HOW TO PRACTICE PRODUCTIVELY

This video explains what the process of practice should look like in voice alteration. Effective practice starts with effective hearing. Effective hearing and perception will be discussed at our next event. From effective hearing and trained perception, our ability to make meaningful judgements during voice practice is made possible.

This video assumes you have a general idea of what to be aiming for in your practice and then shows the overall flow and productive map for practice.

Practice should be a continuous increase in complexity while the individual tries to track and evaluate the success of each attempt. This evaluation shouldn't happen after the fact, but instead during. This is why the foundation before practice is so important. 

What students often hyperfocus on as "vocal exercises" are actually decontextualized actions which live at the "Level 1 complexity" in application. It's necessary for us to have trained perception to evaluate if these actions are giving us the target. Once they are, exercises need to be moved on from and complexity must be increased.

Our layers in complexity can broadly be thought of as:

• Perception Development - training the ability to recognize in real time what is valuable and what is targeted.

• Basic Exploration - small, decontextualized actions which allow a person to reduce complexity and determine if they are moving closer/further from their acquired target. This involves but is not limited to: single tones, basic exercises, simple movements, non connected actions

• Basic Usage - contextualized actions which let us develop basic speech while exploring and tracking for our target. This involves but is not limited to: single words, lists, counting, phrases, reading, basic memory/recall practice

• Dynamic Usage - fully integrated speech and expression while trying to track for errors and deviations of the target quality followed by correction in real time back to the target. this is the singular most important practice layer other than perception development because from here, true voice usage unfolds. Continued interaction in this space is what automatically develops normalization.