I am beyond thrilled to announce the launch of our new brand, Artist Life Vocal Health Consulting. There is so much mystery in the world of vocal health, and I'm excited to unravel it piece by piece with all of you.
This brand was created to help people make the right lifestyle choices to promote healthy vocal cords. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and not having to deal with the fallout of poor vocal health is well worth the investment.
I say this from personal experience. Singing was my entire identity for the majority of my life, but my world came crashing down my junior year at Northwestern, when I discovered (through a hemorrhaged vocal cord - ouch!) that I had vocal nodules. Fun fact: nodes are not at all like what they described in Pitch Perfect, and the inaccurate description of the condition is the ONLY thing wrong with that movie. Put simply, nodes are swellings on the vocal cords. In order for the cords to make noise, they need to come together and vibrate. But when they're swollen in certain areas, they can't come together in others. At the peak of my condition, I had a very small mid-section of my vocal range that was actually usable. As someone who'd been singing her whole life, and intended to keep doing it, that's really scary! I ended up getting some of the best care in the world, and after my surgery in 2011 I was able to make a full recovery. But looking back, there's a lot of choices I could have made that would have prevented both the nodules and the hemorrhage altogether. I learned a lot of it during my vocal therapy, but at that point it was too late, the damage was done. My goal with this brand is to help people avoid my past mistakes.
There are many different areas of life that affect the voice. The most obvious is how you're using your voice to begin with, but there's more than that. Your health and immunity, your eating, your sleep, your stress levels, your exercise - all of those play a bigger factor in your voice than you realize. One by one, I will address all these issues and help you make better lifestyle choices. I can also provide product recommendations that will help support the choices you've made, making them easier to maintain.
I will do a blog/newsletter at minimum every month to address typical vocal health issues, but I am also available for one on one consultations to help you with your personal vocal health journey. As a disclaimer: I am not a medical professional, so if you have any real medical issues, please contact your doctor. I'm just a singer with a heart for people, and I want them to be able to thrive instead of just survive vocally. And if my mistakes can help you thrive, let's help you learn from them!