Online Singing Lessons
I heard that our voices age too, and it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t been to karaoke in more than 20 years.
That made me wonder if the karaoke culture that is so common in Asia might actually have something to do with anti-aging too.
In Japan, going to karaoke is dramatically cheaper than it is in the U.S.
I never thought karaoke was particularly cheap in Hawaii, but Asian-style entertainment was easy to find there, so when my daughter was in her teens, I would sometimes go to karaoke with her and her friends.
But after moving to North Carolina, I assumed there probably wasn’t much of a karaoke culture here, and before I knew it, 18 years had passed.
When my daughter was still living in the U.S., she once told me she wanted to take vocal lessons, and I paid for them. But at the time, it never even occurred to me that I could take lessons myself.
This year, I decided to start taking online singing lessons, partly because I wanted to try something I had never done before, and partly because I thought using my voice might also be a form of anti-aging.
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There are different types of singing voices, broadly divided into head voice, mixed voice, and chest voice. Singing also uses the facial muscles, so it can feel a little like face yoga, and some lessons even include exercises for articulation and pronunciation.
It has made me realize that singing doesn’t just use the throat. It uses the face, the mind, and so much more.
I find it interesting how it feels as though all kinds of cells are waking up.
For now, taking lessons about twice a month feels like the right pace for me.
I can reach higher notes than I could before, and singing songs from different genres has also been fun because each one makes me think about different techniques and ways to use my voice. I’ve been enjoying it so much that these days, I sometimes even find myself practicing my singing while I’m taking a bath.
I create my illustrations to preserve the atmosphere of the original photos as much as possible. I also included my beloved cat Minsha on the sofa.
For the bath illustration, getting the bubbles in the reference photo to look just right was surprisingly tricky.
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