“No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change this world.”
-Robin Williams, Dead Poets Society

I first heard the word habilitation in 2012 at the Summer Vocology Institute in Salt Lake City, UT.  It came up in association with the treatment of injured voices and was the topic of much discussion that summer. (It continues to be the topic of much discussion, it turns out.)

Most of us are familiar with rehabilitation as a medical term, but what about habilitation?  It carries a different meaning than rehabilitation and, in the opinion of vocology experts, deserves a conversation – both for the sake of voice practitioners and consumers alike.

As defined by the text Vocology,

“habilitation is the process of enabling, equipping for, or capacitating.  Voice habilitation is therefore more than repairing a voice, or bringing it back to a normal state.  It includes the process of building and strengthening the voice to meet specific needs.” (Titze, Verdolini Abbott, 2012 pg.11)

Rehabilitation vs. Habilitation

Let’s look at habilitation and rehabiltation back to back.  Merriam Webster online defines the verb habilitate as:

Habilitate (v) : to make fit or capable

When compared to the verb rehabilitate, the nuance between habilitation and rehabilitation becomes more evident:

Rehabilitate (v) : to restore or bring to a condition of health or useful and constructive activity

by Justin Petersen

Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes once wrote,

“We are all of us three persons: the one we think ourselves to be, the one others think us to be and the one we truly are.”

This plight is never so acute as when applied to the student singer and how they perceive themselves through their voice. In my work, I have found that one of the most important things to do is to help singers find their ‘basic vocal tone.’

In his book Voice: Psyche and Soma, Cornelius Reid makes an exceptionally important point often skimmed when examining his substantial pedagogy: the topic of aesthetic listening and its inherent dangers.

Aesthetic listening is hearing a voice in a way that overlays aesthetic and stylistic preferences onto the mechanism (‘the one we think ourselves to be’). For example, a classical voice teacher might prefer darker, rounder tones and would train students to emit sounds in that way. A musical theater voice teacher might go the opposite way and entrain a voice into a very bright, brassy, forward sound.  Both are ‘specializations,’ a term borrowed from Peter T. Harrison in his book The Human Nature of the Singing Voice.