Certificate In Applied Neuroscience And Voice with Voice Scientist Heidi Moss

Welcome to Voice Study Centre’s Voice Professional Certificate programme. We will be offering a series of micro-credentials to develop learning, teaching and boost your CV. This is one of them!

Tutor: Heidi Moss

Soprano. Scientist. Pedagogue. Heidi Moss is a quite remarkable woman. Heidi fuses her backgrounds in both music and science to provide unique and deeply fascinating courses, lectures and masterclasses that focus on the neuroscience of vocalisation and show that the voice is so much more than just an instrument.

Singing and performing has always been in Heidi’s DNA; she has performed with area companies such as West Edge Opera, Oakland Symphony, Sacramento Choral Society and the San Francisco Lyric Opera; and has garnered recognition in a number of major vocal competitions. In addition, she spent over 10 years leading the vocal physiology course at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

But in 2007, she suffered a career-ending cranial nerve injury. She lost her face, her expression, her identity. And it was in that moment that, using her medical research background and every single neuroscience paper she could find, Heidi taught herself to well and truly think outside the box of vocal pedagogy. She was determined to retrain and perform again.

Despite the partial paralysis of the right side of her face, Heidi formed the ‘M2B’ trio with soprano Ann Moss and pianist Steve Bailey, and the formation premiered at the Noe Valley Chamber Music concert series in 2011. She continues to sing and is grateful to those who have given her the opportunity to return to the stage.

Heidi invites you to join her on her incredible journey to defy prediction as she educates the next generation with power and positivity on the wonders of the brain, positivity, emotions, play and embracing new ideas about one of our oldest art forms: song. A prolific speaker and storyteller for conferences, presentations, podcasts and more, Heidi orchestrates her work with passion while always managing to deliver complex information to the listener in simple bites.

Heidi’s six-week ‘Voice Professional Certificate: Applied Neuroscience and Voice’ course runs in September and October 2023 and offers a great way to develop your learning and boost your CV.

Why take this course?

Imagine you are an alien coming down from space and you witness a printer in action: the paper loading, the noise of the different cartridges moving, and finally a gorgeously detailed picture emerging page after page. You assume the process starts with the paper loading; the nuance of output generated within the printer mechanism itself. As an alien, you didn’t bear witness to the complex calculations made long before the paper emerged: the sea of edits, the creative inputs, and the algorithms necessary to create a beautifully formatted page. If you were to manually manipulate the components of the printer, you could never achieve the necessary detail achieved by the computer’s signal.

For centuries, singing has been observed similarly. Like the alien observing a printer, the mechanistic elements have served as the foundation to our understanding of the instrument. Pedagogues devised strategies based on the functional qualities of the singing voice, rather than how the brain organizes them. While this has proved successful, it is essential that we now include a broader lens.

Research on the neurobiological underpinnings of vocalization is growing at a rapid pace. Scientists from varied disciplines contribute to this field, elucidating the process from such diverse angles as evolutionary biology, molecular biology, genetics, neuroscience, and psychology. Singing is one of our most complex behaviors, involving coordination of more than 100 muscles, integrating our musical, emotional, and linguistic selves. Influences are derived from a looped brain-body-environment continuum and serve as the foundation for vocalization and artistic expression. It is therefore essential that singers, pedagogues, and voice scientists capitalize on this wealth of data to fully understand our instruments. An integrative view of how and why we sing can refine the art of voice pedagogy, demystify long held myths, and yield greater vocal efficiency, making singers better faster.

The goal of this course is to detail the wondrous elements of the nervous system responsible for coordinating the mechanism we know and love. It may challenge some the previously held dogmas, but the hope is that a wider understanding of the neuroscience will inspire teachers and singers to see the voice in a new light and add novel strategies to their toolbox.

Singing in the Brain: Course Overview

This course is designed to provide an introduction to the neuroscience of vocalization. It aims to provide a foundation for those who are looking to fuse science with art and understand that the voice is so much more than an instrument.

Assessment:

Neuroscience is complex and the assessment will focus on knowledge and understanding as well as application.

It will consist of a question-and-answer exam with a mixture of knowledge and application-based questions.