This week’s pleasure report is a repeat, something I rarely do, I am sharing the genius vocal work of Jonathan Stancato again as I am collaborating with him to launch our Adventure Dating series. We have designed an evening of Ecstatic Voicing for partners on Friday evening, December 8th in NYC. If you are anywhere near NYC, I hope you will join us.
I met Jonathan Stancato several years ago when I joined his afternoon singing workshop Inside Voice. The first thing he asked us to do was to roll across the floor. No further instruction. All 10 of us dutifully rolled across the cold wooden floor and then stood, dizzy and confused, wondering what this had to do with singing.
The human voice contains infinite pleasure, Jonathan told us. But, we live in a culture that values productivity. You all rolled as fast as you could from point A to point B, which meant your hard bones banged across the hardwood floor. We are mostly water, he told us. Try it again. This time, take your time, roll languidly, like the ocean, feel the temperature and texture on your skin.
I dropped to the ground and relished in the pleasure of a good roll. It is one of the lessons that inspired me to launch The Pleasure Report.
TPR: How do you use your voice to create more pleasure in your life? Or in the world?
JS: The voice is the audible expression of the self. And the human range is unlimited.
Every time I speak, I have a little secret message going in my head saying, “I love my voice. I love the things I'm saying.” And I imagine that this person I'm speaking to loves my voice and loves the things I'm saying. So I kind of force you to love me in my imagination. I find it opens beautiful doors and creates opportunities to go off script.
TPR: So, you run experiments to see how this works? What are you finding?
JS: The checkout line is one of my favorite lab experiments. I watch the people ahead of me have these scripted encounters with this human who's handling their most sacred resource, their food, and everybody's completely detached, and not even in the transaction of it. So I say to myself, “I'm going to have this encounter be the highlight of my day, and the highlight of the day of the person behind the counter.”
I love people's voices and everyone has such magnificent, beautiful voices. If I could do anything in those encounters, I want to let people know that I love their voices.
Hopefully, by doing that, we’ve made the world a little bit of a better place.
TPR: It sounds like you're creating your own reality.
JS: If I sound a tuning fork, and let's say it's tuned to 128 hertz, and there's another tuning fork that's tuned to that nearby, it will start ringing when the other one is sounded.
I like to think if I am sounding these loving parts in me then it will bring out the resonance of other people around me.
It doesn't always work. But I'd rather fail at that than fail in another way.
TPR: You’ve said that you have x-ray hearing. What have you learned about the human voice and what is the range of our voices?
JS: We have all of these sounds that come out of us — overtones and undertones and subtones and harmonics that we can't perceive are happening.
I believe that there are all of these harmonic elements that come into play when we're listening deeply to each other, that we're not even aware of these subliminal sounds in a more technical way.
When I asked you how you are, and you say, “I'm doing fine,” maybe the thing that tells me that you're not fine is actually an overtone that neither of us can hear.
TPR: What if you don’t love your voice? How does one learn to do that?
JS: Play! When we're playing with our voice, we're not thinking is it good or bad because in the domain of play, that's not possible.
Start making some sounds you have never made before in your life and maybe those sounds will strike you as the most pleasurable sounds to sing in or the most pleasurable sounds to speak in. And then you'll have this amazing tool of self pleasuring wherever you go in your life.
TPR: It’s hard to create sound without thinking of how it is being heard. I had this experience recently of being on a deserted island and I thought, okay, this is my chance to make any kind of sound that I want, so what might that be?
JS: So what sounds did you make on your deserted island?
TPR: Well, I did not make the animal sounds we imitate as kids like a lion or bear. I made something that was more like the animal of me, which included some very low groans. It made me think of a gigantic frog.
JS: Frogs are incredible sound makers.
TPR: I was surprised by the sounds that were coming out of me. They weren’t pleasing but I didn’t care. I was paying more attention to the vibrations in my body. It felt like I was following the sounds as opposed to making them.
JS: We should think of our voice not like a well-trained dog that we tell to heal, walks perfectly on our leash, but as a cat on the leash, so we're just following where the cat goes. And if we do that, well, then people are going to be delighted because there's a cat on a leash. And that's fun.
And then to the question of whether your sounds are pleasing, maybe we're thinking, oh, this isn't a sound that people would tune in to hear on the radio. And maybe that's true, but then there are people like Janis Joplin and Screamin’, Jay Hawkins, and people making all sorts of sounds that we do love to hear. At the end of the day, pleasing sounds is one of those constructs that doesn't really hold up under an enhanced scrutiny.
TPR: I’m learning that there are places that you can go, vocally or otherwise, with two or more people that you can't go by yourself.
JS: Have you ever played a game where you're walking up a hill and you have somebody behind pushing you? That’s what it’s like. It's just a little bit easier to climb the hill. And then, when you get to more advanced levels of play, it's the feeling of one of those pedal assisted bikes where you start to pedal and you're like, wow, I'm the king of the world.
And then when you get a little bit more acrobatic with this sort of musical play, all of a sudden there's a jetpack behind you. It's something we can get high on.
Are you ready to create some new sounds?
Adventure Dating begins Friday, December 8th from 7-10 PM in Midtown NYC. Early bird pricing lasts until December 2. I would love to see you there.
Tix available here.
Jonathan’s next singing journey Inside Voice Lab, an 8-week deep dive into the voice-expanding, voice-healing, voice-loving foundations of his work, begins Jan. 2024.
From the Institute of Pleasure Studies
Olivia Hockenberry on Harmonizing
Singing is a form of connection. Voices are locks and keys. Like a key, the fit can be right but when you turn it, it doesn’t quite get the job done. I have spent countless hours listening to beautiful voices sing together, trying to figure out which ones lock together perfectly. There can be a group of ten people and all of them sing beautifully, but only two of them have voices that make your body tingle. When the right voices sing together, the vibrations are felt in the bodies of those listening. When we hear harmony we are hearing connection. We are hearing cooperation. We are hearing trust. Singing is a way to combat isolation. And a way to find harmony in the midst of all this chaos.
These apps are great for singing with strangers or friends: Smule, Acapella.
Want to try a family singing game?
Jonathan Stancato offers this: Take a song that you all know and give each other prompts to sing it in different ways. Sing it like a robot, a hedgehog, a 1930s film star, a dinosaur roaring. Everybody gets a chance to boss everybody else around on the same song. And nobody has to feel like they're trying to sing something well. You can't lose the game by not sounding good. You lose the game by not trying to sing like an abominable snowman, whatever that means to you.
Joe and I are officially open nesters, which is the word that feels most resonant for this stage of life we are in with our kids heading out into the world to explore and lead their own lives. We had a great conversation with Tessa and Amir of the Opennesters Podcast where we talked about ritual, radical trust, a recommitment to marriage, and our work with other couples in Relationship Tripping and Adventure Dating. You can Listen here.