We recently connected with Crystal Barron and have shared our conversation below.

Crystal, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

I can’t remember my life without singing. From the time I was a very young child I would sit and play the piano and sing for hours at a time. There was never a question of if I would be a singer, it was just a matter of how it would manifest.

I actually started teaching to supplement my income out of college. My voice was very fragile due to ongoing vocal health issues, and I was limited as to how much performing I could do, and since I played piano, teaching seemed like a natural side gig. I was naturally very curious, and as I started to teach, I realized I didn’t really understand much about the voice, and my college degrees did very little to equip me to coach other people. At the same time I was committed to healing my own voice and the traditional path of vocal rest and voice therapy was not effective for me. So, I immersed myself in self-study, asking endless questions of my coaches, attending workshops, collecting certifications and amassing what I affectionally call my “Street PhD”. Over the years I’ve built a truly unique skill set encompassing the singer as a whole person, and achieving transformational results.

Through 1:1 sessions, workshops and self-paced online courses, I offer vocal coaching (online and in person), vocal health assessment and education, laryngeal massage, MDH Breathing Coordination and TRE® (Tension & Trauma Release Exercises).

I believe that you cannot separate your voice from your lived experience, so we zoom out and look at you as a whole person, identifying and rewiring not only physical imbalances, excessive tension, vocal technique and breathing mechanics, but we also dive deep into mindset challenges, self-limiting beliefs, and self-sabotaging behaviors. We embrace the messiness of the human experience, leading with kindness and self-compassion as we unlearn and deconstruct what isn’t serving, making way for powerful, intuitive coordinations that allow your voice ultimate freedom.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

We become whatever we believe about ourselves. I was in a long-term relationship with an incredibly gifted musician and they weren’t a big fan of my voice. We would occasionally work together and they would give me notes on my voice, and I always left these sessions feeling worse about my voice than when we started. I deeply respected this person and their opinions, so I listened very closely to what they told me. Over the years of working together, I developed some extremely self-limiting beliefs around my voice and what it could do, based on the feedback they provided me when we worked together. As the years went by, I felt less and less comfortable singing, and found myself trying to mask my natural resonances to be something completely unnatural to me. I was constantly second-guessing my artistic and technical choices, and it showed in my voice.

A few months after this relationship ended, I started to notice that I didn’t hear this person’s voice in my head all the time while I was singing. And my own natural instincts started to take over. I remember really vividly sitting at the piano one night singing Alicia Keys “If I Ain’t Got You,” which was a song I was ridiculed for wanting to sing because it didn’t “fit” my voice. That night, I gave myself permission to just enjoy what my voice wanted to do with the song, because this person’s opinion about my voice didn’t matter. And as I sang, I felt an artistic freedom in my voice that I had never before experienced. At that moment, I became profoundly aware that the only person’s opinion that really matters about my voice is my own. And committed to unlearning all the negative beliefs that had been instilled in me over the years by well meaning teachers, coaches and other musicians.

This is why I have such a strong belief that you cannot separate the person from their lived experience. You are what you believe. And sometimes we have to do some digging to find the beliefs that are holding us back.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I was diagnosed with my first vocal injury when I was 14. I struggled with my vocal health pretty much continuously from that time until my early 40s. I suffered from nodules, muscle tension dysphonia, acid reflux, allergies, and vocal scarring. As a senior in college, I was told by a world-famous laryngologist that I would never be a professional singer, because my voice was too fragile. I was told by my college mentor that I needed to come to terms with the fact that although I was a great musician, I wasn’t a great singer. There were 3 separate incidences of acute vocal injuries that led me to believe I might never sing again.

I was a good student, listening carefully to my vocal coaches and doing everything they told me, to the very best of my ability, but no matter what, vocal injuries just seemed to be a part of my life. In grad school, I wanted to do my thesis on vocal injuries and holistic approaches to vocal wellness, but unfortunately the university did not have a faculty member who could supervise, because there was little to no research on the subject at the time.

I always felt deep inside that I was meant to sing, and that if I just kept searching I could find the answer to why my voice was so fragile. Over the years I explored all sorts of holistic healing modalities and eventually found MDH Breathing Coordination, which was the catalyst to begin my own healing journey. It opened me up to the interconnectivity of the mind, body, breath and voice. This led me to explore and receive additional trainings and certifications in massage, laryngeal massage, TRE® (Tension & Trauma Release Exercises), Vocology (SVI), and coaching workshops and self study in polyvagal theory, meditation and Internal Family Systems.

The more I became aware of how everything is connected, and did the work to honor my whole self, the better my voice felt. It took many years to resolve, but today I can say that my voice is the strongest that it has ever been. It can do whatever I ask it to, without fear that I will hurt myself again.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.crystalvoicestudio.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crystalvoicestudio
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/crystalvoicestudio/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/crystal-barron/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CrystalVoiceStudio