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Mind-Body Awareness for Singers: Unleashing Optimal Performance

Leigh-Post, Karen. Mind-Body Awareness for Singers: Unleashing Optimal Performance. San Diego, CA: Plural Publishing, 2014. Paper, xliii, 216 pp., $49.95. ISBN 978-1-59756-444-1 www.pluralpublishing.comThe link between body and mind in successful singing has been widely acknowledged for several decades. Singers routinely incorporate aspects of tai-chi, yoga, meditation, Feldenkrais, and the Alexander Technique to enhance performance, and books such as A Soprano on Her Head, by Eloise Ristad (Moab, UT: Real People Press, 1982), The Inner Game of Music, by Barry Green and W. Timothy Gallwey (New York: Doubleday, 1986), and Power Performance for Singers, by Shirlee Emmons and Alma Thomas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) have been standard resources for singers for more than thirty years. Karen Leigh-Post delves deeper into the mind-body connection by clarifying the role of the nervous system in the act of performance. She offers a compilation of research, mostly from the field of neuroscience, and its relevance to singing. Writing from a perspective of both science and performance, Leigh-Post offers insight into the integration of the conscious mind-including imagination-and the unconscious processes of the nervous system within the context of voice pedagogy.The author's goal is to encourage singers and teachers of singing to consider not only the skeletal and muscular structures of the body in body awareness, but also the neural systems that stimulate and control those structures. Leigh-Post's research focuses on the role of sensorimotor processing in cognition and body awareness in singing. Sensorimotor processing is the management of neural information, from both sensory and motor systems, to accomplish a given task. Leigh-Post postulates that including cognitive neuroscience in the discussion of voice pedagogy will clarify how thoughts stimulate purposeful action with descriptions that are more specific than metaphors.The author recognizes that, although singers are familiar with many of the anatomic systems, neural anatomy is not often included in voice pedagogy books. One of the first sections in this volume is an illustrated guide to the nervous system that explains, with the aid of diagrams, the design and function of the brain. The sensory information collected is the source of knowledge. Moreover, the sensorimotor controls, despite operating at a largely unconscious level, can monitor and correct behavior. For singers, this means they are attending to the sound and making subtle changes according to the feedback they are receiving. This feedback includes the vibrations that are conducted by the bone to the auditory and vestibular receptors in the inner ear.The crux of this research, however, is application. How does knowing the role of sensorimotor information help singers in performance? …