From Inside Voice: Lake Bell and the Mechanics of Singing

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, it's Justin Richmond here with the preview of a new audio book I had the pleasure of working on at Pushkin Industries, called Inside Voice. Inside Voice is by the actor Lake Bell, who's long bit obsessed with our voices? Why did they matter in such deeply personal ways? Why do we hate our voice? In writing the book, Lake went down some really fascinating rabbit holes, exploring the psychology, social science, and cultural constructs of our voice. She started with the mechanics. In this excerpt, you'll hear Lake in conversation with ear nose and Throat doc to the Stars, doctor Randolph Schnipman. His office is filled with gifts of albums and instruments and other memorabilia from a who's who of grateful artists whose voices were strengthened or even saved by doctor Schnipman. An Inside Voice, you'll also hear the iconic voices of Drew Barrymore, Susie Esman of Curb Your Enthusiasm, comedian Tracy Allman, Broken Record alum Jeff Goldbloom, and one of my personal heroes. You'll know her from Jackie Brown Coffee or Foxy Brown. Pam Greer if you're interested at all in how our voices make beautiful music or why we hate her own voices, I think you'll like this audiobook. Inside Voice is available at inside Voice audiobook dot Com, Audible, Spotify, and wherever audiobooks are sold. To fully respect anything, we need to know what it's made of. So let's find out what the voice is made of, shall we. I think we need to consult an ear nose and throat specialist aka a doctor to get an unboring scientific education on the architecture of our vocal tools. God, if we can only talk to the E n T doc to the stars, someone like doctor Randolph Schnipman. Doctor Schnipman's entire office in Los Angeles is lined floor to ceiling with records, musical instruments, and other memorabilia from generations of grateful musicians and performers whose iconic voices he has nurtured and even saved. Schnipman himself is kind of an icon. The man could rock a yamica and skinny jeans concurrently and make it sing to boot. His own voice is pretty terrific. Long Island, New York accent the best I'm an ear nose and throat doctor. It's also known as an oto rhino laryngologist otto for the ear, rhino for the nose, and laryngology for the larynx of the throat. It is my mission to help people get the best out of their voice, and especially if it's going to help the function better in society. Great. And if you had to kind of break it down to the layman, everyday galler guy, what are the main architectural structural infrastructure items inside our throats and necks and noses that we need to pay attention to. The vocal cords are a muscular structure that is has a membrane lining on the surface and there's a little lubricant in between the actual surface and the muscle that allows it to vibrate. And when we phonate, we bring those two structures together and align them. Similar to when you're a kid and you pull two blades of grass and put them between your thumbs and you then gently blow through it. Those two blades of grass will vibrate and make a noise. And depending on your aperture and the force of your air that you blow and the way you press your lips, and you can affect the sound. That's really helpful because I do remember, you know, even with my children. Now, if we get a blade of grass that's a little thinner, it's kind of like, oh, that's not going to do a great sound. If you get a thicker one, you know, how fat is it? How long is it? So you're saying, our vocal chords and our vocal mechanics are all different shapes and sizes and levels of strength and the breath that we've pushed through, So that's going to all affect the variance and sound. Right. But also it's not just the way you present the air through those two blades of grass, but it's also the actual blades of grass and how they are coordinated. Okay, and here's a really interesting question, which is you know, when you're like, oh, I sound just like my mother, is that actually because mechanics of your vocal chords and all the fun fixings in there are the same as your mother's. Is it genetic to sound a certain way? Is it genetic? Certainly? Bob Dylan and Jacob Dylan sound very much alike. I'm getting people your own got my window open, and yet I've heard Danny Harrison performing concert, and he can sound like an exact duplicate of his father, George Harrison noise. So there certainly are going to be some genetic phenomena based on the way you're that instrument is designed, and I think probably part of that will also be affected by when you're raised by somebody who uses their instrument that way you we will learn to use it in a similar fashion. So I think there's a combination. I think it's both. Just to pop in here this concept hearkens back to the whole oh I sound like my mother phenomenon, And I mean it's not just like that for the ladies in the house. Let the Dylan men remind us that, gentlemen, you probably do sound like your pop. I mean, here's my dad. You really don't want any advice for me, believe me. And then my brother Houston is another exit there, and I don't get off there. I get off fifteenth Street. No one gets outsafe from this paradigm. Fellas. People have asked me some of the albums that are records that are hanging on my wall, They'll ask me, does that person's vocal chords look different? And then the follow up question is if you look at somebody's vocal chords, can you predict that they're going to have a certain voice or that they're even going to have a good or a bad voice? And I'd say absolutely not. The structure itself comes from a standard assembly line in terms of just looking at it macroscopically, and it really comes down to the way one uses it. You work in the great Los Angeles, California aka Hollywood, and you treat so many incredible voices and they come to you when in duress or crisis, and so I'm curious if you could tell me why someone like a Hollywood actor or a sort of esteemed singer would even need an E n T. What are the plagues and foibles that they go through. Well, there's the entire range. I mean, they are people who live in this real world and they have obligations to perform. So I take care of all the uranos and throat problems for performers specific to the performances. Performers can develop problems from a cold causing temporary laryngitis, or they can develop problems from excess of wear and tear, and that can cause more long lasting problems that may or may not be reversible. If you could kind of give us an example of something that, anecdotally speaking, happened where you're called in. You're the big guns and you're called in to help. I guess one story that the sticks in my mind was there was somebody performing at the Greek Theater and I got called at about five o'clock before her evening show, and there was an intro band, so she had an extra hour and her vocal chords to look swollen and inflamed, and she was very anxious to not cancel. There's certain little treatments, little tricks that we can do on site to try to help resolve those issues, little techniques, topical treatments that we can try. Remember she even they went out and they told the intro band to play an extra couple of songs, so she could even say that she could give it even more time to work. And then I remember her going out and performing and apologizing at the outset, saying that she had been struggling. She apologized, and I think subsequent to that she even offered them to come back and see her perform at another time. Are there any voices that just you hear it and you go, oh my god, that's the most unsupported. They're killing their internal structures right now. Is there a voice quality that almost offends you at from a medical standpoint? Well, I mean there's certainly be a lot of Harvey Fierstein voice. I mean, the way he talks like this, it's probably a combination. I've never looked at his vocal chords, but I'm sure they don't look great, and mixing that up with his approach, which is a real fry type of voice. I would say that I hear Harvey Fierstein, and I say to myself, that's a voice. I'd be curious to see what it looks like, to figure out what combination of things is he engaging and listening in order to get that voice. I don't believe in God or gods or goddesses, but I pray every day, sometimes more than once a day, and I operate under a complicated belief system pretty much of my own device, which I based on scientific laws and humanistic principles, and in a while it works for me.