Can Menopause Affect the Singing Voice ES056

Support for Every Sing comes from Studio Boss Media, helping you tap into the magic of singing. Studio Boss Media provides resources for singers of all levels. My name is Nancy Bos, and this is the Every Sing podcast. Hello, my name is Nancy Bos, and I am joined by my co-authors of the book Singing Through Change: Women's Voices in Midlife, Menopause, and Beyond. Kait Fraser-Neely, and Joanne Bosman. The three of us have several things in common. We are all passionate about singing, encouraging others to sing, and helping eliminate singing roadblocks that people encounter. We also have all seen the fear or devastation that happens to many women who sing, perhaps even a majority, as they encounter unexpected changes to their voices in midlife. The thing is, historically, women haven't talked about their midlife voice changes, so we simply don't know what to expect. That's where our work comes in. We have done groundbreaking work that will improve the singing lives of millions of women, but we need your help. The three of us alone can't get the word out to every woman that they are not alone and that there's information that will help them. So, sit back and take it in as we explain the importance of this topic and where to look for information. First, let's find out where all three of us are coming from. For me, I'm in my home in a little saltwater bay in the woods not far from Seattle. Joanne, where are you at today?

Well, I'm in Wisconsin, northeastern Wisconsin, in Appleton, and I always have to orient to Green Bay because most people know where that is. We're We're south of Green Bay, and I am sitting in my living room. That's my studio.

Awesome. And Kate, where are you at today?

I'm in my studio located about 4 miles north of Washington, D.C. in a Maryland suburb.

Cool.

I should explain, you both said studio. Both Kate and Joanne are current voice teachers. As you know, I'm a former voice teacher. And, um, I'd like to say, and I know that I'll give you more details later, that Joanne is retired from an awesome university. Yeah. Um, where she taught voice for many, many years and you still teach privately, independently from your place. And, uh, Kate is a singing voice specialist. Yeah. Who works with injured voices and also really high-level singers from her studio near Washington, DC. Did I get that right? Kate?

Yes, I'm semi-retired though.

Aha.

So I don't teach the crazy schedules we all used to teach.

Yep, totally. All right, so I think it would be great for the audience to understand why each of us gave the better part of 2 years of our lives to researching and writing the book, and why we still continue to nurture a large Facebook community and an Instagram community and make every attempt to get the word out. We each have our own reasons for doing this. How about we start with you, Kate? You've got a lot of passion around this topic. Can you tell us what lies at the heart of your passion for it?

Admittedly, at the heart of this project was channeled anger. I was very, very angry and didn't realize how angry I was with not understanding my body. Not understanding when I went into an early menopause at age 42, not understanding that post-menopause can be worse than actual menopause or perimenopause, and not understanding all these changes as we get older. And I will say that writing this was a great creative act to transform that anger into something beautiful and useful that other people can use Because we still don't know about our bodies. It's still a big mystery. And women are not men. I mean, that sounds very strange to say, but most of medical science and how medications and how surgeries affect bodies, those statistics are based on men's bodies.

Yeah. So go into that. What, what is it we are not men? What is it that we have that they don't have or vice versa where those medical transfers don't always make sense?

Well, I think that the first thing is that the hormonal makeup might be the same in similar quantities. We obviously have more estrogen. Men usually have more testosterone. Women have progesterone, and there are a whole host of other hormones. But our bodies respond to medications differently. Our bodies respond to, we have different symptoms for heart attack in women shows up differently than heart attack in men. So for a long while, when a woman was in the throes of a heart attack that wasn't recognized because she wasn't exhibiting the same signs as medicine said they were, and they were based on men's bodies. That's one example.

Yeah, so you mentioned— so thank you for that, um, that really we shouldn't just expect the male-based science to just fit exactly into the female journey. Yeah, yeah. But also you mentioned that, um, you didn't know what to expect. I gotta say, I didn't know either. Um, I personally, um, my sister hit menopause at 56. And so I thought that I was going to continue to coast along exactly like I am until approximately 55 and then I'd stop having periods and that'd be that. I had no idea what perimenopause was and I had no idea what the changes to the estrogen would be. And I blamed myself for a lot of things that now I look back and I can see that, "Oh, that was actually deeply fluctuating estrogen that was causing those problems." But Can you tell me a little bit more? You've got a couple of years on me. Can you tell me a little bit more about not knowing? How would you even find out more before the internet could provide this information?

This is true. Well, after per— after menopause, when I started getting glimmers that I didn't know what I needed to know, what we had to do was you would go to medical libraries And being in the Washington, D.C. area, there's quite a few that are nearby, but you still had to take a bus or a subway. Then you had to take out the material, you had to know what to look for, and then you had to sit there and read. And at the time, I was not all that skilled in reading and understanding medical or academic language, even though I had a master's degree. So I would sit there with a dictionary, you know, a dictionary, and look things up, and most of the things were not in the dictionary. I've got information, but it certainly didn't seem to apply to me. And there was a period in— oh gosh, maybe the early 1990s— when I was chapter president for the Maryland District Chapter, that I gathered together some people to try to start a study on endocrine issues and female singers, and that study included Martha Randall, who has just recently retired in pedagogy from University of Maryland. It included my gynecologist, who was the sweetest guy and did not know how to communicate to me. I had, I had, I told him my periods had stopped, there were some extenuating circumstances, and he said, well, in this case, would we'd like to keep your uterus? Which turned out to be a good thing, but I didn't know that in this case, "We'll let you keep that part of your body." The communication was very strange. And we did have several chapter meetings, but I was not skilled enough to lead or organize a study such as this. So it kind of just went by the wayside. And it was too new an idea for even someone like Martha Randall and the gynecologist, which I'm sure they would have grabbed the chance to do this, to spearhead. But so it's been an interest for a long time.

Wow, thank you. Joanne, can you tell us a little bit about why you're so passionate about this topic?

Well, I, I, I'm passionate about it because I remember so clearly When it all happened to me, and I was one of those singers that had some issues with my voice during perimenopause, and I was a pretty well-informed singer as far as voice health goes, so it was, it was a surprise to me. So I remember that dismay, I remember that confusion I felt as— and I was an in-shape singer, I had been singing and performing and teaching, and just seemingly out of the blue my voice started doing very odd things, very unfamiliar things, and I I used to say, "It feels like someone transplanted a different larynx in my throat." So that was going on. I started asking around. I started— I was encouraged to do my research. And I was lucky enough to be in the university, so I could get through interlibrary loan and in our collection a number of voice journals and voice training and voice care resources. So I did read up a lot and I did find some comfort in realizing that the changes that I was experiencing were associated with perimenopause and shifting hormones and those effects and how they can manifest in the voice. So it was kind of a, "Whew, okay, it's not just me. I'm not making this up." And that actually manifested— my research manifested in an article that I wrote for Classical Singer in the early 2000s, I think. But since then, and I have to say that my voice eventually calmed down, um, when I was a couple years past menopause. So then, you know, it was not so much on the front burner, but I always had sought to offer information and support to singers that I realized were struggling. Um, and I have to say that with the book, which we'll get to, I know, it's so nice because we have a book that we can say, "Read about it." You don't have to go to the library and do interlibrary loan. We've done the research so that women don't have to silently wonder, as someone said on our Facebook page. And, or if you're lucky enough to run into somebody to talk to, it's in the book and it's on our other media too. So At any rate, when years went by and then kind of out of the blue, Nancy and Kate approached me about participating in this book writing process, project. And I remember Nancy telling me, "We want to tell women's stories." And when I heard those words, I said, "I'm in, I am in." Because reading studies, scientific studies, and looking at statistics and bar graphs and pie charts, and, you know, statistical, I should say the statistically significant figures just don't really tell what the journey is like. So these actual reports of lived experience give life to these statistics. And real experiences, when you wrap them around research, have a lot more power and much more meaningful than just reading a study. So that, that's why I'm involved in this. I want— I want— like Kate said, I want women to understand their bodies. I want them to understand their voices. And there's power in that. And I don't mean that in sort of a flippant way. That's, you know, knowledge is power.

Anyway, and, and as you both pointed out, until we wrote this book, there was no reliable resource for all women who sing to go to, to find this out. Most of us don't have the interest or the access to university library, and they— we just fall silent. And that, that's my motivation. I'll go into that in just a second, but before I go there, Joanne, I wanted to say that you know this, that one of the first times I met you, you joked that you were a mezzo soprano, and I know you got to pause for laughter every time I say menosoprano, and I credit you every time because that is totally from you. It's just, it says so much. And if you don't know what menosoprano means, hopefully by the end of this episode you'll know what we mean by that. It's a brand new word. So about, about me is that I was not yet at menopause. I was having no voice difficulties that I was aware of, but my big motivation is that everyone should be singing. And I see this huge portion of the population going silent or feeling a tremendous amount of guilt or shame about their voices, especially in choral singers. When the choir director asks for a soloist, the singers might very well say, "Oh, well, I would have done that when I'm 30, but you don't want to hear me sing now." And That just breaks my heart when I hear that stuff, and it's so common. I'm sorry, I'm kind of tearing up a little just thinking about that. And so, so the idea that, that everyone should get to sing, but what if you think that you can't or that something has changed dramatically? And so that's why I was into this. Why is a big chunk of our population going silent when it comes to singing? That's why I needed to get to the bottom of this and, and help the women through this. So Ah, with that, let's go into some of those stories. Let's, um, you alluded, Joanne, especially to, um, changes to your own voice, and we don't need to get specific there, but we have all heard now stories not only from the dozens and dozens of women that we interviewed, but now we've, before, for our research, but now we've heard a lot of stories from people we didn't research as well. We included dozens of stories in the book because, like you said, It's always so much muddier and more complicated than what a synopsis on a chart can show us. So I think it'd be great for the audience to understand what people have to gain from learning more about women's changing voices, and especially what the women can do to overcome issues they might be having. So with that in mind, Joanne, do you have any specific examples of what this knowledge has done for a singer.

Yeah, it goes back to that, what I said about my wanting to be available to talk to women. And I was at a conference, and I'm not sure exactly how we made this connection, but a woman said, a little younger than I am, she said, "Can I talk to you about, you know, my voice? I'm not sure what's going on." And I said, "Sure, let's have coffee." So we found a little time at this conference to get off. And not too long into that coffee date, the tears were streaming down her face. And, you know, she just started explaining some of her symptoms that were, again, kind of out of the blue. Like, and I know that she was a singer who had been singing and was in good training and was a teacher. So she's very voice aware. It wasn't one of those situations where We maybe get a little bit out of shape. She was in shape. And she, in her case, she had a kind of a weak point in the middle of her voice, sort of, right? Yeah, sort of like A to C, A4 to C5. And if you're not feeling stable there, it's very hard to sing anything pretty much.

Anything. That's where most of the rep is. Yeah, right, right.

And she felt like her her top voice was sort of sagging and it was hard to— this is a little bit classical singer-y, but you know, the high voice sort of feels high and you kind of feel this— sometimes describes being on the shelf. And she said, "My shelf is falling." So these are very, really subjective descriptions of singers, but we, you know, we know our voices. We have to explain it in some way and And she just said, I just, I feel like as a teacher, I feel like, how can I help my students if I can't help myself? And that's a hard thing when you're a teacher, because you're supposed to know everything. I should probably tell, can I tell my little story about when I came out to my studio about this? It was sort of funny.

I'd love that.

Well, at this point, I was quite aware that when I try to demonstrate something, I was getting a suboptimal sound in lessons and so on and so forth. I just got tired of apologizing all the time. And so I— and I had had a quote diagnosis from a very well-known voice doctor. He said, what you're experiencing, in my humble— not his humble opinion, but his professional opinion— was associated with changing hormone levels, lowering estrogen, you know, having to do with perimenopause. So, you know, that event— okay, it's not just me. So in my voice studio class where my whole group of students at my university were all together once a week and we were singing for each other and I asked them to stick around afterwards because I wanted to tell them something. And so I just explained it, you know, teachable moment, told them that this was going on with my voice and that's why I was not demonstrating or performing at that time. And I hope that they would understand and just be patient, you know, with me. But I was just trying to do the best I could during this time of my life. And then they— I dismissed them, and they were very sweet. And some of the girls came up afterwards, and they circled around me. They said, "Oh, Mrs. Bozeman, we thought you're gonna tell us you were pregnant," which was horribly ironic. But my, you know, I felt good about it because my students— it was a teachable moment. And that chunk of kids, they got the message that this can happen sometimes in midlife. So wait, where did I— okay, I went a little astray there.

Well, actually, that brings me back kind of to Kate's anger that she was talking about, because menopause is considered a condition, a disease, an illness. It's something to be treated.

Kate?

Yep.

They use the word syndrome.

Syndrome.

Yeah.

I'm sorry, when a girl gets her first menstrual period, that's not considered an illness or a condition. It maybe used to be, but it's not now, and it's a natural part of our lives, what we're going through, not deserving of sympathy or care cards or anything like that.

I do think, you know, we've talked about this before, I do think that the reason so many women experience menopause in truly horrific ways is that as a whole, women have been mistreated. And if you're asking, well, how are you mistreated, Kate? You're white, you're in a nice neighborhood. There's such a thing called empathy. You can feel for how other people are being treated and you can see how other people are being treated. And so the only thing about menopause and sexism is that we've been taught to fear our bodies. We've been taught to be sort of ignorant about our bodies. And I am so thrilled to see younger women coming up. This isn't in their awareness as much. It's still there. It's still there, but it's not in their awareness. And I'm thinking, gosh, I was in menopause like, you know, 23, 24 years ago. That's, that it's not that long in history, but it might as well be the beginning of Earth for all these younger women are knowing their bodies, knowing what to expect. And in my work, this is the other thing, if you are someone— and we tell me if I, you know, want me to bring this up later— but if you are someone who works with women singers, female singers, cisgender female singers, because there's not enough research out yet on transgender. If you're someone who works with them, and let's say you've gone through your own menopausal changes, don't assume that what worked for you is going to work for the person in front of you. You have to have a bag of, a bag of information, a bag of tricks, a bag of ways of working that go that will stretch you beyond your wildest capabilities. So that when we sometimes have conversations about people who are having trouble, yes, like Joanne said earlier, we're not talking about people who are out of shape or have to learn to eat well or have to learn what they're allergic to or have to shift their relationships. These are all parts of things that happen in perimenopause and menopause, We're talking about people who are in decent shape, who've kept up their training, and they're still having problems with their voices.

Awesome. Joanne, we should get back to you and your story.

Oh, so anyway, so this person I'd had coffee with, you know, luckily she was, um, we were able to talk and she, she, um, we, we talked about some ideas about how she could work with her voice. And I don't want to get too specific because this was her situation, right? But I know it's nice because I've known her for so long, I can say, I can talk a little bit about the arc of her story and that she is better. Her voice is more stable now. And she learned how to stop beating up on herself in terms of just realizing, I'm not doing this to myself. I'm still a good teacher. I've got to get my head in a good place where I just— I do the best I can with the voice I've got today. And then it's a matter of time and just staying in shape and not stopping singing. This is so important. Even if your voice feels yuck, keep singing, keep the voice going, because the use it or lose it thing, there is truth to that. And if we do dial down our usage, those, um, the muscles will get a little saggy. Nerve transmission may slow down. We're not exactly sure, but we can relate it a bit to athletic— athleticism in general. It's keep calling on the muscles, keep calling on the nerves. So that's— I think that's super important to say. Can I just sort of just zigzag a little bit to another field and talk about that for a minute? And actually, it goes back to Nancy. You're talking about a choral situation. Right? Choral directors need this information. Oh yeah. There's so many women singing in choirs and they may not be the type that's singing every single day of the week or voice teachers or music educators. Our choral singers just want to give the best they can, right? Yeah. But if, for instance, I've heard this story in different forms. I have a woman who was in a choir and she still had her first soprano notes. She could get them out, but they did not feel good. They felt uncomfortable. They felt effortful. But she felt either directly or indirectly compelled to continue to sing first soprano because they needed her, right?

Yeah. And then it just became so difficult for her voice that she just quit And I would imagine her ego too, because she was not proud of the sound that she was making.

Right. So she just ended up, you know, and I would say she, I think she represents probably a number of people that say, I just, this is not fun for me anymore. It doesn't feel good. I'm not getting it. I'm not getting sympathy from my choral directors. So I think I'll just back away. And that, to me, that goes back to Nancy, what you said about we have kind of a right to sing, right? And that's an important situation.

I want to jump in real quick with a story of my own from one woman who, she was trained as an excellent soprano, classical, when she was in her 20s. And she came to see me in her 50s having her voice be a stranger to her, that she was not doing well at things like vibrato and breath control or management. She wasn't hitting pitches well. She couldn't sing as fast as she used to sing. Pretty much everything that defined her as an excellent soprano before was no longer in her toolkit. Now, just yesterday I saw someone type out in a Facebook group that just rely on your technique and you'll get through it. This too shall pass. And, and I thought, excuse my language, but bullshit, because the technique that this woman was taught when she was 22 no longer applied to to her post-menopausal voice because she was just one year post-menopause, which means two years since her last period, and her voice had literally changed. Her anatomy, her physiology of her face, her throat, the structure and physiology of her rib cage, her body mass had changed dramatically, and she simply was a different instrument. So if she was literally relying on the technique from her 20s, and that was failing her, and she needed a new technique for her new body and voice. And so that's really my story, is that, that we are not stagnant, we are not unchanging people. Nobody is, but especially a woman going through perimenopause, menopause, and the aging process is going to see more dramatic changes than their counterpart males.

Yes.

So Kate, we better jump into with you. Do you have any stories of how change has been? I don't know, go on.

Just, okay, well, um, I'll— two things: stories from our book, and one that I rather identified with was the story of Margot. She had four teenage children And she said that she could turn into a raging lunatic at the drop of a hat. Well, this was post-menopause for me, and my children were younger because I, I had my last one at age 36, and I was in menopause at 42. You know, I had a first grader and, and, and a fifth grader, and I'm post-menopause, and I think sometimes when we wait later to have our children, what we have to remember is that their pubescent selves and their teenage hormones are going to be overlapping with your hormonal changes, and it can be cuckoo land in the house, and you have to be the adult. You have to be the grounded one, and I— that, that was very difficult. If— and I did seek out psychological help, and I was put on so many drugs I could hardly function. That's another thing. Many women go to psychiatrists or psychologists or social workers when these symptoms start happening, which, which can include anger, brain fog, forgetfulness, sadness, depression. Which can be solved through other means than medications. Although please, if you need to be on something, please take it. But I was put on medications to perk me up. I was put on medications to bring me down. I was put on meditation.

Wee!

I was put on everything. So I was on 7 different medications at age 46. And it took, it took some years for me to get off of them. And unfortunately, that still happens. So, but as far as vocally, I want to talk about that a little bit because we, we do want to emphasize that everyone's story is different, and this is back to the idea no one thing will work for all women. I In some ways, I am still riding on the reputation I managed to garner as a singer. But by the time I was 30, I was an up-and-coming thing. Uh, you couldn't open the Washington Post without seeing my name everywhere. I was working regionally, I was working, uh, some national gigs in the days before the web. And, uh, I had these birth experiences with my children where I was really I was really traumatized. In the second child, the surgeon left my placenta in my womb and stitched me back up. And it's just, it was providential that I went back to my old OB-GYN who had gone out of the baby delivery business and he caught it and he did 2 more surgeries to heal me. That all happened right before I went into menopause. And there does seem to be a relationship between trauma and an earlier menopause. My singing was still pretty good. I had a great teacher. I saw them— I saw her regularly, and it wasn't until vocal injury occurred in the form of paresis that I started having problems. This is all convoluted. This is a very convoluted story, and the point for this whole thing is that in terms of stories, the ones that I also resonate a lot with because of my experience were the women who told their stories in our alternative health chapter.

Love it. That's great. Thank you. And I think that anybody who's listening has noticed that we are talking just as much about singing— we're talking just as much about all-over body stuff and spirit as we are about singing because the all-over body and the spirit impacts singing, not just literal changes to the vocal folds, but how everything about us is affected by this sometimes traumatic and oftentimes challenging journey. We have to wrap it up there. I'm sorry to say that. And in a minute, I'll give you details about how you can get more information and help more women. But for now, is there anything else that you'd like to leave us with, Joanne?

Yeah, I just also want to stress again that every— everybody's journey is different. We have talked to women, we have included in the book stories of women that really didn't notice any substantial changes, if at all, in their voices, and they just sailed right through. So this is— it's not a given that all female singers are going to have issues with the voice, but we're talking to the people that do, so that's why we're here. And we we love to hear all the stories. Yeah, so thank you for watching and being with us. Thank you.

Kate, is there anything you'd like to leave us with?

Just one idea that I hope that the stories and that the book and that the biology allow you to either have compassion for yourself or help a family member or your teacher to understand what you're going through and that you, you might be, it's, it can be difficult as an educator working with someone in this situation because her whole identity has been shot to hell. And, and, and for those who have not gone through this, We applaud you, we celebrate with you, but please have compassion and understanding for women who are having a tough time.

Wonderful. All right, I have to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining me. There's a copy of the book Joanne's got in her hands. Kate and Joanne, it has been great to be here together with you.

Nice to see you.

Bye.

Thank you. Bye.

Kate, Joanne, and I are constantly updating the resources on the Singing Through Change website, that is singingthroughchange.com. Look for the resources tab, and when you get there, you will find articles by us and by other people. You'll be able to find a link directly to our YouTube channel, which you might be on right now, and you can see how to book us as speakers for your choir or voice-related organization. We are so eager to to get the word out about this to the millions of women who need to hear it, their choir directors, voice teachers, doctors, and speech-language pathologists. As for the book, it is available in print and Kindle through Amazon, and it's available worldwide through Book Depository. The audiobook is available worldwide on just about all of the audiobook platforms. The most reliable site for countries outside of North America, Australia, and Europe seems to be an audiobook platform called Libro.fm. That's Libro.fm. Mbro.fm, but try your favorite audiobook platform first. It's read by me, yours truly, so if you just can't get enough of my voice, here's a chance to hear several hours of me. Thank you for joining us for this conversation. Subscribe here or join our email list to be notified of all future releases. All links are in the show notes. Bye for now.

Down to such just fun.

Maybe we'll stop and stay a while.

Oh baby, if you got the time.