Behind the Scenes of a Learning Lounge Q&A
When people see our Learning Lounge Q&A sessions, they often assume we just turn up, open the floor and start answering questions.
We don’t.
Each session takes shape over several conversations between Gillyanne and me, often starting days in advance. We look at the questions our members send in, spot the themes, and build a journey that connects them together.
Our goal is always to take complex ideas and make them teachable. To show the reasoning behind every tool we use.
Here’s part of our real-time discussion over lunch in the local café for the October Q&A:
Transcript: Jeremy’s [Jeremy Avis] question is about vowel tuning, and there are two parts to it. One is individual vowel tuning for things like soprano f5 and the other is across the board vowel tuning. So vowel – what do we call it?
Vowel modification, is what he calls it.
Well, vowel modification, to me, is individual vowels, but we talk about vowel tuning, which is a setting that goes across the whole song or the whole section. So that’s easy.
Yeah. And we can kind of link that up to Abby’s thing about resonance. We could, you know, move from one to the other. So that would be fun. And then we have a question from Caroline about cry outstanding from last time.
And I’m thinking, cry, whinge, whine, moan, complain, whimper. They are essentially the same thing, give or take. But and for me, it depends entirely on how your student reacts to that word and the vocal, audible and emotional connotations of each word. Because for some people, the word cry works brilliantly. For some it just clogs them up.
Yes, agreed. So we think that they’re all on on a similar spectrum, with, you know, some adjustments in terms of sound output.
We should also talk about the idea that it’s global tilting and not cricothyroid.
Yeah, it’d be good to sort of introduce the idea of some of the notions around what cry is, to help people understand that. I think just taking them to the place where they can use it as a tool, and maybe getting some people to demonstrate would be helpful, and separating between what the cricothyroid is doing in terms of pitch management compared with the global setting.
Yeah. I mean, I can talk about Katie and using loud moaning to get her into a more classical setup.
Absolutely. And then, if there’s time, we can talk about support and Jeremy, you and I are agreed that one of the problems with the issue of talking about support is for many people, it’s a sound outcome. And there will be different sound outcomes, and therefore different interpretations of support. And Caroline isn’t far off, except that she needs to relate it to, she’s got to reverse engineer from, in our opinion, management of sub local pressure. But, yeah, okay, that will be the session I think.
So in the planning session, we identified three threads:
- teenage girls’ voices, especially how resonance links to physical development
- vowel tuning — not just on individual notes but also as a resonance setting across a song
- and the elusive concept of “cry” and the updated thinking that cricothryoid isn’t the main player
Of course, we create plan A so plan B can happen. During the live Q&A, members can jump in, ask for examples, share experiences, or volunteer for demonstration. That means we rarely cover everything we intended, because the group dynamic will lead us into different places.
For us, these Q&A sessions are about more than answering questions. They’re about helping teachers and singers think like voice professionals: analytical, flexible and creative.
If that’s how you want to grow, you’ll fit right in. Come and say hello.
PS If you want to see what actually happened in October’s Q&A, check out this blog post, then join the Learning Lounge and watch the Q&A replays straight away.
