“This is the most advanced vocal technology in the world,” says Pedersen. “Between the types of people that we’ve done the research with, plus the fact that we had access to the world’s biggest stars under the toughest schedules, no one’s ever going to have the access we’ve had over the last 20 years to actually try out this material, under the most difficult circumstances.”
Throughout the workshop Pedersen will demonstrate the findings of this research, advising singers on how to improve their vocal range, better manage their vocal health, and ensure greater control and precision.
“What happens is that people don’t understand the range,” Pedersen says. “They don’t understand how the voice works, so what happens is literally in the first night I will increase most people’s range by an octave without any switches or breaks.
“Essentially I’ll show them how to play their voice like an instrument. Most people use things like breath pressure and stuff like that, and that actually just ruins the voice over time and decreases your range. You start to damage your nervous system and then what happens is you start to damage the physical structure itself. So what I do is I show people the basic mechanics of the voice – what their vocal cords are, how they function and how you can basically harness them with the finer musculature that was designed to use them, instead of using breath pressure to push your cords around.”
These details are often a total mystery to singers, and Pedersen believes his instruction will be of great use to many Australian musicians. “Basically, we figured the most common barrier for Australian artists is thatthey’re not getting their music heard and reaching a wide enough audience. So what we wanted to do is provide a little bit of enlightenment in a place that you wouldn’t normally get it.
“Basically we’re connecting the emotional part of the brain to the science, because without the science you’re completely lost, and TPI leads the development in this area. So we wanted to bring something to Melbourne that you would just never get the chance to see otherwise.”
Pedersen’s vocal workshops can provide singers with immediate gains that are truly remarkable. He also seeks to implant sustainability and longevity – to improve the voice beyond the four walls of the workshop. This can only be achieved by implementing solutions tailored to each singer’s voice.
“This is actually how this project started,” he says. “We had two singers through Capitol records, and one piece of stimulus got one reaction and that same piece of stimulus got the opposite reaction. So immediately from that point I realised that there’s no such thing as a conservatory system, because how your nervous system is wired depends on how your voice responds to stress. So the nervous system is built up over time based on their own individual personality, based on their history, and based on how frequently they try to sing. And this develops what we call a neuro cascade. You develop all these odd neurological aberrations, which prevent you from being able to sing efficiently.
“So people learn a little bit about why their voice is put together that way, but as they start to solve these issues and you start to figure out how your nervous system is oriented, then you also figure out how to sort of rewrite the way you react to stress. It’s a really interesting process.”
BY CHRIS SCOTT
