Pulsation, The Generative point, Sound is only ever Vanishing, and the Supremacy of Touch
Four vocal contemplations around the Well.
To follow the voice is to appreciate not only its audible flowering but also its underground roots, and all that is nourishing beyond them.
Today I’ll show you four pathways into the mysterious garden of the Voice.
I’ll take you right up to the gates and share some impressions from my walks. But beyond them, you’ll meet your own voice — these pathways are here to guide you.
Before we start, it’s important to remember that language will attempt to portray “voice” as some “thing” or some “one”. It will not succeed.
The Voice evades all attempts to grasp and fixate - it teaches transition as homeostasis and paradox as creative ground.
The closest name I found for what the Voice is, is Plexus - many streams woven and resonating together; receiving, organizing, rearranging;
body, belonging, identity, culture, desire, dream.
Meeting your voice is like drinking from a fountain in the core of your being - it has all the water you have been searching for outside, waiting for you to open your mouth, and drink.
The Four Contemplations
These are four core principles that describe the living, dynamic nature of our voice — helping us orient when we are ready to approach it directly, and move anything that has come between us.
In my practice, these principles arrive as cues woven into the breath — I speak them tenderly to thawing voices as they gradually rewild after years of meeting closed mouths and limited expression.
My words drip like insights between waves of sighs and lakes of resonant repose.
I offer them as suggestions, considerations — and as the realizations land, they ripple and matter into the entire field.
Yet the voice ripples even beyond the practice.
When we step outside the studio, understanding how we actually generate sound as a life process can teach us a lot about ourselves and our creativity in general. Considering the anatomy and acoustics behind each principle will give us the conceptual foundation to help correct the prevailing misunderstandings about voice and expression.
Much of it is realizing how much of our expression is happening by itself — or even — non-happening.
Knowing what is within our scope of responsibility and what is not is where self-empowerment comes from. A re-arrangement of leaked power.
I. Pulsation
The voice is not one solid thing.
It is a frequency: a rapid sequence of vibratory cycles.
That "solid" note you hear is actually a kind of sonic cloud made of thousands of pressure pulses, woven by the mind into a single thread of pitch. Sound is not a state or an object, but a process of constant arrival.
Our voice is not one continuous event.
The voice is generated moment to moment.
The Vocal Folds as a Vibrating Threshold
The vocal folds (also called vocal cords) are a pair of mucous membrane folds stretched across the larynx.
They are not strings vibrating under tension like guitar strings — they are rather layered soft tissue that opens and closes in complex patterns and extremely rapid cycles — through an intricate interplay between tension and release.
Each voice sounds unique because the vibratory patterns are unique, much like snowflakes.
Each complete open-and-close movement is called one vibratory cycle. The number of cycles per second determines the fundamental frequency, measured in Hertz (Hz). So a singer on A4 (440 Hz) is completing 440 complete open-close cycles every second.
All this needs to be synchronized for our voice to sound as we know it:
Tissue elasticity — when air pushes the folds apart, they spring back together on their own, like a rubber band.
The Bernoulli Effect — fast-moving air passing between the folds creates a suction that pulls them back toward each other.
The air flow is pressured in a particular way, supported by the diaphragm and chest muscles.1
Together, these forces create a self-sustaining oscillation — the folds themselves do not require active effort to keep vibrating once phonation is initiated.
The body creates the conditions; pulsation maintains itself.
The Mucosal Wave
What makes the human voice so acoustically rich is not just that the folds open and close, but that the soft mucosal cover of the folds travels in a wave-like motion — bottom fold first, then top — creating a complex, asymmetric closure pattern that generates the harmonic richness of the voice.
This mucosal wave is visible under stroboscopic examination and is the first thing lost when the voice is fatigued or injured.
It is incredible to watch:
What Pulsation Means
When we understand that our voice is pulsating, we stop trying to ‘hold’ or ‘sustain’ sound as if gripping it — and instead learn to create the conditions in which the folds can pulse freely. The balance between decisive tension and enough allowing — rather than controlled effort — is what allows pulsation to stabilize.
Every pulse of the voice is a moment of both emergence and collapse — infinite potential narrowing into this instant, this breath, this sound. We do not stand outside this process watching it. We are it. Creator and witness at once — it is both power and understanding.
Discontinuity — if the vibratory cycle is renewing in every moment, there is always the possibility to shift, change or recreate your expression. By learning to tune into the pulsation process we stop grasping for control and resisting regeneration.
Force coming from below — the voice is not coming top down but bottom up.
The air pushes from the lungs who are enveloping the heart all supported by the diaphragm. That involves the lower functions that are associated with the belly such as intuition, impulse, subconscious — a more reliable source of power.
Pleasure/pleasantness as orientation — when you explore your voice for its own sake — outside of goal oriented disciplines or language and the contexts of society, what then guides your voice? How would you orient?
Following what feels good, nourishing and pleasurable allows the voice to expand and find its natural movement and so guide you to a fuller range of expression and experience.
Balancing deciding and allowing - even beyond balance - being in the voice flow is a sort of “sweet spot” thing - An interplay between pushing through and surrendering — the voice exemplifies the creative paradox of these living polarities — not intellectually but in a straightforward, embodied and clear way.
Synchronization - these pulsating frequencies are not random. when allowed to “rewild” - to become less homogenized and more rich in overtones and texture, something both basic and magical happens. you can read more about it here.
II. The Generative Point
“I am listening to my voice” can mean many things.
Are you listening to the sounds? To the way your body buzzes with vibration?
Are you listening to the thoughts and feelings that arise? Are you aware of internal voices that are judging the voice, or are you listening to where the voice wants to go next?
Our awareness can travel through so many dimensions of our being.2
On the acoustic level, by the time the sound of our voice reaches our ears, it has already resonated through the upper spaces of the head, traveled into the room, bounced off walls and returned — a complex chain of translations.
What we hear is already created. Already a moment behind. Already gone.
Shaped by the collective emphasis on production and objectification of expression, we get distracted by the external conditions where our voice landed, rather than staying connected to what is happening right now.
The Tactile Turn
Tuning into the tactile sensation — learning to feel the friction, the buzz, the threshold of sound becoming — brings us closer to where the voice is actually born. This requires a tuning of our listening approach, but it is accessible to anyone open enough to learn something new.3
Here, awareness can orient gently toward the point of origin.
This goes even beyond the body and requires some reverence — one never truly arrives at a fixed place, it’s more like a portal — a non-specific, multidimensional location where sound is made manifest. This is the generative point.
It asks you to stop treating your expression like a product and learn to meet it as a bringer of life, a bringer of self.
Friction and resistance are necessary for any expression.
If the vocal folds are wide open — no sound is heard. If they are too strongly adducted — the breath is blocked — no sound either.
Voice can only happen in the balance between enough resistance and enough allowing for the specific tonality to be heard.
Beneath the vocal folds, the respiratory system builds pressure — called subglottic pressure. When that pressure overcomes the closure force of the adducted folds, it initiates the first vibratory cycle. The breath does not push the sound — it creates the pressure condition that allows the folds’ own elastic properties to begin pulsing.
For practitioners, understanding that friction, resistance and overcoming a threshold is not a sign of something going wrong - or an enemy that is dangerous - it is actually the conversational support that allows the voice to become manifest. It’s a sort of birth, which can be traumatic, orgasmic or everything in between.
Arriving at The Well — Listening into the Generative Point
Being present toward the generative point is a gesture of becoming — ever arriving, never a finished state.
Training our listening to follow our touch experience rather than a presumed audible goal, helps us stay with the currently occurring phenomenon — with reality as it is — and enjoy the resonating sounds and insights as they come.
The well metaphor serves beautifully to describe the voice — only in this case the well is endless.
Listening beyond the audible directs us toward realms of intention and subtle energetic movement that can feel like mystical revelations.
This goes further still — revealing a self-energizing dynamic where the voice begins to fuel its own movement. Each vocal wave follows its own route, its own dynamic, nourishing and synchronizing the systems.
III. Voice is only ever arriving, Sound Is Only ever Vanishing
No acoustic event is ever permanent. Sound is pressure waves rippling through a medium — they travel from the source outward and dissipate. The Voice, as already explained, is never static; it is continuously being generated and its sound - continuously disappearing.
In this sense, every moment of tone can be simultaneously understood as a birthing and a dying.
The Acoustic Reality of Undulation
When the vocal folds pulse, they create alternating compressions and rarefactions in the air column above them (in the vocal tract). These pressure waves travel upward through the pharynx, mouth, and/or nose and radiate outward as sound - which can give some shaping — but the moment they leave the body, they are beyond the singer's control.
Crucially, the singer cannot hear their own voice the way another listener does. A significant portion of what we perceive as our own sound arrives via bone conduction — vibration conducted through the skull and jaw directly to the cochlea, bypassing the air entirely. This creates a fundamentally different timbral picture than what travels through the room.
The Resonating System
The vocal tract — from the larynx through the pharynx, oral cavity, nasal cavity, and lips — acts as a resonating chamber. Its shape determines which harmonic frequencies are amplified (formants) and which are damped. But this shaping is continuous and dynamic; each moment of sound passes through a living system that is never exactly the same as it was a millisecond before.
Tongue position, Soft palate elevation - Jaw position - lip shape - laryngeal height — all continuously modify the way the voice resonates.
The singer is not producing a static object called a ‘note.’ They are continuously regenerating and re-shaping an acoustic event that is constantly passing away.
What Vanishing Means in Practice
Understanding that sound is vanishing frees practitioners from the impulse to attempt to preserve sound by fixation. The moment a singer tries to freeze the quality they achieved, they introduce tension.
By releasing any mental responsibility to preserve the sound, we actually allow the energy to drop down from the head and be available for the lower functions of power and support that can allow for a more stable yet living sound.
Acceptance of vanishing is, paradoxically, the condition for consistency.
Becoming aware of vanishing could mean making space for grieving, but also for liberation. Sound vanishing is literally a guide into creating with non-attachment.
Taken further, sound can expand into sight, smell and touch — phenomena itself pulsating, changing and disappearing in the same moment.
Sound is unique in the sense that it can create and experience itself simultaneously; a living spectrum that moves between hearing and touching.4
IV. The supremacy of touch
There is an inherent delay between the moment a vocal event occurs in the body and the moment we hear it with our ears.
Sensory feedback through the body — a tactile experience - is comprised of proprioception, tactile vibration, kinesthetic awareness — and arrives before auditory feedback.
Therefore, we need to learn to close the gap — trust tactile sensation over heard sound to be as close as we can to life’s movement.
We need to learn to ignore what we hear so we can listen.
The Neural Timing of Auditory Feedback
Sound waves produced at the larynx travel to the singer’s own ears via two paths. Airborne sound must leave the body, travel through the air, and enter the ear canal — introducing a small but real delay. Bone-conducted sound arrives more rapidly but carries different frequency information. Neither channel gives the singer instantaneous access to what the voice is doing; there is always a lag between production and perception.
Trying to orient through heard sound is like trying to move forward by looking at the traces of your steps instead of where you are going.
Proprioception in the Vocal Tract
The mucous membranes and muscles of the larynx, pharynx, tongue, and soft palate are richly supplied with mechanoreceptors — sensory nerve endings that respond to pressure, stretch, and vibration. These provide real-time somatosensory feedback that is not subject to acoustic processing delays.
The network of sensation is continuously reporting on what the voice is doing — faster than the auditory system can process it.5
This simply means that the sense of touch and the fact that you are the one that is both giving and receiving the sound — can lead you into all that happens before sound is even produced - bringing us into realms of intentions and subtle layers of the psyche/body relationship.
Orienting through Touch
What we are aiming for is an increasingly refined sensory literacy — the ability to feel what is happening in our system moment to moment with precision and to trust those sensations as reliable guides. This is not just technical data gathering — it opens up a conversation with the already living, pulsating body, bringing heightened awareness of sensations and vibrations all over the body.
It also means we become less reactive to what we hear and more creative. If we try to course correct based on heard sound we are always a beat behind - but if we correct based on sensation we can respond in real time — and introduce shifts that are non-linear, hence — free.6
Guided by Touch
We said that in touch based orientation we go by what feels good - pleasant or pleasurable, yet so many of us have a complicated relationship to pleasure.7
If we allow ourselves to experience it - we risk creating attachments - trying to recreate what worked in the past - or achieve something we saw someone else experiencing.
For this we have to anchor in beginner’s mind and believe in the basic wellbeing of our whole system - trust that by listening we can be shown the needed movement towards health and expansion.
That innate intelligence of our full spectrum being, when it resonates through our voice could be the biggest discovery one could make.
The voice can become an agent of coherence - that knows how to heal and take care of any process. Can we trust that?
This is the paradox of non goal oriented practice - the sound does tend to become more full, more free, more powerful, more effective, more beautiful - because what organizes our system had a chance, a space and the right relation to be heard and shine without interference.
Weaving Together
The four principles describe the same living system from different angles:
Pulsation or non-continuity is the fundamental gesture of vocal activity (and of reality).
The Generative Moment is where the conditions for pulsation are established — the threshold of sound and the possibility to travel with our listening around it.
Sound Is Vanishing describes the nature of acoustic reality — sound is always already passing.
Supremacy of touch describes how the singer can participate intelligently in this rapid, vanishing, pulsing reality — through connecting to the body’s fundamental sense of connection - the touch experience.
These four contemplations articulate a kind of creativity that was never meant to be owned, optimized or extracted.
We have been groomed to treat expression as product, voice as brand, and presence as performance — therefore returning to the pulsating, vanishing, ungovernable aliveness of our own voice is nothing less than revolutionary.
One last contemplation
If you resonate with this so far, imagine what it could mean for the ways we create and express together — the ways we might let that aliveness organize us, rather than relying solely on rules and regulations to manage what, at its core, cannot be managed.
Meeting our voices can show us the way to redeem our creative expression — and the resonance between us, when we truly listen, can show us how to harmonize as a whole.
The whole anatomical process of voicing, especially around air, support and power deserves further attention and will be discussed in future writing.
If Pulsation is the “How”, the Generative point is the “Where” (and “When”).
It is so easy - if you don’t already know this phenomenon - try humming now, place a hand on your chest, feel the buzz of your voice in your ribs - this is the same principle.
I call this “keep on singing so you can hear”.
On the psychological level, we can assume there are structural correspondences of the psyche to what we are describing as body, space and sound reflection.
What anchoring a touch experience in our psyche feel like?
Connection, encounter, mystery, conversation.
This is where working on your sexual expression can bring tremendous liberation of your life expression in general.