YouTube Video Transcript

again as people are kind of coming in all right let me go back to sharing my screen so thank you all for coming and joining us either live or on the replay to the tongue symposium this is kind of like jessica me and leah and bryce is like this this is all our passion what we're going to be talking about this weekend and what we really really hope is that at the end of this you're gonna come away with a real understanding of some potential roadblocks that singers are up against today that we have really not yet been aware of in terms of the public consciousness um so this is truly a groundbreaking symposium for the vocal world and i'm so thrilled that we all get to be here and present this to you so just a couple of housekeeping notes for today okay i made a little silly thing here just some reminders okay if you can keep your mic muted this really helps the replays okay everybody's gonna thank you if you keep your mic muted at all times except there will be time for question and answers so then we will be uh calling on you and you can raise your hand and you make sure that you raise your virtual hand when asking questions because then we can call on you and you'll be spotlighted so that it will be good for the recordings that really helps people watching the replay and just um make sure you keep the chat focused because sometimes you know we're going to be asking questions and sort of finding out your experience and it really helps if we can just keep the chat um very focused to what we're talking about if you want to send private messages to people feel free um that is i think that function is allowed on here so all right i'm going to stop my screen share enough of this okay so first of all what i want to ask of you all today to start this out is i want you to just take a moment be quiet don't talk and notice what your tongue is doing right at this moment when you're quiet and at rest where is your tongue notice all parts of your tongue okay have you got that now i want you to write in the chat and tell us what you're noticing tell us where you feel your tongue sitting any any notice anything that you notice at all there's no right or wrong answer we just want to see this in the chat okay on the roof of the mill great on the hard palate okay good nice mine is pressed to the hard palate good good oh we've got lots of coming in here tip of the tongue just behind the upper teeth good tip and middle part of tongue or up on the palate posterior part is not okay the surface of the tongue touching the hard palate back of tongue drifts downward pressed against my front teeth tongue rests on the roof of the mouth behind the lower teeth okay front is on the hard palate just behind the teeth touching the alveolar ridge good okay down and back okay tip resting on top of upper teeth at rear all right so we've got kind of oh not at the roof of my mouth not at the bottom sort of sticking between my lips not comfortable not sure why it's doing that okay this is great great mine tends to push down below the lower teeth okay partially on the roof of the mouth and tip pressed to the lower teeth okay tip on the roof of mouth this is great guys thank you so much okay touching the lower teeth up on the palate but kind of tilted to the left that's interesting okay the tongue tip touches the back of the two front teeth all right great thank you guys thank you and one more question just for fun okay this is kind of a quick getting to know you i'd love you to just type in the chat where you're calling in from or where you're from whichever one feels right in the moment yes i was born there okay rhode island ithaca oh wow london greece borgo spain burgos is beautiful okay manchester uk winston-salem oh love it dublin beautiful berlin all over the world spain napa county oh i'm jealous who's from there okay istanbul turkey yes all right south spain ontario portugal sweden hong konger in thailand wow cool taiwan oklahoma india orlando yes okay france iceland bremen boston berlin geneva the netherlands wow all over awesome awesome okay that's fantastic so we really do have a worldwide representation here that is just fantastic okay so we will be circling back to this question about your tongue a little bit later but first i'd like to introduce myself okay some of you know me my name is julia radash and i'm an operatic soprano and a voice teacher and owner of voice with julia and maybe you've heard a little bit about my journey but i want to tell you a little more today especially as it relates to tongue restrictions okay so i suppose you would have called me a natural singer i had a nice tone but early on i struggled with top notes when i was young and by the time i went to college i was finally able to sing high b's and c's but it wasn't what i would call easy i was quickly proclaimed a mezzo by my first college teacher but i absolutely didn't agree with that and so i switched studios and my new teacher let me explore my own voice and through play and experimentation i discovered a completely new register of my voice a free and released head tone that would sail up to high e's and f's and so just in the spirit of safety i declared myself a coloratura because i didn't want anyone to take away my high notes that i had finally found so years went by and i improved significantly i won competitions got jobs etc blah blah okay but however when i lit hit my late 20s my voice changed quite drastically and it was growing it was getting richer and everyone thought this was a good thing and for a few years i believed what they were saying even though it didn't feel quite so good in my throat things were feeling harder but everyone liked it so i just kept doing that because i was getting positive feedback so things kind of continued like this kind of like an iceberg you know you only realize there's a huge problem when you see it above the water and it was only when my top started becoming severely affected that i knew something was wrong and so i took a step back i didn't want to have input from anybody else because i knew that this was not about the sound this was about the function this was about what i was feeling and nobody could figure that out except for me so i researched i tried different things and eventually i discovered what i call public enemy number one and that's the tongue that's why we're all here right okay so my tongue i discovered was rock hard when i was singing and i'm like at this moment in time things had gone on so far down this road i thought how on earth is my tongue rock hard when i'm singing like this is something i i care about right i how did it get this way so i i got a little bit you know freaked out like how did it get so far out of control how could it be that i had been singing so well and freely for a really long amount of time and now i wasn't because it didn't make sense i my technique had changed so after i kind of you know put everything together instead of getting upset i started training my tongue i read studies and watched videos from dr mike mew who i'm sure we'll hear about from jessica a little bit later i decided that i needed to correct my tongue posture not just in singing but in everyday life and it was this single decision that changed everything in addition to changing my resting tongue posture i started doing tongue exercises usually things i just made up things to get my tongue moving and strong and my singing started improving rapidly again things were easier than ever and i was really happy my top notes came back and the voice still was was bigger was the bigger instrument that i had kind of left off with but it was much freer through this work that i was doing however one part of the story that i haven't shared yet was that i had this unexplained neck and shoulder tension that had been plaguing me for years and it was so bad i actually was hospitalized once for it weirdly enough i literally passed out in an airport because i had such drastic neck tension that it it just like made me see stars and i passed out so it was fat okay and i knew something was off and when i asked my parents if they felt aches and pains in their neck and shoulders they said no not not really and i'm like okay they're in their 70s and they don't feel aches and pains like i'm in my 30s why am i feeling this so i then wondered to myself is what i'm feeling normal so fast forward to last year and i was introduced by a very wonderful soprano to the world of myofunctional therapy um and it was amazing to me that there was now a name for a lot of the things that i had been doing kind of intuitively on my own in regards to my tongue training and i had no idea there was a whole world of this so i got really excited and i invited my current myofunctional therapist to do an interview series in my group technique talks on facebook and i sat through the presentation and i just kind of like my eyes sort of got big as she went through her presentation and i was like oh my god i have a tongue tie and sure enough after that interview i asked her i said do do i have a tongue tie and she did a couple little tests and she's like yeah you absolutely do and yeah you have about a grade two tongue tie and i i was in shock but finally everything made sense after listening to her presentation and putting two and two together the body aches the unexplained tension even i discovered my ibs symptoms but i'm the type of person that when i hear something good i act fast and immediately started working with my myofunctional therapist scheduled the surgery and had it done within a couple of months and i must admit that i originally did the surgery for body reasons but now knowing what i know i'm so glad that i made the decision for my voice as well because since having the surgery certain things are just so much easier even at my top singing i always felt a bit like i was walking a tightrope like my margin of error was just that much smaller than other singers like i had to have a much better game than other singers or else i wasn't going to be good and that was scary to me because i felt like i couldn't let myself go like other singers could and i might add that when i tried to let myself go when i in my younger years things did not go well at all so that's that's another thing so now on the other side of surgery i feel i have increased my margin of comfort by about 20 and i've gained some really great benefits and we'll we'll be diving into these a little bit later during the symposium exactly what these vocal changes were and looking at the technical implications more closely but for now i can say that getting my tongue tied surgery combined with the myofunctional therapy that i had been doing unconsciously literally has changed my life and my singing and my body feels so much more free i sleep better singing is just easier and the singers i have spoken to that have gone through this journey also feel similar so i would love to now introduce uh my friend and fantastic colleague leah stewart hill she is a wonderful soprano and voice teacher from central louisiana and she's performed regularly through the us and europe as well as holding faculty positions at mary baldwin college and pensacola christian college so i would love to invite leah to take the stage and share her journey thank you julia i hope everybody can hear me okay i think we have a little bit of feedback yes now we're good good okay awesome wonderful thank you julia um i am so honored to be here today um i'm so honored leah hold on i think we have some tech difficulties just okay just me you might need to change the mic because there's it's a little bit cracking yeah okay let's give it a try now okay is that any better no yeah oh yeah yeah we think it we think it might be your wi-fi you know what you know what we can do we'll we'll just switch this a little bit and we'll have jessica come on and then we can have you jump in in just a bit okay sounds good sounds good okay so we're gonna switch the order just a little bit because there's a little bit of tech difficulties right now um so we're gonna bring on jessica luffy who is another fantastic soprano and colleague of mine and jessica also has the distinction of being the only um combination of operatic soprano or operatic singer actually and uh oro facial myologist so jessica's gonna come and give a presentation to us that's gonna really shed some light on what we're talking about um do you want me to do the presentation or just do my story or both yeah why don't you do both okay well um give me one second here all right um hi i'm jessica i am so excited to be here and talk to all of you today um i am so passionate about what i do um both as a singer and an om and or a facial biologist and so um this marriage of things to me um i think i can say with a lot of confidence that this information could very much change your entire life and your entire career um and so i just feel so honored to share it all with you so um let's not waste any more time and get started um a little bit about me oh why isn't it working there we go sorry um a little bit about me um i started my early yap career and my early professional career before i became an orofascial biologist um and so i started in you know the traditional singers world and um i remember taking vocal ped in undergrad and just thinking oh my gosh this is amazing i was immediately hooked however i always had this like underlying discomfort with the fact that we spent so much time on the larynx and i just remember thinking to myself you know why aren't we talking about the tongue i don't know a single singer who doesn't have some sort of tongue tension or tongue issue you know and it's literally a huge part of our instrument um now obviously i was a little bit biased because i grew up in a dental family my father is a general dentist and so i came into it with a lot of this um like pre knowledge um and so as i went through my early career i started noticing that certain singers with certain face shapes tended to have the same kind of technical issues and then i took that a step further and i started looking in their mouths and i started realizing that what their mouth shape looked like and their hard palate arch looked like ended up affecting their sound tone quality and their ease and again certain technical issues they had and i just thought you know why don't singers aren't why aren't they more interested in their mouths why aren't they going to the dentist why aren't they talking to their orthodontist and so when i discovered or you know became aware of orofascial biology about four years ago i felt like i finally found the holy grail of missing information that i had been looking for um and so i have been doing this ever since um so what i work on now i work with both singers and with you know normal people and basically i come at it from a standpoint of functional movement and craniofacial or head symmetry and structure and i also like to incorporate it into a full body postural alignment and i also like i said have a lot of history with airway focused dentistry and sleep apnea which is really big on the scene right now so if you don't know what or fascial biology is you're not alone um basically i consider myself um part of one of two groups of people so we have the medical professionals that work with the hard structures of the body right that's dennis orthodontist chiropractors and then we also have people who work with the muscular or the postural or the functional side of the body and that's the category that orifacial biology funnels under we work with soft structures tissues tendons that kind of thing so let's break down what exactly it is mouth face myo means muscles and ology is obviously the study of um some of you may have heard this used interchangeably with myofunctional therapy it's the exact same thing people just have two different terms for it so basically what we work on is we work on strength isolation and posture as it pertains to the mouth and the face so some of you may know if you have a pretty heavy athletic background that form follows function that is how you use your body affects what it looks like it actually changes the hard structures in your body so your muscles over time are stronger than bone because they're able to reshape them based on how you use them so some of the health benefits that you and also my normal clientele can see in eight week program you can have straighter teeth with no dental appliances we also do a lot of work on asymmetrical facial structures and movement and function um the biggest thing that i see with my client adults is those that have sleep apnea and have tmj um not only can we improve those drastically we can improve sleep apnea up to 50 which is huge but we also can totally eliminate tmj tmd teeth grinding jaw clenching so and i want to stress that we are attacking the actual cause of all of these issues we're not putting the cpap on you and just saying okay well you have to wear this for the rest of your life we're actually changing our bodies so that we can bring you back to that ideal structure and eliminate all of those health issues and we also can get rid of body pain and tightness like julia was mentioning in the back of her neck that's very common also the front of the neck shoulders i even see clients that have a lot of hip flexor issues even knee issues everything is so connected in our bodies and that sense of tensegrity really does affect how we as human beings function and even going as far as my child clients i see huge changes in behavioral issues and add adhd because we're changing their airway itself we're allowing them to breathe better both during the day and at night and it's totally transforming their entire lives so basically the idea is we change your face we change your life so let's talk about face posture um a lot of us are familiar with the fact that you know we all need good posture right and we're familiar with what it looks like in the body so um this is a gross oversimplification but if you misuse your body i.e if you slump around all the time and you spend your whole life like that then eventually by the time you become like this older gentleman on the right and all of those decades have gone by well now that man can literally not stand up straight he cannot his bones are now fused or shaped like that now we can change him we can make him better but if we wanted to improve his posture we would have to address his function we would have to address his strength we would have to re-teach the muscles and the soft um parts of his body to function in a more ideal way so that we can get him back into that ideal posture well that's exactly what we do for the face right if you have a really great facial posture then you'll age very nicely but if we start with something and you have um some hidden bad facial postures then as all of that time goes by we start to see a lot of face melting or we see actual physical changes in jaw shape and cheek bone shape even in teeth there may be a lot of you out there who have had orthodontics you've had braces and your teeth have changed over time that's very common it's not because your teeth are waking up in the middle of the night and scurrying around it's because all of the muscles in your face and your tongue and your mouth are causing them very very slowly to migrate over time so let's be a little bit more specific let's talk about lip posture your lips should be closed at rest if you're just sitting there reading a book watching tv your lips should be closed you should not look like this right we don't want that open mouth posture that mouth breather if everyone has ever called you a mouth breather we all know that that's not a compliment right also um another joke i share with my little kids is i tell them why don't you show me an impression of someone who's dumb and what do they do they go like this right now we do have a lot of um attractive people in the industry that are able to get away with it and we sort of um allow this open mouth posture because we find it a little bit seductive but that is absolutely still wrong right your mouth is not for breathing your mouth is for eating your nose is for breathing that's why it's on your face so i tell all of my um i tell all my kids you know why don't you i'll make a bet with you name one animal that breathes out of its mouth and the answer is if you want to try in the chat i'll give you a second but one animal that breathes out of its mouth well it's a trick question because the answer is zero none of them they breathe through their nose or they breathe through their blow hole right we all have a separate anatomical um structure that causes for airway right even fish they breathe from their gills so here's what you should look like your lips should be closed that lip line where they come together should be perfectly perpendicular and straight across so you should be like absolutely mathematically pristine and parallel i'll show you this again for a second and you will find that obviously um not all of them but a lot of models and a lot of people that we consider very attractive they all fall into this really fabulous resting lip posture because that's what keeps our face looking great now we talked about lip posture that may seem a little bit you know obvious to some of us but i want to talk about something that i'm sure a lot of people have no idea about which is tongue posture so we have facial muscles and tongue and excuse me and lip muscles but the tongue is an absolute keystone of our entire face and our head um it's also the only muscle in the entire body that's attached on one end which makes it um sort of like its entire own alien um but basically what your tongue should be doing this is what julius sort of gave you like a little teaser about your tongue should not be down between your bottom teeth your tongue should be at rest up on the entire part of your hard palate so a lot of people were saying that they have their tongue tip um up at their hard palate that is correct but you should also have the entire top section of your tongue also against the heart and even back into the soft palate um i want you all to do a little we'll do a little experiment just stick your tongue straight out of your mouth take a finger and i want you to poke very lightly on the back of your tongue like this ah and then i want you to close your mouth and see if you can get that part of your tongue on the roof of your mouth some of us are probably like struggling right now if this is really difficult for you to do i can guarantee that your tongue is not in a good resting posture so here's a picture of what it looks like from the front that is this way you can see that the entire portion of the tongue is up between the upper row of teeth not sitting like a rug at the bottom of our mouths and again the reason this is so important is because if everything is down right just if you slump in your chair if your tongue is slumping in your mouth then it's not creating that really great fabulous reinforced structure that we want and that keeps us in an ideal situation over time so here's an example of one of my recent clients this posture is called a cave hold some of you may be familiar with it but basically it recreates what correct tongue posture should look like and i want you to watch this video and i want you to see or type in the chat if you think that this person has correct resting posture or not so you can see that as she lifts her tongue up and i'm asking her to hold that position the entire portion of the tongue is vibrating and twitching right and you see the tip fall and then you see the back of the tongue fall and then you see the middle part of the tongue fall so this tells us that she is spending absolutely no time in that correct tongue posture because she can't even hold it for three seconds so as she goes out into her daily life she is not recreating any part of that because she has absolutely no strength to do it so let's talk about why this is so important for singers so um in this not quite exactly accurate model on the left here um we have a depiction of the tongue and the vowels right and i want you all to just take a second and notice how lifted the tongue is even on that ah vowel right we all know a lot of us struggle with italian eyes right and we all know that our tongue should not just be like like a rug in our mouth right that even on all of those open vowels we need um arch in the tongue particularly in the back so if we just made a really really simple list of all the things that singers need and want we would need the tongue positioned high and forward in the mouth right that is lifted in the back and the middle and we want the tongue excuse me we want the tip nice and relaxed floated on the bottom portion of our teeth we don't want it to pull backwards into the fairies right like this we don't want that we just want it nice and high and resting in the front we also want to keep all of that while lifting the soft palate in the back and we want to be able from that position to isolate with specificity through different vowels through different consonants and even through vowel modifications depending on if we need to move through different resonance pockets and passage and last but not least we want to be able to do all of those things with freedom and ease so do you guys think that it would be easier to create this ideal singer's starting position from here or from here i think we can all see that it would be this one right an analogy that i give everyone well is it easier to float a feather downwards or is it easier to push a boulder up a hill right so that video that we watched of that client with her tongue shaking there is no way that she's gonna give me nice clean isolated vowels if she can't even hold one position for three seconds because staying up in that posture requires a baseline level of strength and if we don't have that then everything is going to be so much harder for us right off the bat so here's another video of another client of mine um i'm going to have him do an exercise and i want you to notice how twitchy he is he is really trying isn't he he's trying really hard so i want us to notice one more detail about this this which is that isolation requires strength again those of us that have a little bit more of an athletic background we know that body compensations happen as a result of the body looking for more stability or more strength right because we compensate because our body is trying to add another group of muscles so that we can complete the function if we go to pick something up and we don't have enough strength in our glutes and our quads well then our body goes oh we need more so let's add in the lower back and the glutes and the quads let's add in the upper back and the glutes and the quads and lower back right and so what we're do what the body is doing is that it's adding more and more and more until we cross the threshold of being able to do the action right so if we want to be able to find all of these very specific um my brain shut down very specific um formations then we have to have a lot more strength if we want it to be completely isolated so i want us all to watch this video one more time and i'll talk you through it a little bit but i want you to notice how many compensations this gentleman is using just from trying to do one um one exercise okay so you see the lips tense you can also see his nose tensing in his upper cheeks right right okay so now he's gonna try to cheat by biting his tongue so it can't move so now he's using his jaw right so just in the span of three seconds he's using at least four different groups of muscles that have absolutely no control over the tongue right his body's just grasping for things to try to use because he doesn't have enough baseline stability so correct talking posture what's it going to give us it's going to give us a much much better starting position for us as singers right and it's also going to give us more strength because we already have a much improved baseline and not only that but because we have a better strength we're going to get even better isolation because again we have that higher baseline and not i don't have time to talk about this today but i just wanted to throw a little teaser in there for you you can watch some of my other lectures online but if you have correct tongue posture we're also going to get an increased pharyngeal size and an increased nasal cavity size because we're recreating and improving that internal bone structure of the face and body so if you're curious about that you can find that on my website okay so we're going to do an exercise on tongue strength i recommend that you all excuse me i recommend that you all turn your cameras on so that you can watch yourself that way you can use it like a little mirror it might be easier for you so i'll show you what we're gonna do we're going to do the one that that gentleman just did take one hand lightly rested on your chin open your mouth as far as you can like this and then i want you to just stick your tongue straight out of your mouth like so and you should be able to just hold it without clenching the jaw without using the lips without biting the tongue without having the tongue rest on the lower teeth like this that's not lifted that's cheating right it should be like a surfboard straight out of your mouth your tip should be pointed and not like a dog tongue right so how many of you passed that test all right does anyone have any questions about any part of that thus far um oh yeah some people yeah you might not even be able to extend your tongue from your mouth that's very that's very common if you can't do this if it doesn't extend outwards that's common too we're going to talk about that in one second it feels tense points down hey johnny exercise to train this i want i want robbie to come on and just describe what he means because i think this is going to be valuable information robbie do you mind um unmuting yourself and explaining your comment where you said i can stick it yes there you go yeah so i can i mean i can stick it i actually had a tongue tie cut already um so that's part of the reason i you know kind of right all this um however though i i guess i wasn't sure it was done correctly because i still kind of run into some problems so i can i can i can just demonstrate i guess i can like stick it out but there's kind of like a divot in the middle like it doesn't go straight uh-huh can you show us oh geez wow so i'll just try wait okay great yes do we all see how his how his tongue forms a cup uh-huh yes that is fabulous okay i want you all to like put a pin in that because we're gonna talk about that in like two seconds so that is the absolute perfect segue thank you mine does that too okay paula well we're going to talk about you too in a second great thank you does anyone else have any other questions about um posture or function or this the resting position before we move on if not that's fine jessica there was a question about the palette uneven palette aha an uneven palette so if the palette in the mouth is tilted um again that's functioning as um the palette is part of the face right everything's all together so if your palette is tilted i'm guessing that that whole side of your face is also a little bit asymmetric everyone has a little bit of asymmetry that's normal however the palette tilt is really common if you take two fingers and you stick them in your ears like this your ears what might be uneven as well and that's a result of that entire internal structure gravitating on an axis just like our bodies if we always wear our purse on our right side we always wear our backpack on our right side what's going to happen over time this right that's exactly what's happening inside your face tori's on the palate to correct tongue posture yes that's a very dental question i love it um taurai are very common with those that have tongue dysfunction um we also can't reverse them but we can halt their growth by improving strength and posture fabulous question could the larynx being at rest be indicated of proper tongue posture yes robbie he keeps he keeps stealing all of my ideas yes you're exactly right we're going to talk about that one too that's a great question ah how can we reach the right tongue resting posture thank you so much for that question there may be some of you out there who literally cannot get correct tongue posture even with your teeth together we are going to change your freaking lives and i can't wait so with your permission i will move on and address all of those issues right now um just quick note for julia you can't see my chat can you is it in your way um no we can't okay you're good okay all right thank you all all right so let's talk about the tongue tie if you haven't heard of this that's okay we're gonna give you the entire encyclopedia article on it um this thing is totally going to change your life so what is it well a tongue tie is a type of connective tissue it's found underneath the tongue and it's very tight and basically what it does is that it restricts the movement and the function of the tongue here's a couple pictures of what it looks like and you can see it's that white thin membrane that line it can like on the left extend all the way to the tongue and past the tip of the tongue a lot of us are familiar with that with people with lisps right we know of a tongue tie when people have a lisp but it's actually much more than that so this person on the right also has a tongue tie it's a little bit harder to see but we still get that whole white vertical line right and it looks like it attaches about the middle of the tongue yes so how is a tongue tie um created i guess well it starts at the base of the tongue where the tongue meets the floor of the mouth and depending on the person it extends upwards either to the middle or even all the way to the tip of the tongue it depends on the person you can have it show up in different ways anywhere from the back all the way up to the tip it also can be more restrictive or less restrictive depending on the person some people um it's very short just near the base of the tongue but it's very tight some people have it extend all the way up to the tip of the tongue and it has a little bit more freedom it just depends they're like different kinds of bungee cords some of them are stretchier and some of them are just like rope and they don't go anywhere so again when we think of tongue ties we think of things that we can see right so if somebody showed up i mean this is a this is an infant but if somebody showed up in your studio on the left you would be like oh yeah you have a tongue tie right that one's nice and easy what about this person on the right if you saw them as your student would you think that they have a tongue tie because they absolutely do but he's a little bit more um hidden should we say well there's actually some that you cannot see at all we um hidden tongue ties or ones that don't show any sign they tend to be very common in mid-tongue and posterior restrictions they look like this so you know that little middle line of his tongue it's pretty pink right we don't look at that and say oh my gosh you have a lisp you have this you can't eat you know whatever no that looks totally normal right and like yeah his tongue looks a little bit short and a little bit wide but it doesn't look like there's really any issue there right he's able to lift it it looks like he's getting a fair amount of function okay well let's give him a phrenectomy and see what happens okay so now we're seeing that his function is completely doubled right now he's closing off that entire space at the roof of his mouth and the mid portion and the back of the tongue is also lifting right so we can see afterwards how much range of motion and function this person is having from their phonectomy because it's totally different from where we started right so i just want to reiterate that these aren't things that we can just look at and see we have to address them functionally that is we have to see them move and watch their strength to see if they have something that we might not be able to see so let's talk about this a little bit more anatomically so if we have a tie that's fairly short and it's located right at the base of the tongue it seems pretty harmless right oh it's just short it's at the bottom it's not really affecting anything right uh wrong because what this is gonna do is it's going to affect the entire posterior section of your tongue which you know is kind of important for singers right just a little bit so that is that entire section is going to be either restricted movement or in some extreme cases might not have any movement or isolation um at all now if the tie extends up even further well now it's going to restrict that entire back portion and the mid portion of the tongue so now we're not able to lift the back or the middle and then if it extends all the way to the tip well guess what your entire tongue is not going to function and move the way that it should freely so again there's varying degrees you can have a really tight frenum or you can have a more loose one but what i want to demonstrate is that any sort of tie is still going to restrict you it doesn't matter where it is it doesn't matter how long it is you're going to have a lot of compensations and bad results from those so let's go into that a little bit deeper let's say that you have a short tight frenum that's causing a posterior restriction basically that's going to prohibit you from correct tongue posture right because you're not going to be able to lift that back section of your tongue up on your hard and soft palate you're also not going to be able to swallow correctly a correct swallow requires a correct tongue posture and then you're not going to be able to elevate that portion of the tongue and you're also drum roll not going to be able to get an elevation of the soft palate because as we may know the palatoglossus is connected to the back of the tongue right so if you want to lift it you have to lift the back of your tongue well if you can't lift the back of your tongue guess what your soft palate isn't going anywhere right so you may be able to lift it a little bit if your frenum is a little bit looser but you're still not going to be able to lift it as much as you could as if you were totally free right and also really important if you can't elevate the tongue without any laryngeal or jaw motion because you're going to be tied into that predetermined position so if you go to let's say sing an e vowel and you attempt to stretch and elevate the back of the tongue upwards um you're not going to be able to do that because of your tie so what happens is now that whole portion becomes a predetermined set of space so you have to choose between lifting your tongue or keeping your larynx low so i use a metaphor like an elevator right so if you go to lift the back portion of your tongue guess what your larynx is going to come with it and your jaw okay well if you want to keep a low larynx and a nice open jaw let's say you're singing a high note right you need a lot of space well guess what that tongue is not going to lift it's not going anywhere right so now you're stuck between a rock and a hard place you have to choose do i want a high tongue with a lot of jaw tension or do i want a nice reload a nice low relaxed larynx but i have to sing everything on an o vowel you know that's not really going to work so well so here's some of the things that i see and hear with singers that have a posterior restriction this is just general they really really struggle with e and e vowels because that requires a really high back of the tongue they also cannot do ngs especially if they're going to ascend in the top section of their voice right they have a lot of trouble with high note phonation like i just described that elevator is really gonna restrict you right um and they also tend to use or prefer a lot of open vowels right because all those open vowels you can more or less allow that tongue to just lay there like a carpet and that gives them a release of tension that they're looking for so i want us all to do a little experiment real quick um we're going to take two or three fingers and put them on your jaw and i want you to open as wide as you can you know gently and then i want you to make an ng noise without moving your jaw [Music] right a lot of you might not be able to do that now if you can let's take it one step further let's go back into that same position you should be able to sing an entire siren to the entire top of your range and back down without having to move your jaw yes and if you're feeling like something's happening down there what you're experiencing is that elevator that fight against lift yes all right well let's say that it extends past right so now let's say your freedom is a little bit longer and it goes into the mid tongue right so now it's going to affect this entire mid portion so again you're not going to be able to get good tongue posture you're not going to be able to get a correct swallow but now you're also not going to be able to elevate the middle of the tongue i also see a lot of clients that have trouble extending the tongue out of the mouth paula i think that was you right um and you're not going to be able to get that elevation of the mid tongue separate again from the jaw and larynx i notice it especially in the jaw with my clients singers with these tend to struggle with these vowels and these sounds especially that [Music] because it's just that middle portion of the tongue right i also noticed that these singers tend to bottom out in their lower range especially if they've been singing for a long amount of time and what they're experiencing is as they try to lift that mid portion is tugging on their larynx and it's fatiguing them they also tend to struggle with their bottom of their passaggio because that's when we really need a lot of that mask resonance right that's when we really have to drive everything forward so we want the back of the tongue and the mid part of the tongue forward and that's when they really really struggle to get into that mask placement so not only do you have all of that but guess what you also have all of the posterior symptoms oh no oh no right okay well i'm sorry but it doesn't end there because let's say that your your freedom goes all the way to the tip of your tongue so now your entire tongue is not able to function correctly so guess what you're not gonna have your tongue posture you're not gonna have a correct swallow and also you're gonna have little to no tongue mobility strength or isolation your articulation is certainly going to suffer right and again you're going to have a lot of issues tongue tip clients have a lot of issues with jaw attention and they tend to have a lot of stress in the front part of their necks whereas mid and posterior tend to have stress in the back of their necks you'll see these people have a lot of stress in the front they struggle with all of these sounds right everything that requires that tip lift l's d's t's and even esses right now they may be i'm not saying that they're automatically gonna have a lisp what i'm saying is that um let's say that you're a baritone and you're singing a patter aria and you just cannot get all of those consonants at a fast tempo well maybe we should see what's under your tongue right maybe you're having a restriction that's allowing you to flutter really quickly right i also find that these people have trouble really funneling and focusing the sound especially on closed vowels in the middle voice or the lower middle voice when we want to be really really nice and forward on our teeth also almost that like musical theater brassy sound they have a lot of trouble with that and guess what that's including all the mid-tongue issues and all of the posterior restriction issues right so this is like a huge deal so the moment we've all been waiting for let's do an exercise to see if you could be tongue-tied i'm going to give you two we're going to test your tip and mid portion restriction first and if you pass that test then we're going to test for your posterior restriction so um we're gonna take the tip of our tongue and we're gonna place it right behind our top two teeth like this and then i want you to gently open your mouth as far as you can without moving the tip of your tongue from that spot it should look like this now holding that position you should be able to fit three whole fingers between your teeth with ease like so if you have two and a half or two or even one guess what that tie is all the way up into at least the middle if not the tip of your tongue and it's restricting that upper movement so if you all would like to share can you just write in the chat real quick how many of you failed that test now for all of you who did pass the test well you passed one of them we're gonna do another one for a second um i'm trying to get my chat back up one second jessica i wanna i wanna bring up an important point somebody just said what if my tongue is short can we can we talk about the short tongue thing a little bit short if my tongue is short i think what what is inferred is that the reason why you can't open is because the tongue is short or at least well i think that you probably have one of those hidden ties right i mean everyone's tongue is shaped a little bit differently but the point of these exercises is that everyone should be able to do them right this isn't like gym class where some people are better runners than other no this is base line function if you cannot do that exercise and get three fingers you i mean it's not a shape issue it's a function issue you are restricted right so my tongue for example is wider than most people's and it's a little bit larger but i'm still able to sit through that exercise all of us should be able to does that i hope that answers your question failed failed 2.75 is that a tongue tie well susan we're going to find out i'll i'll let you scrape by into the second exercise because i'm curious to see if you pass the second one so um i just want to point out um sarah actually we know sarah has a tongue tie and sarah says she could pass the test though so is there a little bit something sarah i think you have a posterior tie is that correct i for i forget what the actual diagnosis was but if you want to come unmute yourself and yes oh yes yes yes i have a posterior tongue tie yeah and so that i can if i i keep the the the floor of the mouth down then i cannot touch the upper teeth at all well um like i said everybody who passed this test you only passed the first round we're gonna do another one real quick so i'm curious to see if you pass this second one because now we're going to test our posterior restriction right so i'm gonna have us do the one that i just showed you that ng noise so you're gonna take three fingers you're gonna rest them gently on your chin you're gonna open as far as you can now from there you should be able to make an ng noise without moving your jaw at all you should have absolutely no tension here and no tension here right how many people failed that test pass pass pass nice uncomfortable if it's uncomfortable then guess what you're getting that elevator involvement right uh-huh if you can do this one and not the first one then that means that you have a frontal restriction right uh-huh all right let's go back to our um sorry oh if you can't open the jaw all the way without tension then you have tmj [Laughter] right temporal mandibular joint right that's tension here uh-huh if you can't roll your r's um that might be a tongue tie and a strength issue angela you might have to see which one of those tongue tie passes you um passed right all right let's do um let's do another tongue posture exercise i'm going to teach you the cave hold anyone who has ever done or fashionable biology knows the infamous cave hold so basically what we're doing is we're just recreating what correct tongue posture feels like so for the sake of simplicity this isn't exactly correct but it'll be a little bit faster i want you to take the tip of your tongue and to rest it on your dental ridge the back of your dental ridge on your gum it should not be touching your top front teeth it should be just behind there and then i want you to lay the entire top portion of your tongue up against your hard palate and soft palate so it should look like this you can see how i have space all the way to the back of my tongue all the way back by my molars yeah now if you hold that position again you should be able to get three fingers from that position right how many of you nope yeah nope here they all come nope nope no i noticed on this one jessica that the first one like i i could fit three fingers but on this one i can fit like them in even more so some people have that experience as well it's not comfortable right you can just do it okay so if you can just do it that's um your body is already starting to incorporate some of that compensation right so you might have one of those ties that's a little more relaxed like a bungee cord as opposed to a rope but what's happening is that your whole neck goes like this right so that's not freedom and ease right that's compensation please demo again okay yes sorry i have a cramp aha if you have a cramp that means that your muscles are not used to being up there right just like when you get a cramp at the gym it's like oh what is this not sure if the whole tongue is on the roof okay we can do this exercise again where you stick it out and you just tap it or you can tap your soft palate so you get a little bit of kinesthetic feedback to see if you are touching that spot ah [Music] it might help you to swallow into that position got a cramp yeah only two okay so that's not bad diana right but ideally we want three right last one was the worst yeah okay so some of us passed no way my neck is crazy tight okay maria you said i passed the other ones but not this one okay so what is that telling us right that's telling us that you don't have the tip tie and you don't have the midline restriction but that you are getting a posterior restriction right like that first little diagram i showed just right here at the base uh-huh fabulous thank you all so much for that yes cecilia you do need a slight suction to do this uh-huh even short people should be able to do that yes yes because your tongue your tongue is still um uh what's that mathematical term oh my gosh it's still to scale right our bodies are still to scale right so just because you have a bigger face doesn't mean that you should be able to do them right everyone should be able to pass all of these tests uh-huh fabulous all right i'm gonna thank you all so much for sharing i'm gonna move on just that we um make sure that we have enough time because we still have to talk about lip ties oh no [Laughter] so we talked about tongue posture and we talked about lip posture but we haven't talked about lip ties so these are the exact same thing like tongue ties they're a bit of connective tissue that connects the upper the lower lip or even sometimes the sides of the cheeks to the upper or lower gums right they can be just like frenums like tongue phenoms they can be really tight they can be a little bit more loose they can be long they can be thick there's all different kinds of combinations the upper tie in the middle of your cupid's bow is the most common for everybody um and then after that the lower bottom one and then sometimes people have some on the sides of their mouth but the one in the middle is the most common and what this does is just like your tongue it prevents it from getting a full range of motion and being able to completely separate right so here's a couple of photos of what they look like before and after so i want you to take a look at this woman she's doing a nice little kissy face and i want you to notice how far her lips are extending out of her face in fact they're actually passing her nose it's past the tip of her nose right that really fabulous kissy face right that's what we want we want that really large range of free motion right so let's take a look at another guy okay so it looks like his lips are extending right you can see a little bit of space like it looks like there's a little curve there right uh but if we investigate this further what we see is that he is totally cheating right he's thrusting both his neck forward and lifting his chin up so if we fix that here's what he looks like now right okay well now it doesn't really look like he's getting a good range of motion right in fact he's not extending at all look at that little bottom lip it's like one millimeter right and that upper lip isn't even moving at all look at it he's just tensing it but it's not actually getting any motion in it right not compared to this lovely lady right so what's happening is that that tie in his upper lip is prohibiting his lips from moving outwards into that kissy face right just like his bottom lip too right i mean he's he's kissing like those those little two new tony looks right so we as singers all know that we you know kind of need our lips right we definitely need them for certain vowels as we all know like uno right duh but the other thing is that our lips affect our tone color throughout our entire range right um if i'm assuming most of us are classical singers right and even if we're not most of us know that that mt sound is real nice and wide and brassy right and the classical operatic sound is a lot more relaxed and forward and rounded right the round is from the lips of course now not only that but these lips are really going to have a huge effect on all of our compensatory patterns remember the gentleman i was showing you his video and how he could move in his lips to try to move his tongue uh-huh well singers do that too right you'll see them touch their face while they're trying to get a specific position right so again these ties are restricting isolation because they're just mashing everything together they're also affecting cheek mobility which we'll talk about in one second and i've noticed in my own personal studio that especially that upper lip tie really has a huge effect on singers being able to find resonance pockets and placements especially in the front part of their face especially in this masky area right if we're trying to get forward and we're singing like this we're going to have a little bit of trish issue so let's do an experiment um we're going to um i want you to take one finger and i want you to very gently press on that cupid's bow of your upper lip uh-huh and then i just want you to close your teeth and make a fish face that doesn't feel good does it right how many of you share in the chat are already feeling restriction right right aha so all right let's take it one step further let's because we don't sing like those with our teeth closed so let's put it back and now i want you to have let's pretend that you're gonna sing you know something in your upper passage oh so you need a nice cheeky lift right so let's do a nice breath inhale in that position right you might start to feel this portion of your cheek fighting and antagonizing against this upper lip right right and you might start to feel this lower jaw start to get involved because it's not able to float on inhale right uh-huh okay well let's take it one step further now i want you to pretend that you're gonna onset a high note so again here nice cheeky lift and you're gonna give yourself a lot of space now what do you feel i feel a lot of jaw tension a lot of cheek tension right and i even notice some of you may that my tongue is a little tense does anyone feel tongue tension when they do that i'm just curious cheek tension yes tongue tension i thought so uh-huh yeah feeling all the tension [Laughter] yes right so you know something like you know something like our lips seems sort of like an afterthought for our technique right but just this one little experiment we can see that it's not right how many of you have had a knee injury or a shoulder injury or a hand injury and then you know it doesn't get fixed right away maybe you're on crutches or something and by the end of the first or second week now your other knee is hurting now your other shoulder is hurting that's exactly what's happening here right your lip is not independent of the rest of your face they all work together right so if you're having trouble with one i can guarantee you it's affecting something else yes all right so let's do a really easy experiment these ones are nice and easy because they do just function solely on if you can see them or not so these are nice and easy you're just gonna take two fingers like a little crab you're gently gonna pinch either side of your cupid's bow you can turn your video on and use it like a little mirror and you're just gonna lift your upper lip and you're gonna see if you have a little um sail like a sailboat in there and then let me know what you find you also might want to choke your bottom and you also might want to check the size of your cheeks up here yes yes yes tongue and lips yes thank you patience i want to say that that is very common if you have a tongue tie any kind of tongue tie your chances for a lip tie skyrocket right it's very unusual for us to have no tongue tie and a lip tie so you're normal are we not supposed to have elliptide no we are not we are not but again you know like i said with um with these statistics right we're not supposed to have tongue ties and yet 75 of people have some sort of tongue tie it's the same thing like lip ties we're not supposed to have them and so many of us do great now all of these people that are telling me that you have a really really thick lip tie can you just shoot in the chat real quick i'm curious how many of you struggle with rounded closed vowels especially on the top part of your range where you need a little bit more space and or if any of you had a lot of jaw compensation right or a lot of cheek issue oh my god yes yes yes yes uh-huh uh-huh now that all makes sense always struggled on those vowels isn't that interesting what do you mean by a sail oh i just mean that that frenum sometimes looks like a little triangle shape right like those pictures i showed before that's all i mean trouble with ooh yeah ooh is a tricky one because we need both a high back tongue a high middle tongue and a rounded lips so that's like the trifecta problem vowel for people that have ties nathan just because you see the frenum does not mean you have the tie oh if it's lip ties yes if you see it you have it if it's tongue ties it has to be functionally assessed great there yes there should be no flesh there at all it should be absolutely straight all the way across thank you all so much for those questions jessica i think something to maybe speak to is that there is a little bit of um discrepancy in the medical community about lip ties and seeing them i think that's where the confusion is so maybe you want to speak to that a little bit yes thank you so much um yes even amongst um doctors that specialize in phrenectomies there's sort of two schools of thought when it comes to lip ties a lot of people say that if you have a lip tie but you get a lot of motion that you shouldn't necessarily get it released i actually in my personal story i did not get my lip ties released when i got my tongue released my doctor at the time talked me out of it because i wasn't an om yet and then um about a year and a half ago i finally decided to go get my lips released even though i was considered mild and this is just my personal opinion but i noticed an immediate difference i noticed an immediate difference in both the function and the um like less stress and the cheeks and even the jaw which was shocking to me i also struggled on ooh vowels right and especially on keeping this nice tall position as i ascended so i noticed a huge difference in lip ties so yes all of us medical professionals don't necessarily agree on that but i think just from this one exercise and just from your own experience we can all see that that one little thing especially in singers is going to have a huge impact on us right so that's all i have for now um if you guys have any more questions um we can answer a few more real quick in the chat um i just wanted to give you some of my information that's my personal email address down there on the right i love questions so um if you have any questions that you want to ask me please feel free to reach out um i also always do free consults for everybody so if you want to chat or you want me to take a look at you you can go ahead and sign up on my website also instagram facebook all that good news um so maybe just a couple like two or three minutes of any more questions i think some people sharam has his hand up so maybe we could have shot him come yeah let's do it let's do a vocal one i think you have to unmute yourself oh yes hey dears thank you so very much for all great informations do you hear me yeah amazing so as all we know all great singers like berget nielsen like uh the mario del monaco francoise all believed and they said while singing the super high notes the tongue should slightly turn back and shouldn't stay forward and down and it should turn back and high because the reason behind that that they've mentioned a lot especially in arturo meluki school in order to lower the larynx low larynx method they believe that the tongue's root is connected with the larynx that's why to relax the larynx more the tongue should slightly turn back and high how do you explain this and what's your opinion about these big singers of the past they explained that yeah so this is very important um and i think okay so what you're describing it i know beer get nielsen's pedagogy quite intimately so i i want to speak to that a little bit um the meloki school is definitely in my opinion not leading singers down the right track and also in my opinion is can is a technique that was developed i think to provide compensations which we're going to talk more about tomorrow beard nielsen definitely i think if i understand your question you were saying that she and and carlos and um were saying that the tongue raises like in the back and that is absolutely correct um that's and and i do observe nielsen which now here's the thing that you guys have to realize and we're going to talk way more about this tomorrow but everybody is different okay everybody is shaped differently there's different things and so you know i noticed in the chat people were saying 75 of people have some sort of tie so then why isn't this normal well i i don't think we're saying it's not normal i think we're saying it's it's not functional for singing um so i think what you're asking is that that there are techniques that provide assistance for when you can't do other things but what we're looking at is developing in the direction of the correct technique which is that the tongue stays relatively high in the back for top tones it doesn't pull you're not yanking your larynx but it does stay relaxed and high and things techniques that encourage the opposite are probably not going to be helpful long term for your vocal longevity so i don't know if that answered your question about the milwaukee school specifically shadow did we do it did that thank you so much yes i i do think so the only thing that i think it missed just quickly because of the time matters uh just they all believe that the tongue should slightly turn back it lets the larynx moves down automatically and with the breath power not with the lyon muscles that was all okay okay thank you thank you so much robbie do you want to jump on and sure i was actually about to ask literally the exact same thing um you know i i was just listening to this past thing and i'm sure i look annoying because my profile picture includes maria kalas in it so you know they're like all these other singers that were not collect connected in any way to maluki who also had the same kind of tongue thing it's not necessarily the back it's just like that the tip is not touching the bottom teeth and like the entire unit is just kind of pulled back and so i was i was going to ask you know what you think about that and there's an entire um generation of singers and you can look at videos of any of them and they all kind of do the same thing it doesn't matter if they're uh what pedagogical background they really had yeah yeah yeah um i want to say something to that real quickly um i see a lot of people talking about teeth in the chat and like where your tongue should be positioned with your teeth um i just want to clarify that again all of these things are interconnected right so you can't judge your tongue based on where your teeth are because your teeth could be in the wrong part right if you have an upper arch that's this wide you're going to have tongue issues and we can't say oh your your e vowel should have the sides of your tongue within your molars because your molars aren't in the right spot right so what we're talking about here is we're talking about function we're not talking necessarily about structure and um you know just because you know a large portion of the human population is nearsighted like me that doesn't mean that that's it is normal but it's not functionally ideal right so the whole point of this is that we're not saying oh my gosh there's so many things wrong with you you were born like an alien monster no what we're saying is that okay you're not functioning at the at the correct human anatomical baseline and so therefore you're going to have issues in how you move how you function and how much strength you have also in regards to the pulling the tongue back um there's always going to be a lot of discrepancy on tongue position in singing um so i mean i haven't tried them all so i can't say that you know which ones work and which ones don't but i want to clarify that you should be able to lift the back of your tongue while keeping the larynx down and not having it pull backwards so there's a lot of people that cannot do that and so um you know we can't raise you know pavarotti from the dead and ask him but you know it is something to keep in mind that technique should be something that you choose consciously you shouldn't have to pick your tongue position based on what you can and can't do you should be able to do everything and then from there you choose what works best to create the best sound not creating a sound based off of what your current ability is i hope that that answers a lot of questions for anyone just a slight addition to the question i guess for the ng sound you should be able to touch so it goes up in the back and you simultaneously touch the tip to the bottom teeth yes okay because yeah i can do okay you may even be able to extend it below your top you're below your bottom teeth and make an edgy all right okay i'm yeah i hope that clarifies that for everyone yeah i think that's a really good point jessica that you're making about where however where i come from as as a voice technician i actually do have opinions on where the tongue should be but if you are experimenting and you're doing you know this this style of music or you do have a different technique that works for you you need to assess like are you doing it because you can't do the other thing or are you doing this because it's your choice i think that that's a great point that you just made jessica so thank you um okay i would love to i know we have a ton of questions we still have tomorrow so don't worry because a lot of these questions are going to be answered again um and i i think we can probably i'm going to be saving this chat so i will make sure we address a lot of those questions as well um i want to quickly just give you a heads up about something we're going to talk about tomorrow um before i invite leah to come on and share with you a little bit about her journey leah are you here are you in the house now think she is um i think she is i i'm here oh you're here perfect okay good good good fantastic so i'm just gonna quickly tell you about something that i will talk about a little bit more tomorrow but we are offering jessica myself leah bryce who you'll meet tomorrow um we have chris kelly of the musical athlete and also jenny clift of a better life chapping all of us have developed a program called the myofunctional singer and this is a three-month exclusive group program for singers seeking to revolutionize their technique through myofunctional strengthening and integration and it is for a singer who has or suspects they may have a restriction as well as singers who are looking to up level their technique and really gain control of what's happening in here so i'll tell you a little bit more about the program tomorrow but i'm going to be posting links right here for you to read more about the program and to book a discovery call to see if you might be a good fit and then we can talk a little bit if we suspect that there's a restriction we also offer an inclusive package that can take you if you are considering this journey to have a tongue or lip tie release this would take you inclusively through your myofunctional training through the procedure we'd find a provider for you we haven't talked about this but i want jessica to speak to the importance of finding the right provider this is not as simple as going out and getting your tongue cut by anybody that says that they do a frenectomy it's really not quite that simple so we would take you through that whole process and in addition they we would be doing vocal work so there's technique sessions there's workshops so we're integrating as a singer not just myofunctional therapy by itself surgery by itself and then voice lessons we're taking all of those things and putting them together to help you through your journey so i will tell you a little bit more about this program tomorrow but if this sounds like something that you want to do um if you book a call with me in the next two days of the symposium then i'm going to offer an additional bonus session with myself if you choose to do the program so i think julia's put some links for you to check that out um so that would i will look forward to telling you a little bit more about that tomorrow okay so now i would love to invite leah on um and actually jessica no i did say i wanted you to talk quickly about let's let's do our little cautionary tale about finding the right provider first sure sure um so um basically you all know a lot more about tongue ties than even some of the dentists in the field currently know just after this one hour so um i want to stress that airway-focused dentistry is really new um on the scene um there's not a lot as in like um a large quantity of studies but there are some really fabulous ones that you can find on my website of published medical studies if you're really into that and you want to look at actual numbers you can find those there but um this is very new on the scene and so basically you really want to make sure that you're finding somebody who has done this a lot has had some that maybe weren't so easy so that they knew how to handle it and you also want to find a release provider who um sends you to my functional therapy before and after because if you just go in and you cut it and then you keep going back to all of your bad posture stuff you're not fixing anything and in fact it can actually grow back worse so you want to make sure and especially because we're singers you know you don't want somebody who's half good you want to go right to the top so there's not a lot of options when you start looking for really great great people and a lot of us feel a lot of stress with knowing what to look for and who to go to and i don't know how to believe if i think that they're good enough or not so we all decided that we were going to take that stress off of you so if you sign up for our program we're gonna go through and i will personally find you all a top-notch release provider that is nearby um depending on where you are you know eastern europe you might have to go to a different city because there's not very many but um we want to make sure that you guys are getting the absolute best care and we want to help you do that so in my opinion that's probably one of the biggest draws of this entire course with us is that you get to work with not only one expert but you get to work with all of us and we're going to help shepherd you through this entire process because we know how stressful it is and we want to make sure that we can guarantee you an absolutely fantastic result and that it will last your entire life awesome thank you for sharing that jessica it's so fantastic um okay so now last but certainly not least um we had a change in plan for those of us joining a little bit later leo was supposed to speak earlier but we had some tech difficulties so leah is going to come back on and she's going to share her journey which is so inspiring and can't wait for you to meet her so leah take the stage hi everyone i hope it's working better now everything good great perfect thank you thank you um so so much for your patience and uh thank you julia for this opportunity um it today is um a dream come true for me it's a dream come true to be able to speak about answers um solutions around some of the things that i have dealt with as a singer for more than 20 years um and that i know other singers deal with too so just kind of the abridged version of um my vocal history um i have always wanted to be a singer in fact i was one of those people that another career path never even occurred to me i've always loved to sing [Music] and felt so drawn to this field of performance specifically and so i started studying voice very seriously around the age of about 15 and then went on to to major in college i have three degrees two masters in voice performance um and um about ten years of teaching experience so um there are two things that i would say characterize my vocal journey the first one is desire i just had such an intense desire to learn to sing to understand my vocal instrument to master it um and to learn about this field and and the second thing that has characteristic characterized it is struggle and resistance so i learned very quickly um upon getting into the university setting that um even though i was working as hard as as singers around me i was not experiencing the same type of growth i was not experiencing the same type of um forward progress in in my vocal growth and in my vocal technique and some things started i started hearing things i started hearing um kind of a repeated um set of vocal criticisms that would become for me the soundtrack of lessons and coachings and auditions over the next about 15 years and so maybe you relate to some of these but i heard um a lot of things about inconsistent vibrato um i heard constantly about my inability to isolate the movement of the jaw from the movement of the tongue i heard um constantly issues about my inability to correctly pronounce certain vowels deferred to some of these for me um it was virtually impossible to pronounce a a correct pure ooh vowel with any degree of freedom whatsoever in fact i actually don't produce a pure vowel until i had my release done but difficulty pronouncing and sustaining correct vowels um certain consonants would trip me up in fact um it would be such a laborious effort to pronounce those consonants that it would break an entire line um and so so there was it in terms of just basic pronunciation and correct articulation there was so much effort in my singing um i had constant comments about the fact that when i sang that my mouth was in this position all the time almost always and it would become even more pronounced as as i would ascend um particularly up through the passage so and this was always of course a complaint because i was a classical singer i was an opera singer and that spread sound was not conducive um to the type of tone that that we were trying to produce and it also did not serve the type of relaxation and freedom that i wanted um i had of course tremendous issues with this pendulum of if the tongue was relaxed what felt to me like relaxed in the mouth the pendulum would swing and i would get comments about there are no overtones where's the ping um that's a swallowed sound um the larynx sounds like it's depressed that sounds like tongue tension to me and then if i would adjust my tongue position to try and create clearer purer sounds um my voice would fatigue very quickly i would feel a lot of pressure in the in the larynx itself um and i would get i would get sound i would get um comments about um just that there was stress in the sound of the voice um top notes were incredibly difficult in fact i sang as a mezzo through my first masters and um then didn't even get into soprano repertoire until my second masters it was one of the reasons for my second masters um and but had enormous difficulty accessing the very top of the voice even though it was clear i was not a mezzo um and uh just comments about it's too wide it's too open it's too metallic um and even though i grew vocally in many areas as i walked this journey um and things like breath improved and um consistency and musicality and and that sort of thing even though i got roles and got into great programs and had great opportunities there was a level of how can i say this there was a level of my singing that felt totally unorganic it felt like i had to force my voice to do every little thing things in my singing new technique didn't never became second nature in fact it just felt like as i learned and grew i added more balls that i had to juggle and i had to constantly be thinking um julia julia gave the analogy of singing was like walking a tightrope and i would say that that is exactly what it was like for me um singing was walking a tightrope and like people were trying to add things on top of what i was doing as i was walking that tightrope and um it was discouraging i don't i don't know i don't know how to say it it was um i'm thankful to have been given by god i think such a deep desire to explore my voice that that my desire for that was always greater than the sense of discouragement and the struggle but i did come to a point a couple of years ago where i had absolutely exhausted all my options i had read matt's articles and i had worked with this teacher and that teacher and i had read all the vocal pedagogy books i taught vocal pedagogy um i had no idea um where to turn i felt like i had exhausted all of my options and last year i went to a routine dental visit to to have dental cleaning done and a dental hygienist told me that the reason i had a problem with chronic teeth grinding at night was because i was tongue-tied and lip-tied and that blew my mind you know julia asked you at the beginning where does your tongue sit at rest and um that the dental hygienist asked me that and i said oh well on the floor of my mouth of course like in my mind like everybody else in the world and she said oh but that's dysfunction the tongue is designed to rest on the hard palate and i'm so thankful for all those years of obsession with technique and trying to learn about the optimal function of the vocal mechanism because the minute i learned that i had a very severe posterior tie and lip tie the dots started connecting for me and so then that sent me down the rabbit hole of trying to find out who's talking about this um where are the presentations about this where are the uh footnotes in the vocal pedagogy textbooks where uh there has to be information out there about this and i found almost none except for some conversations between singers who had gone through this process and were wondering if it would impact their voice um and so i learned everything that i could and um at the end of last year after going through about 10 weeks actually for me of myofunctional therapy um i went and saw a brilliant brilliant dentist who specializes in specializes in release procedure he actually wrote a book called tongue tied richard baxter in in alabama and he released my tongue tie and and can i say that there is work to be done after the tongue tie is released in the singing realm okay there is retraining we have i have years i have had years of compensatory uh muscle memory that needs to be retrained but i finally understand the freedom that is possible i finally feel that when i begin to sing i am starting from the right place i'm starting from square one rather than negative four or five because i have this restriction um and and singing was always a um a compromise it was always a compromise it was always what i developed was a working technique that allowed me to accomplish what was most important in my singing uh but without the ultimate freedom that i i felt in my spirit in my instinct i should have and i think a lot of us feel that as as we are incredibly attuned as singers to our minds and our bodies and we sense that there is a deeper level of freedom um that is available to us but we don't know how to get to it um so this is a passion project for me to speak around this to have the opportunity to be a part of this is a passion project for me because um after 20 plus years of discouragement and struggle um i think there are finally errors for a lot of singers in the vocal community who have unbelievable potential um if if we can uh provide resources for for them to have the freedom um that really their bodies are designed to have and the voice is designed to work with so anyway that's a little bit of my story i'm just so grateful to be a part of today and uh what what just what julia is doing through her platform so um just thank you for joining us today i'm so grateful thank you so much leah yeah i and you're gonna hear more from leah and i tomorrow because we're gonna really dissect a lot of the sound components we're gonna do some listening examples um and you're really gonna get a picture of the various ways that this manifests because i think the journey can look slightly different for every person there certainly are some hallmarks but i will tell you as you'll hear tomorrow in my case uh i think anyone that had heard me before would not have known i was tongue-tied um especially when i kind of rehabilitated myself um so there are i think when you're listening to today and tomorrow i want you to just really keep an open mind and don't assume that your vocal problems are your fault like just let that little door open in your mind and just say what if this is not my fault what if this is something that i'm just as is is a structural difference in my body and what if there was something i could do about it so i want to kind of end on that positive note but we're going to end our presentation but we still have a few minutes left for questions which i see so many questions so um if you would prefer you can raise your hand that might be a little bit easier so we don't have to scroll through the chat and your question doesn't get lost um and yeah we look forward to hearing your questions okay i'm looking nobody has questions i'm really surprised i don't think that's true hold on let me look okay cecilia says are you going to address the importance of checking the size of the maxilla before getting the tongue tie release to avoid getting the problem with the size of the tongue yeah you know cecilia also like just keep in mind that we like none of us actually do the surgery so the surgeon will actually assess all of those like nitty gritty components and unfortunately yes there are cases where um it is kind of not possible to get a full release at the same time but jessica i think let's have you come in and talk about that a little bit uh yeah so um we didn't have time to talk about um the importance of shape and structure today i wanted to focus on function because that's the biggest thing for us singers but like we talked about it's not one or the other right it's a two-way street if you have good function you're gonna have good structure if you don't have good structure you're not gonna have good function right so there is a little bit of this like give and take in this working relationship so yeah um we can't always release your frenum before we fix some of those structural issues usually we can um i would say about 90 of people no no 97 of people that i say that i see personally we don't have to do any like orthodontic structural changes beforehand but yes sometimes we do have to approach it from that side of the equation first thank you for that question that's fabulous i'm going to answer sarah's question um about doing my functional therapy for singing before getting the phrenectomy to try to eliminate compensation that's such a great question um because there's two different kinds of compensation right there's compensation that's caused from not having strength to isolate and then there's also compensation that happens because you are anatomically unable to isolate right so that's that's what we're trying to get at here with this whole tongue tie thing is that if you have certain kinds of tongue tie it doesn't matter how many times you go to the gym for your tongue you're not going to be able to function fully right so you obviously get a lot more strength and isolation ability available to you if you are fully free so that's why we all need myofunctional therapy both before and after because we have to set you up and get you in the best spot possible for a release then we get your release done and then we have to retrain all of that new freedom and that new movement that you have i use this metaphor all the time let's imagine that you go to the gym for your bicep right but you have a bicep tie so you go like this right you're still going to increase your bicep strength but you're not going to get very much out of it so if we cut your bicep tie now you have this entire range of motion but guess what you're totally weak because you're increasing it by 75 so now we have to go back to the gym and we have to work through that entire range of motion so that you're now using your new structure and ability to its full potential and creating really fantastic correct function love that question thank you i don't see any more questions they have a question go ahead and raise your hand if you don't want to come on you can type that in the chat too i did see something way back that i don't think we addressed um that was important i'm trying to look through the chat too oh um someone someone mentioned something really important important i wanted to i answered in the chat but i want to say it out loud yes you do need a frenectomy to correct the tongue tie they do not stretch they're not like muscles they're tendons and tissues so we cannot do this like holistic thing where we just stretch it out of you we have to actually go in and remove it yes and you know i do want to just speak we're going to say this tomorrow as well but i also don't want this to feel anybody who's sitting there and it's like damn it i have a tongue tie like oh my god what do i do like i'm maybe maybe you're a professional singer maybe maybe you're working right now like don't feel for a second that you can't sing okay i i was a professional singer i was doing very well okay and i had a tongue tie for all these years and i didn't know it now i ran into some difficulty and i do believe that it was because of my tie and i also believe that had i continued even though i did resolve that had i continued on the path i may have run into an earlier demise of my instrument than maybe i you know should have so i do think that there there are compensations that we do i mean everybody does compensations whether you have a tie or not i mean this is just the nature no one is perfect right like we all are human bodies and they work in different ways so don't get discouraged but also know that if this is what you want if you really want to sing with freedom and ease there are options out there for you and i really do stress if any of you are out there and you are professional singers or you are on the journey to become a professional singer this should be at the top of your list this absolutely this is non-negotiable this should be looked at right away especially if you're starting your journey there's no reason to have to do this uphill battle that so many of us have already fought for you so let us do the work for you and just learn from this experience um i also just want to say because we addressed this a little bit but i do know this from my own experience and i think jessica will hop on and tag team on this and leah as well in terms of posterior ties there are a lot there's there's a lot of discrepancy out there so if you go and google this on the internet you will find people saying oh that's not a thing okay you can go on reddit yeah but if you use your brain and you look at the tongue and you look at the larynx and you look at where the tongue attaches onto the hyoid bone and you understand how the function relates you will understand in your head that having a restriction is just not good right it's not good and the restrictions are real they they are actual things that it's not a phantom fatta morgana right it is a thing so it is very important in finding these providers that you there is a wonderful surgeon named dr zaghi and he has personally trained many surgeons around the world in this what we call a functional phrenectomy and a functional phrenectomy is very different than just a regular old phrenectomy and the functional phrenectomy will assess when you're getting it done whether or not your range of motion was increased in the case of myself my fascial tie okay if you understand the you know the fascia the fascial tie was released but my provider who trained with dr zaghi decided you know what that's not enough release for her and so she cut into my genioglossus muscle and gave me a full release and this is the kind of provider that you're going to want so when we say that we're like out we're here for you and looking for these right providers that's what we're talking about i just i'd love you to maybe hop on and say something about that uh yeah i was just about to type in the chat we only want the best for all of you so we're not gonna put up with someone who's like oh yeah i've done like a couple of lip ties like no i like i want to see their cases i want to know what kind of laser they have because they're not all the same i want to know what their protocols are for how many weeks of myofunctional therapy before you even walk into their office right as we all know in any career people can know a fair amount about one subject but that doesn't make them an expert you want somebody who is an expert who has tons of experience who sees you and goes yes i know exactly what that is i'm gonna take really great care of you that's what we want and so we're gonna we're gonna help you by taking that weight off of your shoulders so that we can ensure that you're already gonna have a really fabulous release no matter who you are or where you are awesome um i think amy just asked a quick question about is there a list of people around the country who may be ideal surgeons uh yes so um julia just mentioned dr zaghi z-a-g-h-i he runs the breathe institute he is also the number one um leading researcher on tongue ties most of his um ankle glossier publications are from him he's been a fellow at stanford harvard he's the real deal um he runs a page called breathe ambassadors where he lists by location all of his tongue tie frenectomy providers who have taken his expert sleep course i recommend you start there there are others i'm a little biased to zoggy but um there are lists if you know who to ask and where to look but again we're trying to eliminate your workload we're trying to take some of that from you so that you can focus on your posture and your exercise and sort of you know give everyone a better idea of their focus yeah and with the list too like you know i know in my case my myofunctional therapist she was calling around i live in bratislava i didn't say that at the beginning but i actually live in europe with my husband um and so i was researching getting a release and i said well there's nobody around here right so my family's from florida so when i went home over the holidays i actually got my release done in tampa florida i think celeste and i both have the same doctor um dr d in tampa and she was trained under zoggy but um my myofunctional therapist was very insistent that she called like she was asking certain questions so there's a list but that doesn't mean you just kind of pick from the list like it you know there are certain things that your myofunctional therapist will want to know okay so guys we have a full day tomorrow and i am just so excited that you all have joined us here today and we look forward to seeing you all tomorrow replays will be sent out um this evening once this recording is done initializing and everything and i just want to thank so much jessica for her fantastic presentation and we're so happy to have her here and for leah and sharing her story and you're going to hear a lot more from leah tomorrow so thank you so much it's been a pleasure all right i'm gonna go ahead and save this chat too hi everyone thank you all right we are i'm gonna stop the recording here