Nancy Bos explains how singing heals by engaging mind, body, and spirit. Vocal folds vibrate at about 250 cycles per second, stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system. Research on how hormones affect the female voice only began in the 1940s and remains incomplete.
And speaking of healing, talk to me for a moment about the connection between singing and healing.
The healing of singing happens in mind, body, and spirit, and that's all highly documentable and researched. Throughout time, singing has been the most important vehicle for communication for communities. For, uh, imagine prior to current modern times with technology, sitting around the fire or being in a worship service or in a communal service singing together. We still see pieces of that in our culture when sporting events have singing, when political events have singing. We realize the community building of singing, right? How it brings us together. And that's been true through all time. But also the idea that mothers, As long as we've been human, we have always sung to our babies and our children to comfort them, to give them ease, right? And sometimes life is so exciting that you just wanna burst out in song. And that's what all of Broadway is about, is bursting out in song because things are so exciting. So there's an eons-old need for humans to sing, and it helps us with our parasympathetic nervous system and how our body talks to itself. But if you believe that we are vibration, that our spirit is vibration, and energy, then oh my goodness, we have these two little vocal folds in our throat that right now are, in my voice, are fluctuating about 250 times per second that they're coming together. That is the essence of vibration. And if I were to close my eyes and just listen with every nerve in my body, I could feel the vibrations of my voice through my whole body. So there's that physical health healing side, right? So we've got the emotional connection, the community connection, the spiritual connection, the spirit and the body, all enhanced by singing.
The way you explain that connection, it's like a song. It's almost singing too. It's beautiful.
Well, absolutely. And there are languages on this planet that are based on pitch modulation. The most expressive voices, the people who, they go all the way up and they go all the way to the bottom of their voice. Those are the ones that get our attention, right? We want to hear that story. It's someone's energy going into our ears and into our brains.
Yes.
How exciting. What a way to share ourselves.
Would you like to add anything or read a passage in your book?
I would love to read a passage in the book.
Yes.
What I'm going to read for you is from the introduction, starting— if in the print version, it's on page 7. The relationship between hormones and the voice has been known since the 8th and 9th centuries, but only as it affected male vocal development. It wasn't until the 1940s that the effect of hormones on the female voice was considered in scholarly articles. There was little understanding about the evolving stages of the female voice through the entire lifespan, or how our hormones, emotional health, and physical health are interdependent. Each impacts the others. Relatively few studies have been done on singing and the female voice through midlife as compared to all other studies on men and women in their life changes. Now that we are beginning to understand and respect what women are experiencing, it is clear that the changes aren't all in our heads. There are real biological and physiological processes happening to our bodies minds, and voices, causing them to evolve. The more we know, the more we can help ourselves and each other. Yes.
So true. Thank you again, Nancy, for your work.
