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From: Aonghus Heatley
Date: 02 Oct 2011
Time: 10:50:13 -0500
Remote Name: 87.194.37.201
Hi Peter, I appreciate you taking the time to respond to my comments. Once again can I just say that I enjoyed your paper and the following is offered as commentary rather than criticism. Your point regarding why you opted to base your paper on the 'McGuire Unmasked' article are valid and I agree that it's important that people who read your article are able to engage with one of its sources. However, I do still feel that Dave McGuire's book is useful in that it goes into much more detail on each of the elements and attempts to root them in some kind of theoretical basis. As such when assessing costal breathing critically I would have thought that the book would have been a better source because it's that bit more detailed and comes from 'the horse's mouth' so to speak. It is arguably the definitive text, as things stand, and the McGuire Unmasked document is probably a derivative of book and possibly, but not necessarily, isn't as clear as the book as to why each particular element of the technique is there and the reasoning behind it's inclusion. This point struck me because you mentioned in your article that you weren't sure as to exactly what the author of the McGuire Unmasked article was trying to say - using the book, even as a secondary source, might have clarified some of the confusion and allowed you to engage with the technique more easily. My point on having to view the elements holistically was somewhat clumsy, but what I was trying to get across is that the technique, when used successfully, isn't just an 'on-the-fly' combination of the various physical elements (which, to the casual reader, might sound overly complicated), but is instead a more nuanced approach whereby the various elements interact with each other and, if the user desires, one or more elements can be emphasised at any one time (i.e. to meet the needs of the speaking situation). For example, the 'breathy tone', read in isolation, might sound like something that wouldn't help, but when you do this while making your speech assertive and while also trying speak from deep in your chest (which is really just lowering your vocal pitch) it can be helpful. I realise I'm not explaining this particularly well, but my overall point is that it's probably a mistake to dissect the technique and analyse each element individually. Individually they might be quite suspect, however when used together they do tend to help or at least that is my own personal experience. All the best, Aonghus