Do you think the Kardashians would listen to my advice? For reals, they need voice therapy.
I recently started working with a voice patient, which is an unfamiliar area for me. Voice is a specialized area within the field of Speech Language Pathology, and if you haven’t had a patient with a specific voice disorder, then as an SLP you may say “VOICE?! Uhhhh…yeah just drink lots of water!”. My learning curve has been sharp but I actually really love it.
There’s so many environmental, psychological, and medical factors that may influence our vocal abilities. We can abuse our voice, heal our voice, improve our voice, etc. One of the main vocal abuse activities we see today is Vocal Fry, aka “Kardashian speak”. It’s becoming an epidemic among young ladies and guys too! It’s the disinterested in life, bland, elongating vowels, little vocal inflection speak. “Yeeaahhhh, okaaayyy” with a deeper vocal pitch. Please people, please please please stop doing this. You sound like you’re going to pass out from watching too much reality T.V. and you’re “frying” your vocal cords.
Voice therapy is about healing your vocal cords. Drinking lots of water IS actually important! But there’s more you can do for good vocal hygiene such as not clearing your throat constantly. Have you known someone who has that habit of doing a little cough repeatedly even when they may not need to? This is a big vicious cycle in which the cough to clear phlegm or mucous off the vocal cords actually ends up drying the vocal cords, causing more mucous to be created, thus causing more coughing or clearing the throat. This is a form of vocal abuse because it stresses the vocal cords. So instead of clearing or coughing, try taking a sip of water. If you still feel like you need to cough, take another sip of water with a hard swallow, like you are swallowing a pill.
Here is a link to explain more.
There’s a ton of great info on that website about vocal hygiene and voice disorders. Ok, thanks everyone for tuning in.
~SARAH