Ewelina Pachnik works on the first impression that has nothing to do with a face.
Before anyone has finished looking at you, they have heard you say three words, and something has already been decided. Voice is the part of appearance nobody curates. People rehearse their photographs and their clothes for years, then open their mouth and hand over the rest for free.
She is a vocalist, a voice coach and a therapist working with voice disorders.
That means she meets three kinds of people: those who want to sing, those who speak for a living, and those who have lost their voice and with it a large part of how they exist among others. We asked her about the distance between the voice we hear from the inside and the one everybody else receives.
Almost nobody can stand their own recorded voice. What do people hear then that they do not hear when they speak?
I often tell my students that in a singing lesson we neither sing nor listen to ourselves. It sounds like a contradiction, but there is a lot of truth in it. When we speak, we hear our own voice differently from everyone around us, because it reaches us not only through the air but also through bone conduction. On a recording that effect disappears and suddenly we hear ourselves the way others do. That is why our own voice can seem too high, too thin, or simply not ours.
Then the controlling starts. We shape the voice, change its colour, its pitch, the way we carry the sound, trying to get closer to the image we have in our head. Sometimes we model it on our idols, sometimes on what we believe a voice should be. The problem begins when, in that chase, we lose ease, lightness and flexibility. Paradoxically we start smothering the very voice we wanted to hear.
So the point of working on a voice, for me, is not to make someone sound nice. It is to create conditions in which they can discover their own sound, without constantly judging themselves. The inner critic shows up fast, and then we are chasing an ideal we invented ourselves. Letting your own free voice out, without correcting it immediately, can be a surprisingly emotional experience. You meet not only a sound, but the way you judge yourself.
What do you hear in the first seconds of someone speaking, before they have told you anything about themselves?
Mostly the emotional state and the general psychophysical condition that person may be in. A voice does not tell me everything and gives me no grounds for a diagnosis, but it can suggest a great deal.
I listen to the timbre: whether it is dark, bright, clear, hoarse, tight, free, flowing, broken, smothered, strong or light. Those qualities can point to tension, fatigue, stress or difficulties in how the voice functions, but the causes vary enormously. In the first seconds I do not know a person’s history, so I do not draw far reaching conclusions. Still, I can hear a tremor, see a clenched jaw, tension around the larynx, raised shoulders, a particular way of breathing.
What matters most to me is that the voice does not work in isolation. It is tied to breath, muscle tension, posture and emotional state. When I listen to a voice, I am watching the whole person.
You work with voice disorders. What happens to someone who loses their voice for a longer time, beyond simply not being able to speak?
Losing a voice is rarely only about speaking. Research shows that voice function can be affected by stress, intense emotional experience, psychophysical tension, personality traits or general physical condition. That does not mean every emotional difficulty leads to a voice disorder, but in some people these areas are connected.
A human being does not work in separate parts. When someone loses their voice for a longer period, the psychological consequences can be severe, especially for a person who used to be expressive, sociable, or who worked with their voice professionally. Suddenly the ability to communicate, to express emotion, agreement, objection, or simply to mark your presence, is restricted.
We identify with our voice to a large degree. We give it a colour, a tempo, an expression, and in a sense we use it to shape how we want to be perceived. When access to that tool is limited, frustration, anxiety, withdrawal and a feeling of losing part of yourself appear. A vicious circle is easy to fall into: the more stress, the more bodily tension and the greater the need to control the sound, which makes returning to free phonation harder.
A voice can be trained and set. Where does working on yourself end and sounding artificial begin?
The line depends on what we are aiming at. If we build our voice on an ideal model, a favourite artist for instance, it is very easy to drift away from our own possibilities.
Each of us is built differently. We differ in height, in body size, in the size of the larynx, the cartilage, the vocal folds, the whole vocal tract. Our acoustic possibilities are different, so we cannot expect to sound exactly like someone whose instrument is a different one.
For me a voice starts to sound artificial when a person stops using their instrument and starts constantly producing a certain effect. When how the voice should sound becomes more important than whether it is free and within that person’s range. Good voice work is not about setting a voice once and for all. It is about creating conditions in which someone can use it consciously and in many different ways.
Women are told they speak too high or too quietly, men that they do not sound firm enough. How much of that is acoustics and how much other people’s expectations?
Both. We can work on pitch, volume, resonance, tempo, breath, the way a phrase is carried, and a good coach can develop a lot of that. But phrases like too quiet, too high, not firm enough are not always about the voice itself. Very often they are about what someone expects from us, and what way of speaking they consider appropriate for a woman, a man, a leader, a confident person.
So I separate developing the possibilities of a voice from fitting a person into somebody else’s idea of them. You can have enormous potential, but if for years you hear that you speak badly, too loudly, too softly, those messages seriously affect how you use your voice. Words have power. Sometimes they support growth, sometimes they block it for years.
The goal of this work is not one correct way of speaking. It is that a person has a choice, and can speak louder, quieter, higher, lower, when they themselves need it, and not because someone told them how they should sound.
There is a moment when someone hears their own free voice for the first time. What does it look like from where you stand?
Those moments are extraordinary and I experience them strongly too. Sometimes there are tears, sometimes laughter, a shout, disbelief, or simply silence. Two words usually come to mind: happiness and freedom. Someone suddenly hears something in their voice that they did not know was there, or that they had not allowed themselves.
I feel enormous satisfaction then, not because I set someone’s voice, but because I could accompany that person and help them reach a place that had seemed unreachable. In those moments I try to be present and not analyse what just happened, but let them actually experience it. A first contact with your own free voice can be far bigger than a change of sound.
You sing and you teach. How does it feel to be the one listened to rather than the one listening?
They are two completely different worlds. On stage I enter a different kind of preparation, concentration and stress. Singing for others I feel like a fish in water, though of course I face judgement there as well. What I like most are the moments when I do not have to focus on technique and can sing straight from the heart, rather than the way somebody once instructed me to.
For many years, during my training, I struggled with this. It was easy for me to slip into controlling myself, correcting every detail, chasing perfection. Now I try to sing for the pleasure of it, instead of treating a performance as a quiet duty to be flawless.
I love the moment when the atmosphere thickens and everyone stops for a second. The greatest gift I can give myself is to sing in a way that makes a listener hold their breath. Then I know they felt something, in their own way.
Was there a student who changed how you think about the voice? What did they do?
It was not one particular student. Many of the people I have worked with changed my thinking about the voice, and they still do. I can have knowledge, experience and a plan, but a person very often shows me something I had not taken into account. Being a guide for others, I keep learning myself.
What moves me most are the situations where something looks impossible at first and then turns out to have another route. That taught me not to pass sentence on someone’s voice too quickly and not to take away their chance to develop simply because they cannot do something at the start. A voice can change, a body can change, and so can the way someone uses their instrument. My work keeps teaching me not to take anyone’s dreams away.