“Tone deaf”

Andy’s was the first request. He lived across the country, and I was living in Mill Valley at the time, in the early stages of building my online music studio based in Marin County, California. He wanted voice lessons, and while I’d never taught voice, I was almost positive I didn’t want to. I’d taken vocal lessons in high school and, of course, been in choir throughout college while working on my music degree and found the process of vocal lessons to be too “one-size-fits-all” with a lot of dusty Broadway tunes that rarely fit the range of the student in question. My voice was frustrating to my teachers because, try as they might, they couldn’t get it to sound like anyone else besides me. I didn’t start to find real joy and true expression through singing till long after college when I was safely out of the reach of professors who wanted my voice to be different.

Through university, I had witnessed vocalists and fellow choir members with truly gorgeous voices torn down because they did not have the classical voices or range that the professors desired. I am unsure whether they ever got their confidence back. When they sang, their instrument was quite literally their own body. It went against everything I believed as an artist and an educator to witness older humans judging whether younger human voices were “bad” or even “good enough” to warrant others wanting to listen to them. It was dehumanizing. Humans have evolved to sing for a reason, not just a favored few. I didn’t want to tamper with something as important as a person’s relationship to their own voice.

But back to Andy. What intrigued me about his request was that he had pronounced himself tone-deaf. As he put it, “couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.” His end goals were loveably modest—to be able to sing along with his favorite classic rock songs in the car, maybe a karaoke night with friends without making anyone wince. I didn’t know any educators working with tone-deaf adults, and I certainly had no training in this. Still, the problem fascinated me, and I wanted to see if it could be done. It seemed simple to me in theory. All pitch is vibration, and each note has its own frequency. I thought if you could learn to feel the vibration and recognize what that felt like to match vibration versus what it felt to be dissonant to the vibration, then hypothetically, you could match all notes in that way, and it would become second nature to be pulled into matching frequencies instead of fighting them. Over time, I believed it would feel more natural to sing IN frequency than to sing OUT of frequency. A matter of muscle control, ear training, and attention. And patience. And if there was one thing the Universe had given me in spades, it was patience.

So we began.

I was right, for the most part, about my theories of being able to train the ear to distinguish vibrations, but I was unprepared for what an emotionally vulnerable experience it would be for an adult student to sing for another adult for the first time. Many more tone-deaf adults followed after Andy, and it was always an intimidating beginning for the students, especially after all the other experiences surrounding their voices that new clients brought with them. There was always the learned idea that they didn’t have the right to do something they weren’t already good at. Sometimes, it would be months of helping students dismantle decades of negative self-perceptions around their voices not being good enough before the technical work could even begin. Cold sweats, tears, and sheer terror were common in these early lessons. Yet, as these students continued to show up for themselves and their voices, the new discoveries would keep them going week-to-week and month-to-month. Soon, we were full speed ahead with the earlier anxieties forgotten. As Andy got to know his voice for the first time, we sang everything you could imagine, from rock to country to soundtrack songs from movies. He grew into a stunning range with many genres he could eventually navigate comfortably. In the following years, Andy developed a beautiful crooning vibrato that favored Frank Sinatra songs and Michael Buble and was a delight to listen to. He even began to write his lyrics.

Let’s be clear: Mariah Carey is the only human in the world who would be failing if she didn’t sound like Mariah Carey. Your voice shouldn’t sound like hers, and that doesn’t mean you have any less of a right to sing and bring your voice to the world that you were born with. Humans are capable of expressing something transcendent about life through song because we have evolved to connect and communicate through singing. It is essential to our lives, our well-being, and the health of our communities. It’s been such an honor to have worked with many more tone-deaf adults in the years since then on their journeys to connect with their voices. I am privileged to have witnessed many incredible moments of discovery with them—it now feels like some of my most important work, and reconnecting people to their voices will continue to be a pillar of what I do for as long as I am lucky enough to be an artist educator.

I’m so glad Andy found me, and I’m so glad I said “yes.”