Fatigue is not fatigue is not fatigue is not fatigue.
As a singer, you already know the balance. Putting in ENOUGH vocal effort to meet the demand of the art and the training, without tipping into overtraining, fatigue, or potentially risking injury. It's a constant negotiation with your instrument (and your body).
A review study published in the Journal of Voice by Dr. Shembel and Dr. Nanjundeswaran lays out five distinct biophysiological mechanisms that may drive vocal fatigue: neuromuscular, metabolic, vocal tissue, afferent, and central neural.
We tend to talk about vocal fatigue like it's one thing. Your voice is tired, rest it, drink water. But this review suggests something more specific. The way YOUR voice fatigues may be fundamentally different from the way someone else's does.
Same symptom. Different mechanism.
Your fatigue might be driven by how your laryngeal muscles are recruiting energy. Someone else's might be rooted in tissue-level strain or changes in sensory feedback. That has real implications for how YOU approach recovery, how you work with your voice teacher to design training, and how you and your speech pathologist build therapy plans.
The full article is open access and available here. Give it a read.
Breathing before belting, and the stories we tell.
*DEEP BREATH IN*
A study in BMC Pulmonary Medicine (2025) looked at what happened when opera singers added INSPIRATORY muscle warm-ups to their standard vocal warm-up. The singers who did both showed improvements in maximum phonation time, pitch range, and vocal range.
The sample was small. 16 classically trained singers. So broad application is limited. But the principle is worth considering: "warming up" the respiratory system, not just the voice, may support improved vocal output. Hopefully more to come.
A longitudinal study surveying 264 singers across two time points, 2013 and 2023, asking a simple question: what do you believe helps or hurts your voice? While singers largely agreed on the basics (hydration, sleep, don't smoke), there was significant disagreement on things like belting, caffeine, steroids, warm-up protocols, and dairy. Some of those beliefs aligned with the evidence. Others didn't.
What stood out to me: professional singers held MORE opinions about what affects their voice than amateurs, but more opinions didn't always mean more accurate ones. A lot of what gets passed around backstage or in voice studios is "institutional knowledge" that may not hold up under scrutiny. The stories we tell about our voices matter. And the role of evidence in how we care for them matters even more.
Voices making me excited right now.
New seasons bring new music. And I'm excited for client Casey Lipka (@caseylipka), a bassist, vocalist, and composer based in Los Angeles. Casey's new single "The Long Road" drops March 27th, and you can pre-save it now. If you want to hear the range of what Casey does as a collaborator and musician, check out her collaborative work here.
Yebba's newest album Jean is out. World stop. And the vocal performance across all of her work is expert. The control, the emotional precision, the understanding of what it takes to do it WELL. (apple/spotify)
I grew up in gospel and R&B, so FLO's Tiny Desk performance hits close to home. As modern pop artists, they combine vocal aesthetics from multiple genres and eras with a level of coordination and blend that's genuinely hard to pull off live. My good friend Jaron M. LeGrair broke down what makes their singing work in one of his YouTube analyses. Worth your time.
On the On The Voice podcast (hosted by Mackenzie Bykowski and Jenna Battipaglia), Jay Armstrong Johnson talks openly about vocal hemorrhage, surgery, and rebuilding trust in his instrument after returning to one of the most demanding roles in musical theatre. If you've ever felt alone in dealing with a voice problem, this episode is a reminder that you're not.
