Is Your Pitch Problematic?

Perfecting pitch can be tricky - not only do you need skill, but you also need a group of tiny muscles and a perfectly tensioned nervous system to cooperate to get the pitch you desire. 

So what’s going on if your pitch is out of whack?

Could be a tiny, unreachable muscle called the interarytenoid.  This little guy is responsible for raising pitch, but it’s also innervated by the laryngeal nerve, which we postulate can be affected by vagal nerve tension, too. Which means if your nervous system is stressed,  your pitch can go down with it. 

What do we do about that?

Well, first you need to get a vocal baseline. How off is your pitch today?

Then, we’ll determine if it’s muscle or nerve related through a variety of manual, postural, and nerve tensioning techniques.  After each specific technique, we evaluate against your baseline. You sing, and we compare. Does it sound better? Then we keep that technique.  Worse?  Let’s find out where or how it went wrong. The same? We need to keep searching. 

By the end of the session, you’ll have better control, and a “what to do next” solution.

Sources

Choi, H. S., Ye, M., & Berke, G. S. (1995). Function of the interarytenoid(IA) muscle in phonation: in vivo laryngeal model. Yonsei Medical Journal, 36(1), 58. https://doi.org/10.3349/ymj.1995.36.1.58

Oatis Pt, C. A. (2010). Kinesiology: The Mechanics and Pathomechanics of Human Movement (2nd revised international ed). LWW.

Tellis CM, Thekdi A, Rosen C, Sciote JJ. Anatomy and Fiber Type Composition of Human Interarytenoid Muscle. Annals of Otology, Rhinology & Laryngology. 2004;113(2):97-107.