Here, My Voice

Voice and the ability to create sound that emanates from the body is so fundamental to human experience that we hardly even recognize its power. And yet, many people in the hard-of-hearing community have no relationship to the creative power of their voice and, as a result, do not experience an entire aspect of human embodiment. “Here, My Voice” a pilot program at the University of Southern California responds to these issues and provides therapeutic singing lessons to support hard-of-hearing persons to build confidence in their voice and help them explore its expressive power.

In a collaboration between students from USC’s Thornton School of Music and the Hearing Loss Association of America LA (HLAA), we successfully brought together six hard-of-hearing participants with six vocal-arts students to create two-person teams that worked in close collaboration over the course of two months to develop and implement personalized, one-on-one voice lessons.