KUNM Women's Focus interview of Nancy Bos, Dec 2022

I'm Susan LeVay here with you on Women's Focus, and we have in the studio Nancy Bos, and we're going to talk about her book Singing Through Change: Women's Voices in Midlife, Menopause, and Beyond. And it's, it's sort of about a field, a subject that I hadn't really thought about, and I think a lot of people hadn't thought about, but it's, it There's a lot of information in the book. So let's start out by saying welcome to Women's Focus.

Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to be here.

Good for you. Good for you.

Okay.

Okay. Well, this is a book that— well, maybe we should say a little bit about your background first, but then I'm interested in how you got together with the other two women who you wrote the book with. And how it all sort of evolved. But we should start out by saying who you are.

Fantastic. I'm the girl in high school who got all the solos and did all the singing in town. I was raised in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Went off to college to major in music because what else? You know, I'm a singer, I must sing. But I ran into issues with severe performance anxiety in college. Which took me quite a while to get over. I was in my mid-30s before I really started to hit my stride as a professional singer. And by the time I was in my early 40s, I was wondering, is my voice gonna stay like this? I've had 10 good years here, you know, is it— what's gonna change with age? Nobody seemed to know, but there were ideas, you know, hearsay, talk behind the scenes that once you hit menopause, You just never know if you're going to have a voice on the other side.

Okay, so people suspected that something was happening. Absolutely. Okay, I didn't realize that.

No, and in the professional singer world, there's examples of, again, talk behind people's back that once a woman hits a certain age, she's going to be challenged to sing in tune. What's that about? And it turns out that both of my co-authors and I had that happen to us in our 40s or 50s, that we would sing flat or we couldn't find the key of a music or we couldn't harmonize in difficult harmonies. And then it resolved itself and it was a temporary problem. We now understand a little bit about why that happens, but before it was just like, oh, this is the death of you as a singer, just give up. The twilight of the divas, as one voice scientist called it.

And this is something that happens to women and not to men? That is correct. I know men don't go through menopause, but they do go through changes as they get older.

Absolutely. Specifically talking about cisgender women, we don't have enough information to talk about transgender people in this issue or any other gender definition, but with cisgender women who have ovaries at some point in their lives, once those estrogen depletion issues start to show up, that's when there's distinct changes to the voice. Now a lot of men do think that, that there is such a thing as male menopause, and indeed their hormones reduce as they age, and some of them go through a real hormonal crisis in their 50s, but it doesn't usually impact their voice to such a noticeable degree as it does to some women. Not all women have voice changes.

Oh, interesting.

Not all women have debilitating symptoms, but enough do that it's something that a lot of singers are scared of.

Well, how did you get together with the other two women? Because it's not something that would just sort of come up in normal conversation, I would think.

Yeah, you're so right. Both the other women are also voice teachers. I was a voice teacher. They are both voice teachers, professional singers. I forgot to mention that although I was trained in opera, Folk is really my favorite genre to sing in. The other two both stayed with the opera tract, and that opera is probably the most demanding on the voice. And so that's why I think that singing through changes to the voice is probably more noticeable to opera singers than any other kind of singer. So the three of us— hmm, I love this story. The first one, Kate Fraser-Neely, my co-author, she and I were both interested in this from different perspectives because she had gone through menopause and tremendous voice struggles. I mean, huge voice struggles. And so she was reaching out and trying to let people know this is a thing. You're not alone. We can do this. You can get through this with help and support. For me, I was headed into menopause and I didn't know what was gonna happen next. Boy, yeah. And I love to write. This is the 4th book that I've written. One of the other books I wrote was "The Teen Girl Singing Guide." And I realized when I wrote this for teenage girls that, wow, their grandmothers actually need a book, or their mothers. And so that's where it came about for me. And then Kate and I started working on it. I'm very practical, program management type of personality. Kate's very big ideas, let's make sure that justice is served and that everyone's embraced. But we were missing this third element. And I was sitting in a conference next to a woman that I knew of, as she called herself a meno soprano, and that's Joanne Boseman. And meno soprano to her means someone who's a— used to be a soprano, but now she's been through menopause. And so I said, Joanne, Kate and I are writing this book together, do you wanna be involved? And she said, Heck yes, because she is a deep researcher person. So she brought in all of this going down the rabbit hole knowledge. The three of us together, we made a pretty great author.

Yeah, that sounds great. And I was going to say to listeners that there is a lot of research in the book, and there are a lot of citations at the end of the book, but it isn't something that's kind of heavy like you're reading a term paper or something. It's not like that at all.

Thank you.

It just has— stuff behind it that backs it up.

We wrote it for the singers, knowing that their voice teachers should read it too, but also English as a second language readers. We wanted to make sure that they could easily understand this.

Oh, okay, okay. Now, the other question I wanted to ask before we go on is vocal fold, vocal, or vocal folds. You talk about that all through the book, and I never understood really what it meant.

Okay, cool, cool. The phrase vocal folds and vocal cords is the same.

Oh.

So in our throat, between our mouth and our lungs, there's a couple of stoppers. They're two muscles that are covered in skin. They come together, and that's our vocal folds, our vocal cords. When air blows past those, that's what makes sound.

Okay.

And so if they're matched up beautifully and they're very similar to each other, we get a beautiful tone. If there's lumps and bumps on them, we get a raspy tone. If there's muscle damage, that the muscles aren't working like they're supposed to, then we limitations to our range and our abilities.

Okay, but you also— I think you talked about tiny bones in connection and that those are affected too.

Yeah.

And so do we have— we don't have bones in our vocal cords.

We have a bunch of cartilage. Oh, and no, no worries. But, but it's all, it's all scaffolding that these vocal folds sit in, the cartilages. So when you feel your throat and you feel those lumps and bumps, that's the cartilage that houses the vocal folds on the inside. So the thing is, with any of the joints in our body, with aging, we might get arthritis. We can get arthritis in the joints of our vocal folds. We also say—

Oh yes, you did say that. Yeah.

We also say use it or lose it because those muscles are connected and the joints with ligaments and tendons. And we know if we don't keep stretching and using our ligaments and tendons, even these super tiny ones in our throat, that they just don't function like they used to.

And that was something that you said that was really interesting to me that I think could apply not just to people who are singers— I'm not a singer— but could apply to anyone, and that is that you need to exercise your voice, like, you know, daily. And that's something I never thought of.

Yeah, that really came up during the pandemic when people who were living with quiet people or living alone just didn't talk. And so what we found is they actually needed to slowly resume their speaking before they could get out and go to any kind of a public event and talk through the whole thing.

Is that really true?

It's hard to believe. It is really true. It's just muscles, tissue, skin, just like everything else. Now, the results won't be instant, right? It's not something that you're going to notice from one day to the next when it comes to aging voice issues or atrophying voice issues. It's going to be a gradual decline and then a gradual build back up.

Well, I know I meant the part about not using your voice and then having problems with it.

Absolutely.

That's really true.

I, you know, I worked in retail for a while and I would talk for 8 hours a day when I was in Yeah, then you—

yeah.

And my voice wouldn't get worn out because I did it every day.

Okay. Mm-hmm. Okay. Because, you know, I found myself in this thing of— during the pandemic of— and being alone, I found myself talking to myself. And I thought, oh, you're getting crazy. You're getting old. You know, what is this? You're like your grandmother or something. And now I can say, well, that's what you're supposed to do. Good for me.

100%. There's this researcher in the UK named Rebecca Mosley Morgan, and she's done research on British Episcopal-style choral singing women in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. And the research that she's done has determined that if they sing for 20 minutes, 3 to 5 times a week, in a classic British choral style, that their voices get better and better. Oh, so we're not talking about you needing to talk for 3 hours a day. 20 minutes, 3 times a week can make the difference.

Huh. Yeah. And probably talking on the phone or something like that.

Absolutely, talking on the phone. Now, when it comes to singing though, we are using breath control in ways that we don't usually use for speaking. And that's all the tiny little muscles around the rib cage.

And that's the other thing that you said you lose, is the breath control.

You do, because the cartilage starts to harden as we age. And so the cartilage— just think of us, you know, hugging a 5-year-old. They seem infinitely squishable because the cartilage in their rib cage is so soft. And then as we get older, that cartilage gets harder and harder, so it becomes more difficult to expand expand the rib cage as we grow older. So our technique for singers, for how we breathe, has to change as we age, as our bodies change.

Ah, so you can compensate?

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay.

It goes more toward the abdominal breathing as we age.

Oh, I see. Okay, okay. So you, you sort of lose— use more of your body then?

Yeah, that's right.

Get behind it more?

Yep, absolutely.

It takes a little more effort or a little more concentration and Well, I wonder, as this was something completely new for me and completely just beyond any ken that I had, but I wonder what other people, how, what reaction have you gotten to the book? And I should say again that this is, I'm talking to Nancy Bos, and the name of the book is Singing Through Change.

Oh, the reactions from singers have been dramatic. This summer I get to give a talk at the International Congress for Voice Teachers. And at the end of that talk, two Danish women came up to me with tears in their eyes. This was a 20-minute PowerPoint, and they came up with tears in their eyes because they were so relieved to hear that this was being researched, that they weren't alone, that their fear had some answers. Just the relief from female singers has been amazing. The male voice teachers and choral directors, their grateful for a book that they can just read without it being torture and then be able to help their, their singers through it. And I would say our biggest frustration is that voice changes are not on any menopause symptom list. And so a woman may find in her 40s— I, I do need to separate at this point though, there's a difference between menopause and aging, right? Menopause can happen to any woman post-puberty. Early menopause happens Very early menopause happens in the 30s. Early menopause happens in the 40s. Standard menopause age is 51. Perimenopause is the up to 10 years leading up to menopause. And during perimenopause, that's when most of the worst symptoms show up. That's when sleep issues, rage, brain fog, irritability, hot flashes usually show up during perimenopause for 80% of the women. All of those things tend to show up in our 30s or 40s, but we are too darn busy to notice that they've happened. Oh. Yeah, so menopause voice is a different issue from aging voice, which is the changes we were talking about with cartilage and arthritis and things like that.

Okay, so essentially you've got two changes to go through.

Yes, yes, sometimes they overlap. One of our— one of the women we interviewed, uh, didn't go through menopause till she was 60, so she was going through all the changes at once. Sometimes for somebody who goes into chemotherapy at age 30 and maybe is forced into menopause that way, or has a hysterectomy, then menopause is completely separate from aging voice.

And let's say again that this— there's a lot of stories in the book that you've got, a lot of, um, it does— it felt to me that you actually were going to women and getting their stories. You weren't coming with ideas about what you wanted them to say and having them reinforced.

I love you say it that way. We would have loved to have come with ideas, but there had been virtually no research done. And so since we were starting from almost scratch, there were fewer than 6 studies done on singing voice and menopause changes. Uh, we had to do our own study and we interviewed 56 different women and we discovered that the complexities of their lives impacted their voices so much. Wow. That we couldn't just say, this is what this hormone does to your vocal folds. We also had to say, and this is what your divorce and your stress and your jobs and your kids and your parents, sandwich generation, smoking, all this stuff. It all wraps together— thyroid problems, acid reflux— it all comes together to impact the voice. So the voice covers a little bit of everything that way.

Well, that's another— that sort of gets to another note that I made, because you talk about the emotions that women have dealing with this and finding out about it, or feeling it, I guess. And one of the things you talk about is fear. And, and I thought that seems strange. I could see fear if you were a singer and you were making your living, yeah, uh, but with your voice. But I couldn't see fear if it was just a regular woman, just a voice. Yeah.

The voice is intimately linked with our identities. And when our voice stops working the way that we have thought that it worked all along, it throws us off. Like when you get laryngitis or heaven forbid you got COVID and your voice hasn't quite come back, you just don't feel like yourself. Or people hearing you realize that you might be a little bit different.

And they react probably differently.

Exactly. So as we age in general, the speaking voice lowers a half a pitch. So on the piano, that's going from a white key to a black key. That's the average for how much the voice actually lowers as we age. But we also know with aging that the voice gets richer and deeper. And you are going to know— well, your voice sounds tremendously young, Susan, but you would, you would usually be able to tell the difference between a woman who's in her 20s, 40s, 60s, and 80s just by the sound of her voice. And that's because of these natural voice changes that we go through.

Hmm. And we're so used to them.

We're so used to them. But if you're a professional voice user, someone who's on the radio, a singer, a professional speaker, you might be very, very self-conscious about changes to your voice and do anything you can to keep your youthful voice. There's one woman that we wrote about in the book who didn't realize that she was compensating for years and years to keep her voice sounding the same that it did when she was in her 20s, to the point where her muscles were starting to get it too tense for her to be able to sing well. And it was really impacting her performances. She was no longer getting hired to sing because she was compensating to try to sound youthful.

Oh.

Once she realized that—

So she was sort of—

She was holding on her throat. Yes, exactly. Breathing higher and holding on to her throat, reducing her resonance. But our resonance chambers of our mouth, our throat, and our sinuses, those actually get bigger as we get older.

Oh.

So our resonance actually increases.

So you also talk about women whose voice gets lower.

Yes.

And that's, I guess, what one would expect.

Yes.

And you have a nice story about a woman who had sung alto and then sang with the bass.

Yes.

In her choir. She didn't quit the choir. She just came back and sang with the basses.

Yep, absolutely. She was not a professional singer by any means, but singing in worship was really a big part of her life. And she could not imagine not being in the choir. Yeah, it was really fantastic the day that she very nervously came to me and asked if she could maybe sing down lower in the choir. I was just the alto section leader, but she knew that I knew this stuff. And what a gift to her. She continues to sing in the choir, and it's been 4 years now since we interviewed her.

And you sort of gave the impression that she kind of basks in being able to sing with the men.

She sure does. She sure does. She's their token female.

And so let's— Let's talk a little bit, because you talk a lot about what you can do about it and what you should do. I guess what you should do about it and exercises and things like that. And I'm sure that women, especially singers who are listening, are going to want to know, how do we— what do we do?

What do we do? The first thing is awareness and understanding that every woman's journey through this is going to be different because our lives impact our voices so much. Because the way that we sleep, how how happy we are with our partners or the other people we live with. These tensions all show up in our voice along with our hormone changes.

So the—

as the estrogen decreases, it changes the flexibility and pliability of the voice, and the same with progesterone. And then testosterone is no longer in balance in the same way, so the voice might get a little bit richer. This can't be helped. One, one thing that a woman can do is deal with her hormones, whether that's through hormone therapy or other ways that she's reducing her stress or taking supplements in order to keep her hormones as much in balance as possible. And she'll know that through other body symptoms. That is probably the best way to maintain. But use it or lose it and embrace what you've got. Embrace the voice you've got. As we age, we hit more and more stories. And I don't know about you, but we get more and more confident in telling those stories. And so it's a time to shift from thinking that I'm going to be the I'm going to be the most fabulous singer in the room to thinking, I'm going to tell stories like I have never told them before. And my voice is trained. I haven't lost technique. I'm still awesome. And I'm going to put those stories out there in the best way possible.

And I guess if you feel as though you have something to say, that probably helps.

It's huge, actually. That helps the whole body line up for breath support and resonance, the passion that the story gets through. Heaven forbid that you would ever sound like Willie Nelson, but even if you did, you could make billions of dollars telling these great stories.

Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. What about breath? Because that's something you can work on.

Absolutely. One of the best sports that you can do to support singing is swimming, and yoga, if it involves breathwork, is also fantastic. As we age, our physical sensations that our nerves receive change. We receive less physical sensations. So don't stop learning. Keep learning how your body works today, rather than falling back on, well, this is how it felt 10 years ago. Okay, this is my body today. This is how my nerves are responding. This is how my breath is responding. And then optimize that. Optimize your breath that way. Breath of Fire and other amazing new breath techniques— no, not new breath techniques at all, but things that are newly being rediscovered and written about in our society, fantastic ways to train our breathing. There's a great book, Breath, by James Nestor, that really goes into great detail about this.

What— but what you're not talking about training, you're talking about dealing with your breathing. And that's what I was wondering. How about training your breathing?

Yeah.

Like, you know, taking deeper breaths or I don't know what you do.

Yeah, it's easy. Once the rib cage becomes less flexible, it's easy to let the breath get more and more shallow. So what I do personally is I measure my breath every couple days to see how slowly I can breathe in a minute. I'm shooting for 6 breaths a minute, 4 breaths a minute, that kind of calmness that comes with breathing that deeply. It also oxygenates the whole body, but it helps retain some of that flexibility in the rib cage. So those deep, slow breaths, and then the Breath of Fire, where you're breathing heavy and hard for a specific amount of time, like 3 minutes, also great for training. And there's nothing like climbing our mountains here.

That's what I was going to say. Yeah, altitude.

Yeah, altitude. Absolutely. We just go to sea level and we've got a huge advantage. But, but getting your breath going with hiking, fantastic.

Well, I know I live at 7,000 feet.

Yeah.

And, and there's a big— there's a difference between 7,000 and 6,000, which is Albuquerque.

You're just special just coming down to town.

That's so cool. Okay. Now, the other thing that occurs to me is if we start responding to this and start dealing with it, we're going to be listening to the people we deal with, the women we deal with, and we're going to be listening to how they're talking, and we're going to be analyzing how they're feeling, or if they're getting older, you know, if they're not doing their exercises, we're going to be sort of jumping on him.

I love that you went there. Yes, you can hear so much in a person's voice. You can— a voice can diagnose mood for sure. But also like, oh, you don't sound like you've been talking much lately.

Yeah, yeah, we can hear that. So should we just do that and then come out and say it? What do you think?

Oh my goodness, how do you— well, maybe you could just suggest that we have a nice long phone call tomorrow, you know?

Oh, okay.

Yeah, you could be more subtle about it.

Okay, I see.

Okay. Or, you know, my dear, do you remember you used to sing with that Sweet Adelines choir and you loved it so much? How about you go back to that? Or if you've been singing along with your Christmas album, I sure have, you know. Little statements to encourage somebody to keep using their voice. If I can say that singing is older and more core to being humans and mammals than speech is. Making pitch adjustment sounds, like I can go, mm, mm, ah, you know, without any words.

And people understand right away.

Anywhere in the world.

Yeah.

Anywhere in the world, they understand it. And so that's all tied to singing rather than speech.

Okay, that brings me to another question. I had been looking through my notes and I couldn't find it, but one of the things you say is that singing affects things in your brain, that it sort of turns things on or makes things happen. And that was a surprise to me too. I mean, that's crazy.

Sorry.

The singing center of the brain is separate from the speech center. How could that be?

Well, left-right hemisphere, different parts of the brain.

Okay.

There's a fantastic new branch of division of neuroscience for singing that's just exploding right now. And I'm sorry to say I'm not the expert in neuroscience of singing, that other people like Heidi Moss are really nailing this. But the essential lizard brain desire to sing and make noise combined with the higher function of making deliberate sound in harmony with other people, the companion the companionship of sharing these vocal sounds, it comes in, it goes out, the winding together when you're singing with other people is an emotional release like very few other things. So the whole brain gets to firing.

Oh, okay. But how does the brain separate them and put them in the speaking center or the singing center?

That's one of the challenges that we face with singers. Singers either come in with— students, that is— they either come in as a singer who has to learn how to tell a story, or a storyteller who has to learn how to sing. And so one of the great joys of a voice teacher is getting them to combine the skill of singing and speaking, which so many of the folk singers that we hear on this station, they have mastered that. I go all the way back to my first inspiration for that was Bing Crosby, a master of combining the singing and the speaking. But then you look at other singers who you don't understand any words they say. And it's like, "Oh, they haven't quite got that storytelling singing thing put together." Ah, okay.

Or a singer in another language, and you can tell when they're telling a good story even if you don't understand it.

And then there's people like us who do a lot of pitch modulation in our speaking voices, and there's whole languages that are based on pitch modulation. And so there are plenty of us who realize that if we talk higher, it's going to have a different impact than if we talk lower. That impact is different. There are a lot of people who don't realize that, but those of us who have a singing speaking voice. We put this into play all the time.

Huh. Well, it sounds as though you've got more. You've got another book. You've got step number 2.

I love all these questions. You're bringing out stuff I hadn't really talked about with anybody before.

So is there more?

Well, my passion right now is something I learned from this book, and that is that the stories that the women believed about themselves and menopause and aging the stories they believe impacted the results. So if they went into menopause—

mean the wrong things.

Yeah, stories that were negative, you know, you're worth nothing after menopause, you're a dried husk of a woman, older women are never seen, these kinds of stories. These women tended to walk into those stories by eating more, exercising less, spending more time sitting in their chairs, whereas women who believe the story that it's just getting better, I'm finally free of those evil hormones, you know, I can live my best life, let's make my hair purple. Those women tended to take better care of themselves and have excitement, adrenaline, and less stress in their lives, and that impacts their whole body.

Okay, so is that a new book, or is that a series of classes you're giving, or what is it?

I am giving classes on that now. I have so much to learn, and I learned so much from my students students. And so I'm giving classes now called Empower Your Voice. And they, they are small groups where people are looking at the stories that they didn't realize that they had about themselves. I also got to give a TED Talk about this this summer here in Albuquerque. And the stories that they've gotten from their parents or from culture telling them who they are, their religious organizations or political organizations, these stories are what make us who we are. But if the story is not working for you, you can look at it and decide if you're going to accept it the way it is, reframe it, or reject it altogether and find a new story.

I don't know how you would go through with how you would reject it altogether. I mean, yeah, you've got to build on what has come in the past.

That's, that's true. One of the—

I guess if it's a— if someone imposes something horrible you could reject that.

Absolutely.

Okay.

Yeah, you could, you could absolutely reject that. One super simple example is the story that, um, that when a couple gets married, that the woman takes the man's name. A lot of us grew up in that culture. I chose not to, and by choosing not to become the same name as the man that I married, I made a choice that impacted the rest of my life because I had a different name from my children. My mother-in-law was always confused about it, but nonetheless, that was true to my identity and That was a choice that I made, not to accept that I was Mrs. Somebody Somebody, but that I was still the same me I'd always been.

Oh, okay.

Yeah. Okay.

I think we should tell listeners if they want to find out more, obviously they can get the book.

Yeah.

But where else can they go and get information? And we should say again that the name of the book is Singing Through Change with the subtitle Women's Voices in Midlife, Menopause, and Beyond. And maybe we should give the names of the other authors again. The person— the woman I'm talking to is Nancy Bos, and why don't you give out the other names?

Joanne Bosman, she's in Wisconsin, and Kate Fraser-Neely, who lives in the D.C. area. This book has been an enjoyable read apparently for a lot of people, whether they're in singing or not. And one of the people who read it was a male ear, nose, and throat doctor who said that this book is essential reading for any man who has any women in his life.

Ah.

I think it's a good book. Very easy primer on menopause and aging. My website is nancybos.me, but perhaps more importantly for this topic, singingthroughchange.com has a bunch more resources, including some videos and podcasts.

Oh, okay. So it's the website for the book?

Yep, singingthroughchange.com is the website for the book, and my website is nancybos.me, and that's where I talk about the courses that I'm giving on empowering your voice.

Okay, that's what I was thinking. So if women want more Is it something that they can do virtually? Or—

Yeah, it's the next set of— well, I'll be giving some webinars here at the end of December and early January. The next set of courses starts up in January, and they are all on Zoom so that I can work with people all over the world.

And is it something that you can do after the fact, after you've given it?

I haven't done recordings yet.

Okay.

Because it's, you know, honestly, the group experience where these 4 or 5 or 6 people in the group are discovering things about themselves, that's really key, that community feeling.

Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Well, that tells us how we can get things and what to expect. So great.

Thank you so much.

Is there anything you want to add?

Yeah, I want to add that, that, you know, these voice changes are to be expected, but also to be grateful for. They're an exciting part of our journey through life as human beings. And no, you're not alone. We're all going through this together.

I guess The story that just keeps being in my head is the woman who likes so much moving with the bases. So that's the way we should think about it.

I love that.

Yeah. Okay. Well, thanks for being with us and speaking to the listeners on Women's Focus. And let me remind you that coming up in the second hour, we're going to hear from Diana Johnson from Madrid, about Madrid and from Madrid, New Mexico, and her her gallery that she started there, La Modista, and lots more coming up for you on Women's Focus. So thanks for being with us.