Liz Jackson Hearns, founder of the Voice Lab
Liz Jackson Hearns's Voice Lab provides gender-affirming vocal coaching—and in the process, explodes ideas of what voices "ought" to do. Liz Jackson Hearns, founder of the Voice Lab, is known for her innovative approach to gender-affirming vocal coaching and teaching new coaches. She has written two popular books, The Singing Teacher’s Guide to Transgender Voices and One Weird Trick: A User’�s Guides to Transgender Voice. Her passion for music, physiology, and problem-solving came from a strong background in biology and voice science. Hearns moved from Idaho to Phoenix in 2006 to grow a sound-engineering business with her then husband, but a life-altering accident led her to begin teaching singing lessons instead. She moved to Chicago in 2008 to develop her vocal-coaching career, recognizing an underserved community of queer and trans adults who needed resources specific to them. In 2014, she founded the Voice lab.
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Liz Jackson Hearns wants to challenge how you think about the voice. As founder of the Voice Lab, she’s a leader in providing gender-affirming vocal coaching—and in teaching new coaches. She’s written two popular books on the subject: The Singing Teacher’s Guide to Transgender Voices (cowritten with Brian Kremer) and One Weird Trick: A User’s Guide to Transgender Voice. Developing this expertise was a natural outgrowth of her passion for music, physiology, and problem-solving. She loves exploding ideas about what a voice is “supposed” to do.
Growing up in Idaho, Hearns was always involved in music, whether studying piano, singing in choirs, or jamming at family reunions. When she enrolled at the College of Idaho in 2001, she thought she was going to study biology and become a geneticist. But at her first college choir practice, she realized, “No, music is my path.” In 2006, she moved to Phoenix to grow a sound-engineering business with her then husband, but a life-altering accident led her to begin teaching singing lessons instead. In 2008, she moved to Chicago to develop her vocal-coaching career, and she gradually came to recognize an underserved community of queer and trans adults who needed resources specific to them. In 2014, she founded the Voice Lab. I moved to Phoenix in 2006. I had started a business with my first husband, who works in video-game sound design. We moved there for a job for him, but we also had a sound-design business.
After moving, I went to the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences to do a vocational program at the intersection of music and engineering sciences. My favorite part was learning about stuff like signal flow and troubleshooting soundboards. Biology feels kind of similar—like tracking signal flow and seeing what happens when one little piece changes in the puzzle.
After that, I thought I was going to do sound engineering and continue down the path I had started with our business, but then I got hit by a car. Some bones in my knee were broken, so live sound engineering wasn’t possible anymore. There’s a lot of walking and carrying heavy things and going up and down. My body couldn’t keep up. So I started giving voice lessons to make money. It turned out to be super fun!
In 2008, I moved to Chicago. My husband and I had just split up, and I had an internship here. I started working for Midlothian Music in Orland Park, mostly with kids. I got my teaching chops and met my current spouse. After a few years, I started working at Flatts & Sharpe, and it became clear to me that grown-ups needed their own place for vocal training.
The vocal-coaching industry caters to kids because children will start lessons in early elementary school, then stick with it through high school graduation. Grown-ups have lives. They’re probably not going to stick around for ten years.
Singing is usually a new hobby for adults, and it often carries a lot of crappy childhood memories. Putting grown-ups in environments that cater to kids means not only is their inner child not being served, but they’re also watching other kids go through the same thing. Grown-ups need some freedom to play and to be terrible at something and still be loved.
At that time, I also started working with my first trans student—an author and gender philosophy professor named Das Janssen. He was learning violin, but his joints started getting stiff after he started T [testosterone], so he decided to switch to singing. Because I had a strong background in biology, vocal function, and voice science, the team recommended me.
I learned a great deal from him. At one point he literally sat me down, held my hand, and taught me about gender in a way that was just . . . amazing. He wrote the foreword to my book The Singing Teacher’s Guide to Transgender Voices, and we’re still close. Then I had a metal singer referred to me, and during our work, she decided to transition.
Ten years ago, the whole industry of gender-affirming voice care was brand-new. It was hard to find resources on anything related to gender and voice. It was smacking me in the face that this was an underserved community. I decided to start the Voice Lab to cater to adults, especially queer and trans ones.
One element of the work we do addresses gender and sexuality. The music industry, and by extension the voice-lesson industry, is very cishet. Many queer and trans singers have been forced into boxes, like, “This is your voice type, this is the kind of repertoire you do, and this is the kind of character that you play.”
You don’t have to be limited by the ways that you were trained up to this point. We work with a lot of singers that have been trained as high-voice singers, like sopranos. Many fear that they’re going to lose that piece of their voice and identity if they take T. Sometimes there’s a reckoning with how much individual identity has been funneled into a voice type.
I’ve worked with clients who started singing lessons before taking T and were told it’s unhealthy to sing in a particularly low part of their range. That’s not true. It’s not dangerous to them as an individual. It’s dangerous to a heteronormative standard of performance practices. When we dismantle those kinds of falsehoods, people discover ranges they didn’t know they had.
Another part of our work is focused on speech. We work with a lot of trans folks on developing voice techniques to be read as more feminine. Inevitably, we come to a point where we have to discuss misogyny. It’s really tough to confront some of the realities of being perceived as more feminine. They suck! The beauty is that you’re not obligated to use any of these vocal habits beyond when you want or need to. It’s like a dial. Maybe there are certain situations where you dial it up and others where you dial it down.
A lot of folks think of the voice as a static thing, but that’s untrue. Voices are incredibly resilient and flexible. There is no reason why someone couldn’t sing tenor and soprano. The human voice can do so much. It’s phenomenal watching people discover how much control they actually have—and combat being gender-policed through their voice.
المواضيع: Music