For directors, voice and dialect coaches, Alexander teachers, medical specialists, speech pathologists, actors and singers and anyone interested in the performers voice in the theatre, this book provides an overview of basic voice and speech production, the Alexander technique and ways to integrate these principles into the rehearsal process and methods for working most effectively with voice and speech/Alexander coaches.

The Working Voice is an accessible, go-to resource to help readers get to know, take care of, and develop their voice. An essential guide for anyone whose voice acts as an integral part of their professional role, this highly practical yet informative book provides the necessary insights to achieve real results, drawing on the experience of an expert speech and language therapist, and an accomplished actor and voice and communication coach. Each chapter offers a wealth of information on a key element of voice, including posture, tension release, breathing, resonance, volume, intonation and effective communication, alongside advice and exercises to maintain your vocal health and empower your communication in the workplace. The book includes self-assessment checklists, questionnaires and thought-provoking prompts to help you understand your voice better, identify the challenges you face as a professional voice user. It also contains exercises to enhance your vocal ability. Expert advice on what to embrace and what to avoid ensures a safe and structured path towards vocal health, quality and authentic presence. This crucial introduction to voice in the professional workplace will benefit anyone who speaks as part of their job, including education, law, media, health, entertainment and corporate professionals, whether communicating in person, online or to a large audience.

The Performer's Voice, Second Edition presents a comprehensive approach to the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of voice disorders as well as up-to-date voice care and injury prevention information--specifically related to actors, singers, and other voice professionals. This second edition is completely updated with six new chapters and contributions from leading voice professionals. Written in an accessible, straightforward style, The Performer's Voice, Second Editionappeals to medical professionals, vocal coaches, and professional performers. This text not only serves as an effective resource for practitioners and clinicians who provide state-of-the-art treatment to voice professionals, but also provides professional vocalists and coaches with insight into what to look for when seeking treatment. The authors have dedicated their careers to voice disorders and prevention of voice injury as well as education and research to advance the science and art of voice care. The diversity of authors' backgrounds supports the importance of a multidisciplinary approach in the care of voice disorders.

Seven Seconds or Less is a book about applied intuition for mergers and partnerships, human resource management, new product development, and other important aspects of business. Companies and leaders have relied on intuition or “gut feeling” since the beginning of time. The proper use of intuition is a liberal art, not an occult one. This book demystifies the process of learning to use intuition on demand in the world of business. Through the use of intuitive techniques and qualified professionals, companies can have the benefit of hindsight now. They can find out in advance how actual or potential decisions play out in the future and adjust those decisions to avoid undesirable outcomes, while increasing desirable ones. The result is greater productivity, higher morale, lower costs, and better service! The techniques are lighthearted and fun, and yet the implications are significant. Decision making in seven seconds or less may signal a new era in business development.

In arguing for the crucial importance of song for poets in the long nineteenth century, Elizabeth Helsinger focuses on both the effects of song on lyric forms and the mythopoetics through which poets explored the affinities of poetry with song. Looking in particular at individual poets and poems, Helsinger puts extensive close readings into productive conversation with nineteenth-century German philosophic and British scientific aesthetics. While she considers poets long described as "musical"—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Emily Brontë, and Algernon Charles Swinburne—Helsinger also examines the more surprising importance of song for those poets who rethought poetry through the medium of visual art: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Christina Rossetti. In imitating song’s forms and sound textures through lyric’s rhythm, rhyme, and repetition, these poets were pursuing song’s "thought" in a double sense. They not only asked readers to think of particular kinds of song as musical sound in social performance (ballads, national airs, political songs, plainchant) but also invited readers to think like song: to listen to the sounds of a poem as it moves minds in a different way from philosophy or science. By attending to the formal practices of these poets, the music to which the poets were listening, and the stories and myths out of which each forged a poetics that aspired to the condition of music, Helsinger suggests new ways to think about the nature and form of the lyric in the nineteenth century.

Is it possible to work with sound in sociology rather than being about sound? Can there be a »sonic sociology«? Rémy Bocquillon reflects on the process-oriented character of sociology as an experimental science by including aesthetic practices of sounding and listening as constitutive for the making of sociological theory. Following new materialist and speculative philosophies, this study is thus a combination of sociological theory, philosophical thought and aesthetic practices, not understood as discrete fields of inquiry, but co-constituting each other. It also features an audio chapter, »feeding-back« the sonic experimentations at the core of the research in new and engaging ways.

The post–Civil Rights era was marked by an explosion of black political thought and aesthetics. Reflecting a shifting horizon of expectations around race relations, the unconventional sounds of free jazz coupled with experimental literary creation nuanced the push toward racial equality and enriched the possibilities for aesthetic innovation within the Black Arts Movement. In Imagine the Sound, Carter Mathes demonstrates how African American writers used sound to further artistic resistance within a rapidly transforming political and racial landscape. While many have noted the oral and musical qualities of African American poetry from the post–Civil Rights period, Mathes points out how the political implications of dissonance, vibration, and resonance produced in essays, short stories, and novels animated the ongoing struggle for equality. Situating literary works by Henry Dumas, Larry Neal, and Toni Cade Bambara in relation to the expansive ideas of sound proposed by free jazz musicians such as Marion Brown and Sun Ra, not only does this book illustrate how the presence of sound can be heard and read as political, but it recuperates critically neglected, yet important, writers and musicians. Ultimately, Mathes details how attempts to capture and render sound through the medium of writing enable writers to envision alternate realities and resistance outside of the linear frameworks offered by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. In precise and elegant prose, Mathes shows how in conceptualizing sound, African American writers opened up the political imaginations of their readers. By exploring this intellectual convergence of literary artistry, experimental music, and sound theory, Imagine the Sound reveals how taking up radically new forms of expression allows us to speak to the complexities of race and political resistance.