw you off.
    • For me, this means that when I clap, I hear the clap slightly later and this messes me up. I always decline from clapping if possible in SoundCrowd because I haven't figured this out yet. Or I fake clap! Anything to make the performance look great and rely on other people's claps :D
    • For clapping, it also means I hear other people's claps slightly later than they do ... which also can mess me up :D
  • Volume adjustments
    • with the hearing aid, the point is to balance enough volume so you can hear instructions and the other parts, but not so much volume that you blast your ears and eliminate your self-hearing (via vibrations up the chest and into the ears, bypassing the eardrum)

Teamwork

  • Singing is a team activity! I rely so much on my fellow choir members and they provide me with so much support and love. I couldn't do it without them.
  • Music directors are awesome. They help me. I do think that the help they can give is best when I am focused and directed in presenting what I need. When I don't know what I need, and I don't know what's happening, I wouldn't want to just present an open ended "I don't know" question - unless there are specific things they can help me with. I'm not sure if this is the right way, but it feels right because the music director is responsible for the whole sound (of which I'm a part of) - but not necessarily for my undefined issues (which I need to figure out).

Persistence

  • when to try again, when to give up? TKTK

Communicating musical ideas

Instrumental

violin/fiddle

  • combination/coordination of breathing and bowing
  • removing shoulder rest (once you are ready for it) for vibrations to reach into the bones - NOT at the expense of proper posture though.
  • getting a fiddle sound that is distinctive - ok this one is debatable but in tweaking my setup in group lessons I arrived at a sound that was slightly different in timbre than all the other violins. Of course, each fiddle has a different sound to it - all that I needed to do was to really get the sound of my fiddle into my brain, so that I can distinguish it in a group setting. For the fiddle camp, this worked really well.
  • Little Bow, Much Sound.
    • when doubtful, use small amounts of bow. The sound it produces can be astounding!
  • Be prepared for the fiddle to make sounds that just can't be heard even with hearing aids. The fiddle makes overtones over an extremely large frequency range (for example, when singing, you know you can't make certain sounds because of biology, but on a fiddle, anything goes).
  • Trust the sympathetic vibrations! On the violin, one of the earliest things you recognize is the various types of buzzing and vibrations that your particular fiddle will make when everything is in tune. There are many names for this, some people call them sympathetic vibrations or ringing tones. It happens when a string that is not being bowed will start vibrating due to being "called" by a note that you are bowing on a different string. I try to think of it in terms of "call and answer" - you play a 3rd finger on the A string, you are calling out the D - the D string will answer by playing itself. The fiddle starts buzzing altogether and it might even involve overtones from the other strings that you didn't even touch. I was watching a video from Hilary Hahn, and she goes one step further to Sympathetic Vibrato!! where she vibrates a string she's not even playing to manipulate the sound of the sympathetic vibration. That's truely next level stuff. For me, I settle with just getting things in tune! Feel the vibrations, and the fiddle will tell you when it's happy with the sound.