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11th Annual
Singing Voice Science Workshop
The originators of science-informed pedagogy
and the Official Workshop of VoceVista
Save the Dates
June 26 - 29, 2024
The 2024 Workshop will be hybrid in-person and online!
Teachers College Columbia University
New York, NY
Registration begins January 15, 2024
About Donald Gray Miller and VoceVista
A Brief Note from the Director
​As Director of The Singing Voice Science Workshop, I am often credited with the workshop's existence, but that honor actually belongs to voice teacher and researcher extraordinaire Donald Gray Miller, who passed away on April 22, 2020 and for whom the workshop is now named. How Don came to create VoceVista is a fascinating story, so several months before his death I fortuitously asked him to write a biographical sketch about his life and how VoceVista came into existence. Below is a window into the thinking, circumstances, and actions that have led to the development of real-time voice feedback for singers and singing teachers and to what we now refer to as science-informed singing voice pedagogy. A long list of testimonials to Don Miller follows the biography. Enjoy! ~RL
Voice Science and Early Experiments
In 1964, following four years of post-graduate study and minor professional gigs in Milano, Berlin, and Vienna, and with a growing family, I needed a "steady job." It was my good fortune to land a position as voice instructor (later Professor of Voice) at Syracuse University (SU), where I happily remained for nearly 25 years. Among the advantages I found in upstate New York was proximity to Tri-Cities Opera, a respected company in nearby Binghamton, where I sang leading roles from the standard repertory. An even greater stroke of luck was that SU had started an initiative modeled on the recently created Voice Foundation, using up-to-date technology for research in laryngology, speech language therapy, and at least potentially, singing instruction. During my earlier years in Europe, I had followed my interest in languages and began to delve more deeply into phonetics (production of speech sounds), which then led to interest in acoustics and voice science. At the SU lab, we singing teachers were invited to observe our vocal folds during singing by videostroboscopy, an unusual opportunity in those days.
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In connection with the Voice Foundation initiative at SU, singing teacher Jo Estill had arrived as a graduate student. It was her task to pursue the relationship between voice science and singing, an interest she and I shared. Jo and speech scientist Ray Colton offered a one-week summer workshop that offered an introduction to those interested in the topic, with participants largely from outside of the university. Jo and I had stimulating discussions, and I gradually found my way to the early Voice Foundation symposia in New York City.
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In those same years of the late 1970s, I was engaged as the bass soloist for an oratorio performance at Calvin College in Grand Rapids and met pedagogue Richard Miller of Oberlin Conservatory, who was the tenor soloist. I invited Miller to give a workshop at SU and as we became friends, I learned about his extended work with Harm Schutte, an otolaryngologist and voice physiology researcher in Groningen, The Netherlands. Coincidentally, Groningen was also where esteemed voice pedagogue William Vennard had worked with voice scientist Janwillem van den Berg, author of the myoelastic-aerodynamic theory of voice production. It was from his time with van den Berg that Vennard found the basis for his highly regarded book Singing: The Mechanism and the Technic. Thus in 1982, I resolved to visit Prof. van den Berg, who then introduced me to Schutte. Both men then arranged for me to spend the spring semester of 1984 in Groningen. And that is how I came to spend my first sabbatical with Dr. Schutte, an otolaryngologist. I saw the sabbatical as a unique opportunity to learn as much as possible about voice science with the essential help of a laryngologist who was licensed to perform invasive procedures.
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One such procedure that Harm wanted to try entailed passing a rather rigid catheter (originally intended for the urinary tract!) through the posterior commissure of the glottis, allowing direct measurement of the rapidly varying sub- and supra-glottic pressures. A few other Dutch colleagues had used that experimental protocol for speech research, but ours would be the first systematic application to the singing voice. (It also turned out to be the last to date, as far as I know.)
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To be honest, I was not looking forward to swallowing the catheter and spent as much time as possible in avoidance, preferring to instead learn about other aspects of invasive procedures (i.e., video laryngoscopy) as well as about Schutte's own dissertation work on subglottic pressures. Schutte had successfully measured average subglottic pressure with an esophageal balloon introduced nasally and swallowed into the esophagus, a relatively uncomplicated affair that sounds far worse than it is. When we did finally get around to pressure measurements with the hard catheter through the posterior commissure of the glottis, the initial result was a lot of coughing by me, with only short stretches of sustained pitch. I feared that the experiment had failed, but then saw the 'beautiful' display of oscillating pressures above and below the glottis in the few sustained moments of successful phonation. When examined together with the electroglottographic signal (EGG), which indicates the instants of glottal closing and opening, the results were quite satisfying. To avoid coughing spasms in future experiments, we discovered that 15 minutes of rest after catheter insertion was a terrific help. I then used a sort of [v] sound before the vowel, which helped further to initiate a smooth vibration of the vocal folds that would then continue into the sustained vowel. The procedure never became easy for me, but we returned to it for four more extended sessions, and were even able to collect data from other available professional and amateur singers.
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The results of these early experiments were quite revealing. The pressure data, together with the EGG data, showed that at glottal closing supraglottic pressure was minimal while subglottic pressure was maximal; thus, the basic acoustic impulse was a negative one, producing a wave of rarefaction, not compression. This result contradicted common scientific thought at the time. At that point in voice science history, the intuitive understanding of voice production assumed that subglottic pressure increased in the closed phase of the glottis causing the vocal folds to burst open (the open phase), resulting in the production of a train of pressure waves at glottal opening that generated the quasi-periodic fundamental frequency. It was assumed that the acoustic pressure wave began with a compression, or positive impulse that supplied the acoustic energy of voicing. Sadly, van den Berg was not supportive of our conclusions and died two years later without resolving the question.
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But it turns out that we were not quite finished with the rigid laryngeal catheter. Schutte had been well acquainted with an excellent professional soprano who was willing to try our experiment, reasoning that if I could manage it, so could she. It seemed logical that glottal adduction would be inherently reduced in the 'falsetto' register typical of classical female singing compared to the operatic male voice in which the high range is produced in a type of modified 'chest' register. Because of this, the catheter in the posterior commissure should be less of an obstacle during phonation. This proved to be true and the catheter presented no great difficulty for her throughout the entire singing voice range. The particularly surprising finding from her data was this: the peak-to-peak variation measured in supraglottic pressure included a brief phase where it momentarily exceeded the subglottic pressure, suggesting that airflow through the glottis was momentarily reversed. This totally unexpected finding gave me an idea.
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I had made my debut as a presenter a year earlier at the Voice Foundation Symposium in June of 1984, reporting on suggestive findings from our experiments with van den Berg. The following year, Gunnar Fant, a giant in the field of voice science research, announced a conference to be held on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. Invited to participate were top international voice scientists and clinicians, including Ingo Titze and Johan Sundberg, whom I admired from the Voice Foundation Symposia as well as from their published research. Additionally, noted speech scientist Martin Rothenberg, whom I had come to know as a colleague at SU, and Harm Schutte were included. Those invited were expected to give presentations. I had the idea that our sub- and supra-glottic pressure measurements might be worthy of this group, and I proposed to write a paper that Harm would deliver. Though the organizers were somewhat reluctant to accept the proposal, the paper was well received, with special mention by Fant, and subsequently published. Already in my fifties, I had the feeling of having belatedly crashed a party of the "big boys."
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Harm Schutte and I continued productive investigations of the singing voice for the next 25 years, contributing annually at the Voice Foundation Symposia, as well as publishing a series of articles in refereed journals. In 1987 I resigned my professorship at SU and moved to Groningen to devote myself full-time to scientific research. In particular, I was deeply interested in investigating how modern technology might be employed to inform practical studio instruction of the singing voice.
In the 1990s the computer had entered into the considerations of the Groningen Voice Research Lab, but I gave it little attention. In fact, born as I was in 1933, I was reasonably certain that I was beyond the age where I would ever get involved with computers. But thanks to Harm Schutte, who patiently guided me through the learning process, I soon changed my mind. Personal computers had evolved about then to the point where they could do spectrum analysis in 'real time,' giving immediate evidence of the effects of formant tuning on the relative strength of the harmonics of the voice source. (Formants are the variable dominant resonance frequencies of the vocal tract that produce the several vowel sounds.) The Groningen University Hospital provided Harm with the resources to have a computer program created -- in MS-DOS -- that would show and record the microphone signal, spectrum analysis, and electroglottograph (EGG) signal simultaneously.
Anxious to present this new technological tool to singing teachers, I was initially surprised that our presentations at the Voice Foundation symposia appeared to arouse little interest among the participants. For example, we identified "formant tuning" as a key practical measure by which skilled singers, through adjustments of the resonances of the vocal tract, successfully negotiated the challenges of "passaggio" in producing climactic operatic high notes. The basic problem comes from the fact that as the spacing between the harmonics rises with increasing fundamental frequency, the technology for automatically identifying the formant frequencies gradually fails. When we showed, however, that the formant frequencies can nonetheless be reliably, if not precisely, identified by the skillful use of vocal fry, that news was received with indifference. This response was perhaps to be expected, since the expertise of the singing teacher is manifest in hearing the desired result, rather than seeing a visual display of harmonics of the voice source. Nonetheless, I resolved to continue efforts in this line of research, which showed great promise in my own practical teaching. And though there was no enthusiastic stampede from a large group of singing teachers, there was enthusiastic, deep interest from a few.
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Jim Doing, a young American tenor living in The Netherlands in 1996 to whom I gave occasional singing lessons, landed a position teaching singing at the University of Missouri. Jim was the first professional singer to make deliberate use of visual formant tuning feedback in our lessons together. When asked about his "research interests", he mentioned our work on formant tuning and the university responded by offering to fund such research. Part of the funds were used to send me, along with some bulky apparatus, to work with Jim and his students for what turned out to be a successful few weeks. I recall that Jim had one tenor student in particular with a remarkable voice who beautifully demonstrated the key "passaggio" maneuver enabled by informed formant tuning.
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It also happened that John Stuart, a tenor friend with a notable operatic career who had settled at Washington University in St. Louis, was on the planning committee for the upcoming biennial national conference of the national Association of Teachers (NATS). John was familiar with my work and he proposed to give it a place on the program. So, Jim Doing, his star student, and I drove from Kansas City, Missouri to St. Louis, all the while rehearsing our afternoon presentation in the car. The response was positive. Well-known baritone Ron Hedlund declared that he wanted VoceVista for the University of Illinois (UIUC), and Dan Ihasz, a young singer teaching at SUNY Fredonia, expressed his enthusiasm and began a years-long process of mastering its application to studio teaching and to his own singing technique. Dan continues to use VoceVista with his Fredonia voice and pedagogy students, some of whom are now building successful careers of their own.
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There was also Garyth Nair, a choral conductor, singing teacher, and pedagogical researcher at Drew University in Madison, NJ, who was an early user of the internet and a promotor of new technology. I had met Garyth in 1997 at the Voice Foundation Symposium, where I presented the original VoceVista. After that original meeting, we decided to work together to make the software more user-friendly for singing teachers. A first step was to make it compatible with Microsoft Windows, which was then a new operating system. Garyth had earlier been in contact with the American engineer Richard Horne, who had put a free spectrum analysis program on the internet. A simple email inquiry was enough to get Horne to agree to meet to discuss VoceVista. But there was to be an additional twist. In addition to spectral analysis, I was hoping to add electroglottographic capability (from Martin Rothenberg's Glottal Enterprises) to the software program. And so it was Richard Horne who would subsequently integrate both the acoustic and EGG signals into the original Windows version of VoceVista.
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But still a serious impediment to the wider use of the VoceVista system remained in the high price of the EGG, which had been designed and available at the time for medical use only. After some inquiries, Schutte was able to find a resourceful Dutch engineer, Gerrie Goeree, who recreated and personally manufactured a unique VoceVista EGG that resulted in excellent waveform signals, all for a price that singers and singing teachers would be able to afford.
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The following decade brought improvements in our software, principally Richard Horne's integration of his own spectrogram software into VoceVista. This new technology made it possible to view a singer’s resonance adjustments in real-time, thus allowing the signals to be projected for an audience to see the changes as the singer made them. It was then in June of 2007 that we invited pedagogue Scott McCoy, author of Your Voice, an Inside View, to conduct the first-ever "wired master class" for some students of Dan Ihasz in Fredonia. The class was a great success and Scott began to use the program on his own later that summer.
Knowing that Scott had previously self-published Your Voice, which provides a basic acoustic and physiological background for vocal pedagogy, I began to envision VoceVista as an extension and practical realization of the voice science contained in his book. Recently chosen as the incoming president of NATS, Scott would have influence over the program content for the 2008 biennial conference in Nashville, so he made the bold decision to begin the program with a wired master class using VoceVista. This development allowed me to see an important opportunity, if not an obligation, to write a book that could serve as an extended manual for the use of VoceVista and the EGG in time to be available at the NATS conference. I asked Scott if he would edit and publish it, and without hesitation he agreed. Thus, I began work on a draft of Resonance in Singing.
The actual writing of Resonance in Singing proceeded smoothly as I had already covered most of the content in a series of published articles that resulted in my dissertation for the Ph.D. in Medical Sciences (University of Groningen in 2000) entitled Registers in Singing: Empirical and Systematic Studies in the Theory of the Singing Voice. Scott turned out to be a helpful and prompt editor, even while fulfilling his full-time faculty position at Westminster Choir College and managing the presidency of NATS. Though my writing was momentarily interrupted by an emergency appendectomy in the spring of 2008, the book was ready in time for the conference in Nashville, where the wired master class with VoceVista would be the opening plenary item on the agenda.
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I think it safe to say that few in the audience fully understood what was presented in that abbreviated master class, but the connection of pedagogy with voice science was obvious. A small group of interested singing teachers -- we nicknamed ourselves "Fryers" from the use of vocal fry to locate the formants -- continued to exchange information and share insights, promoting our biennial workshops on the Physiology and Acoustics of Singing (PAS) in San Antonio, Stockholm, and Las Vegas (after previous workshops in Groningen and Denver).
The basic acoustic analysis software with the addition of EGG became known as VoceVista Pro, and together with the book Resonance in Singing, continues to be an important tool for singing teachers throughout the world. It is the basis for a doctoral dissertation, soon to be published, by Stephen Robertson, head of Voice Studies at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. It covers his use of the program in instructing students, as well as analyzed data from successful professionals on the international opera circuit.
Though gaining in popularity in the voice pedagogy world, VoceVista was about to undergo yet another period of change. Bodo Maass, who had created the software program Overtone Analyzer, offered to update and improve the VoceVista software, adding a video signal to the basic audio and EGG signals, along with other technological advances. We are at present (January 2020) in the homestretch towards the finished product, and are additionally in the process of a major edit for the second edition of Resonance in Singing to match the updates to VoceVista Video Pro.
The Origins of VoceVista
Background of the Author
The idea of connecting studio voice instruction with advances in voice science has an obvious logic, but without historical precedent, that logic could easily have remained untapped. Connecting the dots might only happen because individuals would emerge who were positioned to see and act on them. My own role in bringing vocal science and pedagogy together likely emerges from my willingness to pursue a wide range of interests and study, and to seize the opportunities for learning that came my way. And of course, to experience music as a passionate through line in my life.
Born in 1933 in the depths of the Great Depression, I grew up in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, a small residential community of 2,500 with a minimal area for commerce around the railroad station, where the adult men typically left for work in New York City five days a week. The advantages of living there included fresh air, a green and pleasantly spacious landscape, and a quality public school system from which a college education would be the logical next step. My parents, born in the first decade of the twentieth century, had not had the advantages of higher education, but luckily saw its value and encouraged further studies.
I was considered "smart in math," and it was assumed that I would most likely pursue a degree in engineering. Though sports and girls occupied a preeminent place in my high school mind, serious books also interested me, and I maintained high grades in school. My parents -- nominal Protestants -- had no strong interest in religion, but I had learned to take belief, or at least ethical behavior, seriously. I was encouraged in this by a local pastor, with whom I would meet and enjoy deep, philosophical discussions. These long talks awakened a realization that people might ultimately be more interesting, or even compelling, than either math or science.
But then circumstance and history conspired to present unforeseen opportunities.
Following the return of WWII veterans to the university system, elite Ivy League schools began to show greater interest in graduates of public high schools. Though my family was not part of the country-club set, I earned my spending money as a golf caddy, working in a game I loved. One day, an unanticipated consequence came from caddying a round of golf for a Yale alumnus who put me in touch with an acquaintance who happened to be a Yale Admissions Officer. Invited to visit Yale, where no graduate of Mountain Lakes High School had previously attended, I made plans for a weekend trip to New Haven. I stayed in a spare room at one of Yale's colleges and my host arranged for a current Yale student to take me to two Saturday morning classes: a chemistry class presented with wit, and a philosophy class focused on hedonism. This was a new word to me, though its meaning would soon become clear from the class discussion. I returned to my host that afternoon having decided that I wanted to "go to Yale." When it came time to apply for admission, it turned out I had little to fear, as I had been accepted early by the Navy Reserve Officers Training Program (ROTC), which would cover the entire cost of study at Yale, relatively modest in those days, but still out of reach for a typical, middle-class family.
As an avid high school choral singer, the possibility of singing in the famous Yale Glee Club held enormous attraction. First-year students were eligible for the Freshman Glee Club, selected from auditions by its conductor, who also assigned one's appropriate voice section. Though he classified me as a second tenor, which pleased my lyric aspirations, to my chagrin I was not selected as a glee club member. My graduate advisor (all freshmen were assigned to graduate students, who lived in our dormitories) explained that I might later succeed by taking voice lessons, an idea that that initially struck me as strange. In the end, rejection from the Freshman Glee Club was a stroke of good luck as it made me instead available for the Chapel Choir, a more select group in which my strong music reading skills were highly prized for its more challenging music. My acceptance might also have been aided by the fact that I was likely to have attended Sunday worship services anyway.
Partly because of scheduling limitations connected to the naval officer's training, I felt that my own curriculum for the first semester was somewhat intellectually limited. Thus I was on the lookout for cultural challenges beyond regular class time. One Sunday evening I attended a wide-ranging philosophy lecture that stirred my imagination. I noted that the professor was offering a course in the philosophy of religion for the following semester, so I resolved then and there to add it to the five courses of my normal study load. The course was structured as two weekly lectures by the professor and a single "recitation," covering discussion and written assignments. I was disappointed to learn that I was not assigned to the professor's section, but instead to one led by a graduate student of theology, William May. I loved the course and the readings, but the real discovery for me was a budding friendship with Bill, my elder by six years, who was also a graduate advisor living not far from my dormitory. With Bill, I had a chance to talk regularly and informally about my future studies.
Among the readings for the course was the Grand Inquisitor chapter from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. By the time the course ended, I had a plan for the remainder of my undergraduate education: I would attempt to get into the "Scholars of the House" program and write about philosophical issues that had absorbed my thoughts during the philosophy of religion course. The eventual success of that plan left me at age 22 with the intention to commence graduate study in academic theology. With both Fulbright and Danforth Scholarships in hand, I would be able to cover expenses for further study abroad as well as for an eventual Ph.D., which I had planned for the Yale Divinity School. The Fulbright money got me to Hamburg, Germany, where I found intellectual stimulation in my studies with eminent theologians Helmut Thielicke and Paul Tillich, and also experienced the challenge of making sense of my life in a new and foreign language. But as it surprisingly turned out, the more serious development for my future occurred in singing lessons.
The presence in Hamburg of a Hochschule fur Musik, together with the modest cost of the lessons in postwar Germany, allowed me to additionally study with the tenor concert-singer Wilhelm Koberg, a lively teacher and a fine musician. My weekly lessons were inspired by efforts to perform arias from the Passions of Bach, as well as songs of Schubert, Hugo Wolf, and others. I listened carefully, intently, and repeatedly to a recording of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert’s Winterreise, and I had the feeling that I could understand and imitate what that singer did, and perhaps even replicate it. In any case, my efforts made me bold enough to appear in a public recital well received in the Hamburg newspapers. In 1956, I decided to return to Yale not for theological studies, but as a voice major in the School of Music.
The Yale School of Music was better known and respected for academic studies of music theory and history than performance, so we were only about a half-dozen voice majors at the time. By 1960, I had finished my studies for a master's degree, which at the time was considered a terminal degree. My singing teacher, Benjamin Deloache, a conventional concert singer of that era, supported my own inclination to concentrate on the concert-singer repertory. But I had won the Ditson Award, which offered financial support for further musical studies. Reasoning that as a professional singer I would indeed eventually encounter operatic roles, I headed for Italy with my wife and young daughter after finding an operatic baritone teacher, Leo Piccioli, in Milano. Besides the lessons, my activities there included an inauspicious public opera appearance as the postman in Lee Hoiby's The Scarf. (The reviewer suggested that I would make a "magnifico postman.") After less than a year, I came to the conclusion that I was better suited for the singing of German lieder. Locating the teacher of baritone Hermann Prey, Harry Gottschalk, I moved to Berlin in August of 1961, the same month that the East German government divided the city with the infamous Wall.
The next 2 ½ years were divided between Berlin, where I continued singing lessons with Gottschalk, and Vienna, where I gained experience (and better reviews) in roles with the Wiener Kammeroper, as well as a debut recital of lieder. But with financial resources running out, I resolved to return to the U.S. and seek a university position. Howard Boatwright, who had taught a “physics of music” course I took at Yale, had recently been named the new dean of the School of Music at Syracuse University and he had an unexpected vacancy for a singing instructor. The position was offered to me, so I gladly accepted and launched my academic teaching career.
The Singing Voice Science Workshop
The basic elements of VoceVista, which uses spectral analysis and EGG waveforms to supply useful, real-time, factual information on the activities of studio voice teaching, has attracted and continues to attract interested users. However, the practical challenges of learning one's way in the use of the technology, as well as acquiring essential knowledge of formants and contact quotients in the specialized world of professional singing, present significant learning curves for newcomers. Unfortunately, only a small number of those attracted by the idea of VoceVista reach a level of expertise where it becomes fully useful. The task is made even more challenging by the fact that most new users have no immediate like-minded colleagues with whom to share insights. What we then lacked was an opportunity for interested individuals to learn from and connect with experienced, fluent users of the program (the Fryers). We needed a way to somehow share the system and its capabilities but wanted to avoid the typical system of selling limited, and often inadequate, training for certification in its use.
The need was answered by a combination of circumstances. Richard Lissemore, a successful private singing teacher in the highly competitive market of New York City, made a voice pedagogy presentation (Falsetto Integration into Male Chest Voice) at one of the annual symposia of the Voice Foundation in Philadelphia. Admiring his pedagogical insights, I followed up with an extended visit to him in New York, explaining how VoceVista enabled me to find the patterns employed by one of his outstanding female pupils. We continued to stay in regular contact and Richard became an avid student of VoceVista, so much so that he made an extended trip to Groningen for the sole purpose of working with me for a week in the summer of 2013. By then, Richard had just turned 50 and made the daring decision to undertake a high-level speech science Ph.D. program in a respected articulatory phonetics laboratory at the CUNY Graduate Center. Now, more than six years later and in the final stage of his dissertation, Richard has arrived at very useful articulatory insights into the female secondo passaggio (circa F5 at the top of the treble staff). Through this intensive period of study, he has also become an experienced, popular teacher of speech and hearing science, as well as a pioneer in applying the technology of ultrasound to tongue articulations in the singing voice. Richard is also diligently working at application of ultrasound to the VoceVista Video Pro system.
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Richard's embrace of VoceVista and his further doctoral studies came together with another development in the New York metropolitan area. Montclair State University had the tenor and singing teacher Steven Oosting on faculty. Having approached me at one of pedagogue Paul Kiesgen's well-known summer workshops at Indiana University a decade ago, Steve was interested in exploring the potential value of VoceVista to his teaching at MSU. After some initial conversations, Steve and I decided to invite Richard to Steve’s home for a conversation about potentially putting some sort of VoceVista workshop together. We knew Richard had the organizational and administrative ability to pull it off, Steve had MSU, and I had VoceVista. And so, in 2014, we held the first-ever VoceVista Workshop/Conference, which the next year became The Singing Voice Science Workshop (SVSW). Richard, now the workshop’s director, possesses remarkable administrative skills that have allowed the workshop to flourish for six consecutive years with participants from throughout the world. Dear friend Steve Oosting has since retired from full-time teaching, but the workshop continues with MSU’s unwavering support and enthusiasm, especially from Voice Department Chair Dr. Lori McCann. SVSW Associate Directors Kelley Hijleh, a topnotch fryer and singing teacher at MSU, and Ereni Sevasti, the face of the next generation of fryers, assist Richard in making this vitally important workshop available for all interested in learning about science-informed voice pedagogy and VoceVista Video Pro. (Editor's note: as of November 2021, SVSW is affiliated with Teachers College Columbia University.)
In a most recent twist, Richard made the executive decision to honor me by officially re-naming the workshop, Donald Gray Miller’s Singing Voice Science Workshop. I must admit to feeling taken aback by the announcement but am deeply grateful for and humbled by the recognition. I consider myself fortunate to continue to serve as a sort of éminence grise who can participate in the sharing of insights that VoceVista, together with the ever-advancing technology, can provide for future generations of singing teachers and pedagogues.
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Donald Gray Miller
January 2020
Groningen, the Netherlands
Testimonials About Dr. Miller
If you would like to add a testimonial, please email Richard Lissemore at rlissemore@singingvoicescience.com.
"Donald Miller’s contributions to the voice world were extraordinary. He started his career as an operatic singer and voice teacher. After graduating from Yale, he enjoyed a successful performance career in the United States and Europe before dedicating himself to education at Syracuse University School of Music. As a professor, his innate curiosity led to a fascination with voice science and singing. Following his exposure to research with Harm Schutte in 1984, Don became so passionate about research that he moved to Groningen and devoted the rest of his life to research on the acoustics and physiology of singing. His publications have been definitive, particularly his observations on registers in singing. His development of the VoceVista software program in 1996 brought computer analysis to the singing studio long before most other educators or scientists had conceived of this interrelationship. His imagination, scholarly dedication, and good humor influenced the field of voice enormously. He will be missed but not forgotten."
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Robert T. Sataloff, M.D., D.M.A., F.A.C.S.
Professor and Chairman, Department of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery
Senior Associate Dean for Clinical Academic Specialties
Drexel University College of Medicine
Conductor, Thomas Jefferson University Choir
Adjunct Professor, Department of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery
Sidney Kimmel Medical College
Thomas Jefferson University
Director of Otolaryngology and Communication Sciences Research
Lankenau Institute for Medical Research
"It was in the early spring of 1983 that my teacher and supervisor Dr. Janwillem van den Berg called me if I could receive a visitor to show my voice lab in the ENT clinic. I had defended my dissertation in 1980 and was working on plans to continue my physiological research of the voice with a more detailed research in the time domain. My thesis was about average aerodynamic values ​​in phonation, which also involved a number of professional singers, including James Stark and Richard Miller.
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You understand, it was Don Miller who visited van den Berg like other visitors from abroad. He was advised by Richard Miller who visited Groningen in the 1970s.
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Don came to the Netherlands, as he described it himself on the web site of VoceVista.com, looking for someone who could measure well and reliably. Van den Berg sent Don to me and there I met Don, a tall, friendly man with an impressive voice. Don wanted to know what back pressure was and I saw possibilities. Later Don came back to work out further plans and at that stage we came up with a plan to do simultaneous pressure measurements below and above the vocal folds. We felt a responsibility to attempt to do this with an active singer, and though we hesitated, curiosity overcame us. Required equipment was made suitable in van den Berg's lab and we were loaned the double pressure transducer.
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At that time, there were no personal computers. We could borrow a four-channel instrumentation recorder. Two for both pressures, one channel for the audio and the fourth for electroglottography (EGG). I had already known and played with that in the 1960s. And you could not leave the fourth channel unused, is it.? That was a lucky shot. By fast recording on tape and writing out at maximum speed on fast-moving paper on the ink writer, we obtained a high time resolution.
In 1986, I visited Don in Syracuse to work for a few weeks with Martin Rothenberg, with whom Don also worked. By then we had already done our first experiments. We learned a lot and also enough from those first experimental measurements with the directly measured pressures to present our initial results at The Voice Foundation in 1985, then still in New York.
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It was published in the transcripts but got too little attention. I think it is time for a reprint in the Journal of Voice, honoring Don Miller.
It was very time consuming to study all the curves of piles of sheets of paper, but due to a good catalogue and administration it was possible to find and work out the interesting places. The necessary spectra were written by Don one by one on an X-Y writer from a Spectrum Analyzer. Don worked on it carefully and with great dedication. This is how our mutual series of presentations and publications came to be.
At the beginning of 1990, we got a personal computer and I was able to convince Don that it was possible to use the computer for recording and working out from the slowly played tapes of the recorder. But it was looking for the right software to maintain the simultaneity of pressures and EGG. We were pleased with a visit from Garyth Nair who tipped us off about a highly skilled American software designer, Richard Horne, who developed our concept into what would become VoceVista.
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The EGG signals, we became convinced, were a crucial factor in evaluating the acoustic waveforms. The closing of the glottis could thus be determined precisely, by which we then experimentally substantiated the excitation moment. In fact, Don's meticulous, hours-long manual work that found its way into our publications in the 1980s and 90s is primarily, but not exclusively, the scientific basis for VoceVista.
After 2000, it had become a mission for Don to further develop, supplement, and refine VoceVista with the help Dick Horne. Don wanted to propagate his work to convince vocal educators of the usefulness of research in teaching practice. And in this research, electroglottography was indispensable. Through contacts in the Ham Radio Group around Groningen, Dutch engineer Gerrie Goeree saw an opportunitt to manufacture an EGG for combination with VoceVista, all at an affordable price for singers. Thus, Egg for Singers was born.
After defending his thesis in 2000, Don shifted his interest from publishing to giving conference presentations and instructional courses. Researcher Don became a missionary for VoceVista and electroglottography. He spent a lot of time traveling the world, spreading the word about VoceVista, and instructing interested parties on how to use the program as an important element in the singing voice studio. His 2006 book, Resonance in Singing, contains an a wealth of additional ideas from his ongoing work with the practical application of VoceVista to studio teaching. At the time of his death, he was working on a revised, second edition. All the while Don lived in Roden, where Dagmar lovingly cared for him until the last day in the hospital. We should have great respect for her sacrifices in recent years. I was also with Don in the last hour of his life, though he was no longer able to speak. Don's VoceVista is not just a voice made visible device, not a visualization of phenomena in professional singing. It is an optimally usable tool, which requires knowledge to obtain valid data. It is also not a data machine that gives numbers or nice pictures. It is an instrument together with electroglottography to understand the phenomena when singing, each singer individually. What does the singer do, that can be captured with VoceVista and electroglottography if you know what questions you want answered. VoceVista alone, without electroglottography, is not enough and electroglottography in and of itself is also not sufficient. A great strength of VoceVista, as Don saw it, was the use of an affordable electroglottography for singers and singing teachers.
That is the fundamental lesson that Don wanted to teach us for years. Take that chance Fryers and keep going!"
Harm K. Schutte, MD, Ph.D.
Voice Research Lab
University of Groningen
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"I am writing from my home in New Zealand to express my shock and sadness at the death of Donald Gray Miller. My sympathy to his family and the respect and gratitude for his work is heartfelt. As a studio and university voice teacher I acknowledge a debt of gratitude to my American colleagues, of whom Donald Gray Miller was an eminent member, for the dimension of voice science as an immeasurable enrichment to my work."
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Flora Edwards ONZM
Inaugural President and Life member of the New Zealand Association of Teachers of Singing
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"The passing away of Don Miller is a very sad news for me. For almost a decade, Don has been my closest collaborator in the search of a scientifically sound theory and practical applications of human voice production. Through years of intensive study with the electroglottography, Don was convinced that human voice production is a transient process, starting with each closure of glottis, to emit a decaying wave for each pitch period. Based on that idea, Don demonstrated the importance of a large closed quotient in the production of good voice. Don also introduced me to Robert Sataloff and Donald Baken who share the same idea of a transient theory of human voiced production. Partly due to the encouragement of Don, I authored a monograph Elements of Human Voice. Don volunteered to be the copy editor (World Scientific Publishing Co. could not find a professionally qualified copy editor). I was suggesting to put his name in the Preface as the editor, but Don politely declined it. Without Don's meticulous reviewing, there would be a lot of errors and language defects!
Also, Don was my coauthor of a recent paper published in Journal of Voice outlining a transient theory of human voice production, which both of us consider to be the only correct theory of human voice production. The passing away of Don is a huge loss for me.
I believe that some time in the future, it would be possible to get some funding to advance our joint study of human voice production with applications.
Don and I share some common interests besides scientific research. As a professional physicist, I was an amatour pianist, chorus conductor, and composer in my entire life. We were trying to make some music together, but unfortunately it did not become a reality.
Julian Chengjun Chen
Adjunct Senior Research Scientist and Adjunct Professor
Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics
Columbia University
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"Only very recently I learned that Donald has been a formidable singer of German Lieder in his earlier years. He also was an excellent writer, with his prose always possessing a high poetic quality. He took the effort of choosing his words with much care and tenderness. During our friendship I received so many beautiful notes from him in response to happy as well as sad events taking place in my life. These short essays are now the more precious to me.
His lecturing skills could not compete with his writing and singing. During his talks there often was a moment when communication from Don suddenly ceased and the audience was left alone in bewilderment of what was going to happen next…..
His mind was always so full of thoughts and ideas, that perhaps the processing of all this information, and at the same time having to decide how to phrase these thoughts most eloquently, simply required too much time to keep up with the tempo one needs for fluent speech.
Well, people instantly forgave him. Even at times when little practical ‘misfits’ added to the confusion. As Peter Pabon formulated: 'I liked Don and was always happy to assist him when something went wrong. He often lost or had forgotten to bring something, or there was a loose cable or a connection. He had an endearing form of awkwardness along with a kind of naive authenticity that others could only envy.'
And then, his sense of humor I would like to recall here. In September 2019, I visited Don for the last time and we were totally absorbed, as usual, examining Voce Vista signals into the late evening. Since Dagmar happened to be away for several days, Don invited me to stay overnight. Early the next morning, just as I was coming down the staircase with my luggage and Don was opening the front door to let his nurse in the house, he realized what how the situation appeared to his nurse and whispered with a side glance, 'Ah, caught red hot in the act!' There was Don at the age of 86, fragile of health but still with twinkling eyes and a wonderful sense of humor.
In addition to his love for voice science and the profound contributions he has made to the field, his great generosity in words of encouragement, consolation and utter friendliness will stay with me for the rest of my life."
Hanny van Lankeren
The Netherlands
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"I met Don in 1976, when I auditioned for him at Syracuse University. He was his always-gracious self from the start, helping to calm my pre-audition nerves with his easygoing, encouraging manner. Little did I know then that he would become a lifelong friend, offering his encouragement for the next 44 years.
As my voice teacher, Don suggested interesting and less run-of-the-mill repertoire. He was my diction teacher as well, where his love of languages was evident. I have a Rachmaninoff score with his handwritten translation and International Phonetic Alphabet transcription. This was before one could find such things on the Internet, and I was the beneficiary of his beloved Yale Russian Chorus background.
Over the summers in college and afterward, I sang in the chorus at the Artpark Festival, near Niagara Falls. It was somewhat of a summer home for New York City Opera and Music Director Christopher Keene. We sang a few operas and a major choral work each summer, and Don sang operatic roles and oratorio solos there. One was Father Trulove in The Rake’s Progress; we later mourned the loss of Jerry Hadley, who had sung Tom Rakewell with us. We also both sang in the American premiere of Satyagraha at Artpark, with Don as Parsi Rustomji, and in the New York City premiere when that production was brought to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. We compared notes about the productions when Satyagraha came to the Met. Here is Don’s headshot as it appeared in the BAM program:
Don's bio in the program refers to a little-known performance fact from his post-graduate days of voice study in Germany: 'Miller undertook the role of Matt in the only German production (70 performances) of The Fantasticks.'
Don was a terrific singer. I was fortunate to hear his rendition of Winterreise while at SU, and I understand a recording of him singing that work is included in today’s service. He regularly sang with the Syracuse Symphony, also conducted for years by Keene, and I found this Syracuse Post-Standard review of his 1966 performance in Le Nozze di Figaro with the Symphony: Very robust and dramatic singing was done by Donald Miller in his role of the Count. Miller maneuvers his rich baritone with pliant technical skill. There is no question of his artistry as demonstrated in the very vital and adept interpretation he gave 'Hai già vinta la causa.' His ensemble work in the trio 'Susanna, or via sortite' presented another excellent facet of his art. Together, we also mourned the eventual demise of the Syracuse Symphony.
Other tidbits I recall from my time at SU include playing tennis with Don (he went easy on me), his insistence that we must seize the rare opportunity to hear a lady I had not heard of at the time, Montserrat Caballé, at the Syracuse Civic Center and, as my academic advisor, his urging me to take philosophy, knowing as he did from his own philosophy background at Yale how important it was to developing critical thinking.
We stayed in touch after I graduated and moved to Manhattan, and had happy visits over the years when he came to New York. He once came to my voice lesson with my longtime teacher, David Jones, and when David later published his book on technique, Don wrote: “I’m going to get David Jones’s book. Learning more, rather than defending one’s private wisdom, is what motivates my days.”
He was so excited about his studies in Groningen, and I in turn was so excited when he sent me his dissertation, Registers in Singing. Of course he was not going to stop there, and VoceVista and all that has followed from it were the results. I studied VoceVista with him at SUNY-Fredonia and at Oberlin, and he used it to analyze my and my husband, baritone Robert Mobsby’s, voices on a visit to New York. I was so proud to see his prominence grow through VoceVista as The Voice Foundation, NYSTA, NATS, and worldwide pedagogy associations recognized its value. It must have been so gratifying for him to see the program he developed become the standard in a new field he was a leader in establishing. And what a legacy it is to future generations of teachers and singers, now through the Singing Voice Science Workshop.
I remember that Don, always an early adopter, was the first person, in the mid-90s, to mention email to me, using it as he did to keep in touch with his kids after his move to the Netherlands. Don and I were regular email correspondents over the last many years. We wrote about our lives (with him always mentioning his beloved family), politics in our respective countries, spiritual matters, my experiences with university teaching, and most recently my February duo-recital with my husband. He was hopeful about coming to the June workshop and we had planned a visit, and he was looking forward to the SU sesquicentennial.
Don had a formidable intellect and a lively sense of humor, and he was always positive and curious. Here are a few quotes from his emails that display his special personality:
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Regarding instruction in singing (or anything else), my hobby horse has been to emphasize the fact that learning should go in both directions, not simply issuing from the teacher/parent.
We do our human best without pretending we have the absolute truth.
Life continues to be mysterious, leaving much to be discovered.
We learn to be grateful for much that we take for granted.
Learning persists quite vigorously as a motivation for this aging organism.
And, this past December: I continue to practice and learn from the results.
I will miss Don. And I will miss his thoughtful and thought-provoking emails, through which I could always see his smile and the perpetual twinkle in his eye."
Robin Lynne-Frye
Mezzo-Soprano, Voice and Piano Teacher
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"Donald Miller and I had a long history, though when we reconnected, we weren’t at first aware that that was what we were doing. In the early 2000s, I wrote to Don out of the blue, having had just a little experience with VoceVista. I was interested in finding out more about the program and thought I would go directly to the source. As many of those who knew him have experienced, he wrote back quickly and encouragingly, and we planned to meet at Paul Kiesgen’s workshop at Indiana University later that year.
When we met, we found ourselves having extensive and wide-ranging conversations. We shared professional and personal histories and found that we had performed together in Turandot in the 1970s. I subsequently even found the program for the performance! We also found that we shared an interest in theology and that both had considered a career in that area. Don’s was an active mind and one that was engaged in the world at large in addition to voice and singing. We often discussed our mutual social and philosophical concerns.
When I decided to work on voice analysis during my sabbatical year from Montclair State University, Don suggested that I come to The Netherlands, stay at his home, and spend time working with him on the VoceVista system. That time proved delightful and valuable, if challenging to my non-scientist’s brain. Most importantly, we began to talk about the possibility of starting a Voice Science Workshop at Montclair State where I was then Voice Program Coordinator. At the following year's Voice Foundation Symposium in Philadelphia, Don introduced me to Richard Lissemore, who was then in the early stages of his own Ph.D. in Speech Science. The three of us were able to work together and launch the first VoceVista workshop/conference in June of 2015. Since then, the workshop has become an annual event most recently re-named Donald Gray Miller's Singing Voice Science Workshop in honor of Don.
Don altered my pedagogy considerably over these years, sometimes by confirming my own instinct, but also by clarifying what was really happening through acoustic analysis instead of perceptual conjecture. In some ways, this concrete work has demystified aspects of singing. In other ways, it has added to our wonder at the complexity of vocal function. Both were goals that Don sought to achieve; an achievement he treasured. My voice performance and pedagogy students and I owe a great deal to Don's groundbreaking work. His persistence and steadfastness in disseminating the work have ensured a mighty legacy. That legacy will endure in his publications as well as through the work to be carried on by the many active professionals who were lucky enough to know and learn from Don."
Stephen Oosting, DMA
Associate Professor of Voice (ret.)
Montclair State University
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"I first met Don in the early 1990s in Voice Research Lab in Groningen. I was neither a researcher nor a singer and knew next to nothing about human voice or operatic singing. Yet I recall the moment because of what it felt like. As if in that very moment his attention opened up the space for the other person to feel like the center of the entire microcosm. I imagine many people felt that way in his radiant presence. Later, when I was living in Groningen for a while, Don was helping me brush up my English and self-confidence to apply for a job at Talencentrum. We were reading articles from the New Yorker together, looking for interesting thoughts and ideas. Don liked ideas; his mind was curious and ready to examine them from meaningful perspectives. He weighed his words with the precision of an apothecary and seasoned his explorations with genuine laughter. But he was much more than just the sharp and creative mind; he was also and more importantly the heart, selfless and kind, modest and loving. "
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Hana Mádrová (Švecová)
Olomouc, Czech Republic
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"There is much to be learned. There is much to be learned from great singers and from voice science. There is much to be learned from engagement in rigorous debate as well as through the process of having your beliefs or ideas put through a fiery academic crucible. These are all things I learned from Don. Reading this, you might think he would be cold, judgmental, or rude. Yet he was the farthest thing from any of those. He welcomed and championed ideas and people. Don was part of a world that can often be filled with pretense, but he had none of it. He was welcoming and kind, and desired to gain friends and colleagues, not disciples. Don wanted singing to matter to science and science to matter to singing. He was a voice for the people; sometimes a voice crying in the wilderness, but always one whose heart was in the right place.
Don never abandoned his roots as an artist. He never backed down from a good sparring match with a worthy rival, but he also never made curious beginners feel unqualified. We all can learn a great deal from his example. Rare are those who make professional contributions similar to the research of Miller and Schutte. Even more rare are those whose ideas challenge the entire field. But those who create seismic discipline shifts, such as Don did by creating VoceVista, will live on as legends in the mythology of graduate pedagogy courses for decades to come. He was my mentor. He was my friend. I miss him. May his next journey be as legendary."
Nicholas Perna, DMA
Associate Professor of Voice and Voice Pedagogy, Mississippi College
Voice Research Associate, University of Mississippi Medical Center
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"Thank you for your brilliance, your dedication to voice science, and for including me in your collaborations with Richard Lissemore. I will forever be grateful that the great Dr. Donald Miller wrote a recommendation letter for my application to pursue my doctorate in Music Education at Columbia University Teachers College. I was admitted and will start in the summer of 2020!
Also, I consider myself beyond fortunate to be included in and associated with The Singing Voice Science Workshop since its inception. I am forever grateful for that and send much love to you, dear Don."
Ereni Sevasti,
Associate Director of Operations for the Singing Voice Science Workshop
Doctoral student, Teachers College at Columbia University
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"I met Donald Miller in the very early 1990s at the Voice Foundation. He was friendly, jovial, interested in and encouraging to science-curious young teachers. He encouraged me to visit his lab with Harm Schutte in Groningen, Netherlands, a visit my life's path unfortunately never allowed. I did not realize at the time how significant Donald’s work was becoming, and I remained unaware of his many studies and articles with Schutte through the 1990s. I had myself made a “clinical” observation in the studio in the fall of 1989 about the crucial role of first formant locations in the acoustic transitions of passaggio, an observation which was both significant for my own singing and teaching and which promised to be important for the pedagogic community. Aware that as a non-scientist I did not have adequate means of proof, I delayed writing about it for years, but began using its implications in both my teaching and singing. Though I casually proposed testing my ideas to a couple of scientists through the 1990s, none were interested, and I was politely dismissed. When I made the transition from the now aging spectrographic hardware I had been using to Donald’s voce vista in the early 2000s, he made a side trip to Appleton to visit and acquaint me with its capabilities. During that visit, Donald Miller became the first scientist to confirm my observations, since he and Harm had been documenting the same phenomena in their science lab since the mid-1980s. It was especially encouraging to have this duality of confirmation: what had been increasingly apparent to me in my own singing and in the students I was teaching for over a dozen years had long been confirmed by Donald and Harm through careful analysis of the spectrographic signals of great singers. Though our subsequent interactions at conferences were sporadic, we became fast friends from that point on. We shared a mission: helping the singing community appreciate the immense value of understanding specific, objective, predictable acoustic events of range and strategy.
In the spring of 2013 Donald returned to Appleton with me from an event hosted by Scott McCoy at Ohio State University. I had asked him to read the manuscript of Practical Vocal Acoustics and give feedback. Donald had made detailed notes about several chapters which we discussed over several days, and from which I made a number of important adjustments. Later that year He and his lovely, intelligent wife, Dagmar, gave us a delightful tour of Prague following the 2013 PEVOC conference. I will be forever indebted to Donald’s welcoming, encouraging, affirming support of my own pedagogic journey.
Donald’s fine singing and teaching career, his subsequent commitment to establishing objective information and terminology for voice pedagogy through careful scientific research, and his many significant observations of acoustic strategy, made him a stellar exemplar of the marriage of singer, teacher, and voice science researcher. He will be greatly missed, genuinely appreciated, and fondly remembered by all who knew him."
Kenneth Bozeman
Professor Emeritus, Lawrence University
Author
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"Don missed the annual Care of the Voice Symposium in Philadelphia last year because of illness and I was so hoping he would be able to attend this year.
During my first few years as Director, Don Miller was the guy who sat on a bench in the hallway busily working on his laptop. He would look up at me and smile as I flew past, running some important errand. His demeanor was always gentle and kind. It was only later that I learned the extent of his major contributions to the field of voice research, a discipline that has evolved greatly in the last 75 years. Don Miller was one of the people on the front lines. His name will be remembered forever, in particular, for his profound work on the practical application of voice science to the singing voice studio and for the development of the VoceVista voice feedback system.
We thank him for his dedication to the art and science of singing as well as to The Voice Foundation. Personally, I thank him for his winsome smiles and warm personality. I will always picture him busy at work, sitting on that bench in the Westin Hotel hallway."
Maria Russo
Executive Director
The Voice Foundation
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"How strange and wonderful it is, that as I sit down to write about Don my radio magically conjures the opening bars of 'Im Abendrot.' Having watched the final exit from the stage which Don made in Groningen, culminating touchingly with that sublime music sung by Jessye Norman, I am now inspired as the immediately distinctive Renee Fleming sings with comforting ease, 'Wir sind durch Not und Freude gegangen, Hand in Hand.' Don was a Renee Fleming fan too…it seems I see that concentrated face of his again, listening intently. Don was unashamedly an avid fan of any good singing.
Almost twenty years ago I was invited by my very good friend, the late Paul Kiesgen, to go to the summer workshop he organized at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. It was at one of those workshops that I first met Don, who after discovering our similar interests, kindly gave me a copy of his ground-breaking Ph.D. thesis, 'Registers in Singing' that Don completed in 2000. I was hooked. Don’s lucidity on paper had authority, discussing fresh insights and understanding of areas of singing, all of which clearly had such powerfully practical relevance to the art of classical singing, always underpinned by meticulous attention to detail. In 2005, Don published the highly original article on resonance in tenor high notes, perhaps causing some in the voice science world to pull long faces. But for those of us who were actually singers, Don's insights made for compelling reading, having described with valuable logic and precision things which most of us had frequently struggled to articulate. What was that thing we all called 'the turn', which Richard Miller insisted was really 'voce piena in testa?' At last, some clarity.
It is difficult to convey here how generous Don was with his own experience, ideas and intellect. His published writings are admirably clear models of logical thought and orderly findings. But the Don I knew personally was rather different. Not only did he inspire me because of his vast knowledge, but also because he was intensely creative and open-minded to new ideas concerning various topics. If one could understand the medium (which was often the workings of VoceVista), it was possible to spend many exciting hours with Don creatively brain-storming through an issue. His mind would latch onto an idea and leap ahead, with a tendency to assume that you had made the same leap with him, muttering as he went ahead, '…..well, you know…..', even if you didn’t, 'know.'
Over the years, I had the immense privilege of getting to know Don better and was frequently and warmly welcomed into the home he shared with his wife Dagmar, I came to more and more treasure my association with him. It was with Don’s encouragement, and inspired by his example, that I started my own Ph.D. work. During its gestation, Don was always ready, either in person or via Skype, to enter into lengthy and substantive discussions about any and all aspects of my work. In some ways, Don was actually quite shy, but beneath the shyness was an enthusiastic zeal for uncovering the truth about things and a crusading spirit to teach others what he had learned.
What impressed me so much was Don’s honesty and integrity. I heard it in his singing of Schubert and Schumann songs and saw it in his scrupulous approach to the science of singing, which of course was facilitated by his development of VoceVista. His knowledge of singing voice science creation of VoceVista, an invaluable tool for better singing, made for a rare combination. Don 'got it' because his ultimate goal was always to help singers be the best they could be. His enthusiasm never faltered. Not once, not for a millisecond, in all the time I knew him. I think back on some occasions when we were engrossed in VoceVista analyses, sitting comfortably on the sofas in his study and singing examples ourselves to view the resulting signals, Don would have gone on all night if I had now yawned and declared that I needed to sleep. I think Don probably dreamed each night of 'frying' and VoceVista.
Periodically Don would declare that it was time to go for a walk, to get some fresh air. What he meant by this was a mini marathon, at high speed, covering ground with a determined long stride as though on an urgent mission. But then, Don was a man on a mission. Is it too fanciful to say Don’s mission was to change the world? I don’t think so. It wasn’t that he was ambitious for his own sake. He was ambitious, and rightly so, for his ideas and insights. Also, for using VoceVista to show those concepts, to understand the detail of how formants and harmonics interact, together with vocal fold and vocal tract characteristics. His book, published in 2008, 'Resonance in singing: voice building through acoustic feedback', should be on the shelf of every serious teacher of singing and in the library of every Conservatoire and University singing department.
In clarifying how resonance works in classical voices, Don did change the world. It is our privilege now to be able to stand on his shoulders and attempt to see further. Thank-you, Don!"
Professor Stephen Robertson, Ph.D.
Head of Vocal Performance
The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
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"I recently spoke with Don Miller about a special event I was planning in his honor, to be held this fall at Syracuse University, where we will be celebrating the school’s sesquicentennial anniversary in the 2020-21 academic year. Don was on the faculty here at the Setnor School of Music for many years and has long held a strong connection to the area, returning frequently to consult, advise, and share his knowledge about voice science. I had been arranging to bring Don back to SU, along with our colleagues Daniel Ihasz and Kelley Hijleh, for a voice science residency at our school of music. All three had come to SU three years ago for a two-day workshop with our students, and this residency was to be a larger scale collaboration between the Setnor Graduate Voice Pedagogy program and the Gebbie Speech Clinic at SU. Don was very excited about this project and I was excited about the prospect of honoring him in this way. I looked forward to introducing our students to this great man and to celebrating his enormous contributions to voice science.
I met Don about twelve years ago when I was living in Los Angeles and teaching at both University of Southern California and Pepperdine University. I attended an Introduction to VoceVista workshop taught by this wonderful man for a small group of voice teachers. I had completed my doctorate at USC a few years earlier, but the world that Don introduced me to was light years beyond everything I had learned in graduate school in the field of voice pedagogy.
Since that first workshop, I’ve been able to attend a number of workshops and seminars with Donald Miller. He’s been my friend, mentor, and one of the most generous souls I’ve ever known. While learning to incorporate 21st century concepts and tools into the teaching of singing, I, along with many of my colleagues in and out of academia, have always had Don Miller by my side eagerly willing to share his knowledge and insights with warmth and graciousness. For me, Don has been a model of a successful scholar, always growing, learning, and sharing. He was excited about the prospect of returning to SU for this residency, and I still cannot believe that we won’t be welcoming him back there. I am bereft at the thought of his absence from this world."
Kathleen Roland-Silverstein, DMA
Associate Professor, Setnor School of Music at Syracuse University
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"I met Don at the Voice Foundation Symposiums and over many years became friends. When he developed VoceVista I wanted to use it, and, being electronically challenged, I had difficulties with it, compounded when I added the EGG to my toolbox. He was unfailingly cheerful, encouraging, and helpful. He called me one of the most “determined Fryers,” at least Fryer Wannabees.
We were trying to set up a Skype meeting just days before his death, and I had no idea that he must have been in the hospital at that moment, because he did not mention it. His son, Niels, told me that even at that point, he was more interested in his work than in his health. I found that very touching. I will miss greeting him at the workshop and at the next Voice Foundation Symposium."
Martha Randall
Professor Emerita of Voice
University of Maryland