Today Alexa is joined by a singer-songwriter, speech pathologist and voice rehabilitation specialist. She's also the author of Everyday Voice Care, the Lifestyle Guide for Singers and Talkers, with other publication credits including the Journal of Voice and Voice and Speech Review. Joanna Cazden is on Singing Teachers Talk to tell you how you can help your singers maintain a vocally healthy lifestyle. 
KEY TAKEAWAYS

The Singing Teachers Talk podcast will be airing its 100th episode on the 1st of March, 2023. And so to celebrate this milestone and to thank all of our amazing listeners, we are giving away an incredible prize to one lucky winner. Keep an eye out for more details. 
In the late eighties and early nineties the only vocal health advice you would get was that you need to drink a lot of water and avoid reflux. That's what the vocal health experts were saying and even doctors were too. Joanna did a little research and decided to make the information that was only in textbooks available in a more accessible form. 
In her book Joanna advises the reader to understand and tolerate that contradiction is part of the health journey, referring to how sensations we feel can be contradictory to what is actually happening.
A fundamental bit of information is that it feels like the mouth and the throat are all one thing, but they’re not. We think if I drink something, it should help my voice. We have all this folklore about what to put in your tea and so many other recipes that are recommended. But we’re not realising that the vocal cords are further away than we think.
One of the functions of having a daily warmup routine is that it becomes self diagnostic and everybody should know their typical range at each time of day. If that starts to change consistently, then there's a problem. If it takes a little more effort to get sound going, you make a note of that. So it's really about getting to know your own instrument.
There are a lot of different ways singing teachers can cue the thing that you want. You should use the simplest possible sensory language to do it and pay attention to which parts of what you instruct the student gets and which they don’t. Reinforce that. 

BEST MOMENTS
‘I was afraid to tell anyone about it. I had no clue what was going on. I had no idea of going to a doctor’
‘Contradiction is part of the health journey’
‘That system is designed by survival to be out of mind and unconscious’
‘We're balancing this seesaw of considering vocal health, but also not becoming neurotic’
EPISODE RESOURCES 
Guest Website:

https://joannacazden.com/

Social Media: 

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8UDIaxfQ5I5_WxOnFFqrag

Book Link - Everyday Voice Care: The Lifestyle Guide for Singers and Talkers by Joanna Cazden:

Hal Leonard: https://www.halleonard.com/product/333734/everyday-voice-care 
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Everyday-Voice-Care-Lifestyle-Singers/dp/1458443183

Relevant Links & Mentions: 

Vocal Health Education: vocalhealtlh.co.uk
Homunculus: https://www.google.com/search?q=homunculus&rlz=1C5CHFA_enGB916GB917&sxsrf=AJOqlzXXbPTA0L7otbvtAn-FEHP4a8GolA:1674575611845&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj3jPmjyOD8AhVPhlwKHQqmC9oQ_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1166&bih=726&dpr=2
American Speech-Language Hearing Association: asha.org
Brain, Mind and Voice Therapy by Joanna Cazden at the ASHA Convention (2017): https://youtu.be/dnvNjoows90
Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others by Marco Lacoboni 
Joanna Cazden’s talk on Empathy and Self-Care for The Voice Foundation: https://www.facebook.com/events/1354751692019414
Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks
Kate Devore: https://www.colum.edu/academics/faculty/detail/kate-devore.html
The Vocal Pitstop: Keeping Your Voice on Track by Adam D Rubin MD

ABOUT THE GUEST
Joanna Cazden is a voice rehabilitation specialist, singer-songwriter, and educator in Santa Cruz CA, recently retired from the Voice Clinic at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles where she was s