Interview with Noah Pikes – Finding your Voice
By Jena Griffiths | June 18, 2013
Can you inhabit more of your potential by improving the range of your voice?
Next up in the Earth School free auditorium is voice expert Noah Pikes.
We’ll be discussing archetypes and the healing voice
– June 21 2013
4pm Central Europe, 3 pm UK, 10am Eastern, 7 am pacific. Elsewhere
Noah Pikes has been exploring, researching, performing and teaching the Whole Voice for more than 30 years. It is an interdisciplinary and humanising work, ranging from the healing effects of voice to its use in many forms of performance arts.
The kind of questions I’ll be asking Noah?
Can you inhabit more of your potential by accessing the full range of your voice?
Replay of this call here
More about Noah
Noah’s work is rooted in the experiences of Alfred Wolfsohn, a young German Jewish soldier traumatised in the trenches of WW1, who subsequently healed himself with his own voice and enabled many others to do so. His method involved both going beyond the conventional bel canto structuring of the voice, to achieving an extended “unchained voice”. My own teacher was his student Roy Hart, whose voice could span 6 octaves (holding the Guinness Record for several years), and for whose voice inspired Sir Peter Maxwell Davies to compose “8 Songs for a Mad King” for him as King George III.
“I work with voice as sound. Its roots lie in our mammalian ancestry – where vocal sound is used to express and communicate bodily states. It retains that role for us, as in the voice of the infant, but is also heard the voice heard in adult laughter, sighs and yawns, coughs, yells and howls. I call it the sounding voice, which unlike our speaking and singing voices, is a universal human voice.
“In recent years I have discovered that this fundamental sounding voice is structured in a fascinating way, both in its physical as well as its imaginal dimensions, by a series of archetypes. They all have a particular place on the vertical axis between Earth and Sky, and a relationship to a particular form of personal power. The first is the archetypal image of the Imagination itself, The Tree. Then, in a more detailed way, by a family of figures that are expressive of different kinds of power. At the bottom end of a voice is The Giant while at the top are the Fairies, Angels and Birds as well as the Witch. In the middle live a Royal Family. These voices are not necessarilly beautiful, indeed they can be quite ugly, especially when moving away from the Royals and noble figures into their dark sides.
“By giving voice, and body, to these archetypes, many individuals have discovered parts of their personal identity that were hitherto closed to them. Of course that is not an immediate process but one that takes time. Part of that is the reclaiming of one’s own individual voice from the hold that any particular figure has had on it. Then those archetypal voices become resources for effective and lively speaking and singing.”
Noah has taught workshops in many countries, and in many different settings. He offers individual coaching in Zurich.
To contact Noah via email: noahpikes(at)gmail.com
« Doctor, lawyer, Guide – or Just Plain Clever archetype | Home | Finding more joy »
Topics: self esteem, Showing Up | 1 Comment »
February 9th, 2017 at 7:59 am
Many many qulaity points there.