The Story of Vocal Integration™

Awe-struck by his “talented” singer friends, the then 12 year-old Patrick Michael Wickham decided he was going to have an excellent voice… no matter how long it took.  Unfortunately, he did not possess any talent or ability in this department.  (For reference, please ask his younger siblings who would have to endure his attempts in the car on the way home from school)  He was consistently off-pitch (could not accurately repeat any note played on a piano) and his voice lacked any power or endurance.  For years, despite intense voice training in chorus and with several teachers who encouraged him to pursue other endeavors (as some people simply are “not born singers”), he was unable to develop any significant ability as a singer.  Early ideas of “support” and “placement” were not at all helpful, as they seemed to only increase throat tension and frustration.  It was then that he decided to research on his own why he was unable to produce this majestic “sound” from his own flawed instrument.

At the time, Patrick was obsessed with become an airline pilot, so he was already somewhat familiar with basic engineering and aerodynamics.  He began to see the human body as an instrument capable of creating sound as a secondary function to breathing.  The problem was that every efficient singer had a different body with different structure (athletic, thin, fat, wiry, short…).  More complex was the diversity of training backgrounds each singer underwent.  Some swore by the Bel Canto method (a popular distilled Italian method which translated simply means “beautiful singing”).  Others were obsessed with the relatively new SLS method or “speech-level singing.”  Many singers were self-taught.  And the physical form singers came in was as varied as the training itself.  It wasn’t until Patrick was babysitting a friend’s infant that he noticed the perfection of the human voice at birth.  Virtually every vocal problem he had come across was not present in the baby’s voice.  The entire body worked as one perfect unit to produce a sound proportionately larger than the most powerful singers he had ever encountered.  In addition to the shear volume, the baby could cry for hours without losing its voice.  It was obvious that the ideal function followed the form of this infant instrument.  Utilizing that as a model, Patrick’s new theory held that every potential singer had to become more like the baby in order to attain balanced vocalism.

And so, the foundation of Vocal Integration was born...