Did you know that listening to mp3 music can mess with your brain, and your voice?
I love my digital music. But I make sure I listen to CDs and high definition recordings, too.
Why? Because I know from personal experience that we can train our brains to stop paying attention to certain frequencies, and that’s BAD news – for our brains and our voices.
In last week’s article, I talked about how we don’t hear our own voices accurately. This is another piece of that important discussion.
When I had to stop performing as a singer, part of the reason was because I actually could not hear my own voice accurately in the heart of the soprano range. When I sang, I heard my voice as matching pitch with the piano, or another singer – but I wasn’t. Here’s the freaky part: I could hear that I was flat if I heard a recording of myself – just not while I was singing.
I found out how to fix that when I read about the work of Dr. Alfred Tomatis in a singing magazine. I had to re-train my brain’s ability to perceive all the frequencies in my own voice.
I had an audiogram at the beginning of my listening retraining program that showed a dip in my hearing at 2,000 hz in both ears.
After my listening program, that dip was gone. So was my inability to hear when I was singing flat. (I still had to retrain all the bad muscle habits that made me flat, but that’s another story. I couldn’t have fixed those without restoring my brain’s ability to hear my own voice accurately again.)Continue Reading
I’m passionate about creating true partnership between men and women, so we can all be in partnership with our planet to create a world we can all thrive in.
