Being Tuned: How Relatefulness Revolutionized Voice Pedagogy. Category: Cross-Modal Integration
Abstract
Over twenty-two years of teaching voice and piano and a decade of practicing and facilitating Relatefulness, I have developed a methodology I call Being Tuned. It’s a way of teaching voice built on the theory that the body already knows how to sing and the teacher’s job is not to construct technique from the outside but to help the singer’s voice come through unobstructed. This paper traces how Relatefulness influenced my teaching style into a new methodological framework: Being Tuned, my approach to voice and embodiment. I describe the specific mechanisms by which Relatefulness produced this inside-out orientation that treats the singer’s felt experience as the primary data. It’s a practice of embodied listening in which I feel the student’s voice in my own body, a pedagogy of emotional coexistence that reframes “wrong notes” as information, an emergent session design modeled on attunement rather than curriculum, and a reframe of discipline as discipleship rooted in the Relateful invitation to trust attention. Drawing on reflective interviews with six current and former students, I illustrate what this integration produces in practice.
Author Information
Annabeth Novitzki is a voice and piano teacher, Relateful facilitator, and Relateful coach based in Austin, Texas. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Vocal Performance from Carnegie Mellon University and a Master’s degree in Vocal Performance from the University of Memphis. She has twenty-two years of teaching experience. Annabeth is the creator of Being Tuned, an inside-out approach to voice and embodiment, drawn from her work as a music director, voice teacher, and Relateful facilitator. She has been practicing Relatefulness since 2015 and has been certified since 2017. She has has facilitated with The Relateful Company since 2019, is the Head Facilitator of the Relateful Austin Studio, and is one of the certifiers for Level Up, the facilitator training program. She spearheaded the creation of Relateful Camp and organized its first two years.
Originality Statement
This work has not been published elsewhere and is entirely my own.
Conflicts of Interest
I am Senior Staff at The Relateful Company and derive income from both my music teaching and my Relatefulness facilitation work. The students quoted here are clients in my private voice studio.
Permissions
All student reflections were gathered in recorded conversations with informed consent. Because of the vulnerable nature of the way I work with the voice, all names have been changed for this article.
The Mind-Bending Question
About twenty years ago, a very dear friend, Paul, asked me what singing feels like. I had a degree in Vocal performance, I was a Music Director and taught people to sing, it should have been an easy question to answer, but I was grasping at straws. Paul had been born deaf, so I couldn’t use what speaking feels like as a reference point.
The way I had to really look to describe each of the intertwined sensations taught me more about my singing voice than my degree had. No one in all those years of training had ever guided me to develop this type of intimate knowledge of my voice and expression. Paul’s simple question planted a seed. But it took a decade, and Relatefulness, for that seed to grow into what is now a new methodology.
Midwifing and Reflecting
I call myself a midwife for the voice. The premise of my methodology, Being Tuned, is that the body already knows how to sing; my job is to help it come through, not to construct it from the outside. This is a direct inversion of how I was taught and how virtually every voice teacher I have encountered teaches.
The conventional model of teaching voice works from the outside in: the teacher listens to the sound, diagnoses the problem, and prescribes a correction. The student executes. But the voice is the only instrument we can’t see or touch while playing it. A pianist sees the keys. A guitarist feels the strings. A singer has no tangible external anchor. The vocal folds are hidden deep in the throat, and excellent technique shows almost no visible evidence. This means the most valuable data in a voice lesson is not what the teacher hears, it is what the singer feels. And in the outside-in model, that data is largely ignored.
Being Tuned reverses the flow. I begin not with how a student sounds but with how they feel somatically, energetically, and imaginatively. What does it feel like in your body to sing? What happens in your chest when you reach for that note? Can you perceive the source of your desire to sing? Every detail they give me provides far more refined data than anything I can hear from the outside. I am the expert on vocal technique, but the student is the expert on their own body. Neither expertise is sufficient alone.
Two signature Being Tuned moves illustrate the approach. The first is exhale-first breath work: rather than teaching singers to take a big, controlled inhale—the standard instruction, which often creates tension in the very moment the body most needs release—I start with the exhale. Release first. Let the inhale be a reflex, not an effort. The body knows how to breathe. When we stop overriding it, the breath organizes itself around the sound.
The second is what I think of as the “opera jolt.” A majority of my voice students are terrified to be loud, to “take up space,” so their instrument stays constricted. In these moments I will sometimes sing at my full operatic capacity, no holding back, the whole room vibrating. It is to let the student feel, in their own body, that full vocal expression is not oppressive. They get a firsthand experience of the sharing, resonating, beauty of an unleashed (but still aimed) voice.
Three Moments of Waking Up
I began practicing what was then called Circling in 2015 and took my first facilitator training in 2017. I did not set out to integrate Relatefulness into my voice teaching. As I spent more time in Relateful sessions, where the central aim is presence and an embodied awareness of what being with you is like for me right here right now, the gap between how I showed up in Relatefulness and how I showed up in my music studio became untenable. The integration was less a decision than an inevitability. Most of it happened subconsciously, but three early moments made it visible.
In the first, I was in my sixth consecutive lesson of the day. I didn’t schedule buffer time, and I believed that if a student paid for an hour I owed them precisely sixty minutes; I never let myself go to the bathroom. That day, a Relateful awareness surfaced: what I need matters during this time too. I told the student to run the song again while I went to the bathroom. It sounds small, but it was game-changing for me, the start of understanding that my own regulation and comfort directly affect what I can offer. Before that, I thought professionalism meant discomfort.
In the second, I was teaching a piano lesson and I was bored out of my mind. My Relatefulness training had me notice that I was tolerating. I said it out loud: “How is this for you? I’m super bored. Are you bored too?” It turned out he didn’t care about reading sheet music or the method book, he wanted to play the music he heard on the radio. We pivoted to chart reading on the spot and never felt bored again.
In the third, a student arrived with a tear-streaked face, having learned an hour ago that her beloved grandmother had died. By then my Relateful listening had become intuitive. I offered two options: we could work with how grief was affecting her body and voice, or we could let music hold her. She chose the second. I dimmed the lights. We lay on the floor. I played Barber’s Adagio for Strings while we both let waves of tears flow. Then I played from my mourning playlist. That was a voice lesson.
Each moment traced back to the same Relateful move: arriving at what is actually here, not what a predetermined curriculum says should be here, but what is genuinely present.
Invitation, Not Command
My all-time favorite word is “ictus.” An ictus is the moment where a conductor’s had changes direction, and I had always thought it was a demand: “Put beat two right here!” But I later learned from a first chair violinist of the New York Philharmonic that the ictus is an invitation, not command. The conductor commits to the movement with an energetic resonance intended to compel the desired sound from the musicians. My favorite conductor would stop us in rehearsals when something went wrong and say, "That was my mistake, will you give me another try?" He was refining his ictus, his invitation.
This is exactly how I facilitate a voice lesson, and it is exactly how Relatefulness taught me to facilitate anything. In a Relateful session, instead of leading a planned interaction, the facilitator orients toward presence and trusts awareness as a guide, noticing what is genuinely present, including what is being avoided or tolerated. I bring this same orientation to every music lesson.
I have the student pause and self-reflect before we begin. Where are you right now? How is your body? Is there something you’re burning to work on? This is not small talk, it’s the foundational act of the session, because fatigue, emotional weight, and physical tension determine what is even possible for the voice in that moment. Liam, one of my students, told me it took five or six lessons to realize he could sing at any time he chose—that he was in the driver’s seat. He had spent those early sessions waiting for me to tell him when to sing, what he thought a voice teacher would do. When he understood the choice was his, he described it as learning he was at choice with his voice. Bella described the effect of this approach: the sessions were so different from one another that it seemed like I never had a plan. It was fluid and in-the-moment, waiting to see what would arise. Elle, a scientist who had always preferred being told the material directly, surprised herself by thriving. She reflected that the technical elements—scales, intervals—came in at their own time. When she arrived one day having not practiced her opera piece, I offered the choice to work on it anyway. She was startled. Her previous teacher would not want to hear a piece that hadn’t been practiced—a waste of the teacher’s time. The idea that a lesson could meet her wherever she was struck her as a revelation.
The Relatefulness practice of “making the implicit explicit” has entered my voice lessons directly. Rather than delivering a verdict, I explore collaboratively from embodied experience: “I felt something shift in the third phrase, did you feel that?” or “There was a moment where I lost you, can you tell me what happened internally?” This makes the lesson genuinely collaborative in a way that outside-in instruction cannot be.
Listening with the Whole Body
When a student is singing, I’m often not really seeing with my eyes anymore. I’m feeling my body, letting their voice impact me. Something in that impact generates, inside my own body, a surprisingly developed guess of how it might be feeling in theirs as they sing. When they finish, I check my strongest guess: “Was there a tightening here when you reached for that note?” If they’re unsure, we run an experiment. Recently at a session my embodied guess was entirely accurate, and Dave said it seemed like I had done magic.
I did not learn this in any pedagogy course or see it in any of my training. I learned it in Relatefulness, where tracking one’s own embodied experience in the presence of another person is a fundamental skill. Over thousands of hours, my body has become an increasingly sensitive instrument for reading what is happening in someone else. In the voice studio, this gives me access to information I could not get otherwise.
Dave reflected that in all his years of studying saxophone, trumpet, and drums, no teacher had ever asked how a passage felt in his body. He told me that if his childhood teachers had done this, he would have locked in his learning far more effectively. Bill, a guitarist, described how bringing this kind of somatic attention to his voice was the most exciting and surprising thing about lessons. It felt more in tune with how he already experienced music internally; he just needed permission to apply that attention to singing.
Everything the Voice Does Is Informative
Nearly every student arrives with a mindset of right and wrong (wrong notes, right sounds) and that framing is itself one of the biggest obstacles to their singing. My view is different. All sounds the voice can make are informative. Almost any sound is the perfect sound for some moment of some song the student may want to sing someday. Instead of “wrong note,” my response might be: “That pitch was a quarter tone flat, but given the difficulty of what you’re aiming for, your vocal cords are still building strength. Singing it a quarter tone flat with excellent technique is the best place you can be right now, great job!!” Or simply: “Ok cool, you don’t prefer how that sounded, let’s aim at what you’d like more.”
For most adult singers, the main obstacles are emotional and psychological. Someone told them they were tone deaf as a child. They believe singing should feel effortless, so when it feels exposed and vulnerable, they clench against the vulnerability, which makes the sound worse, which confirms the belief. Relatefulness gave me the capacity to be with these dynamics, to name what I notice, stay present with whatever arises, and let the student know that singing feels vulnerable for many of us, including me, and that we can collaborate to navigate the full emotional range. Playfulness and humor are essential tools here. Laughter is a regulatory act. It coexists with seriousness. When I can model that coexistence, being deeply attentive and genuinely playful at the same time, it gives students permission to stop performing composure and start being human.
Liam described singing as intimate and sacred, which he’d never associated with his voice. Bella reflected that the lessons dismantled her perfectionism in a way years of work in other contexts had not. Isaac noted that a previous teacher would ask where he felt a sound but then say “don’t feel it there,” which is unhelpful when that was simply where the sensation was and he wasn’t putting it there on purpose. In our work, the aim is never to deny what is present. The aim is to get curious, explore, and be with it.
Discipline as Discipleship
For most of my life I felt burdened by the way I approached discipline. I forced myself to practice during my degrees. I told students what I expected of their efforts. Discipline was a weight I carried and placed on other people.
The shift came through Relatefulness. In my earlier training, I was doing a lot of tolerating: ignoring my own desires to give others the attention I thought I was supposed to give. But Relatefulness is one of the deepest trust practices I’ve encountered. An aim is to trust where our attention is naturally drawn and not force it elsewhere. This requires trusting the others in the session; if I missed something important, someone else’s attention will have caught it. And for me, no longer tolerating requires trusting God: if we all missed it, the person who spoke can see that their way of sharing didn’t land.
I had been tolerating the discipline I was taught in music school, and then I stumbled across the fact that discipline shares etymological roots with “disciple,” which is when a person loves something so much they can’t help but become devoted to it. Relatefulness helped me see that my truest nature is in love with music. I notice and accomplish enormous amounts with no force. I could trust that love, that discipleship, and stop ruining music with all the coercion I’d been calling discipline.
I now tell students: we don’t need music to survive. Music is for thriving. Don’t make the piano bench feel like the time-out chair. Because my methods rely on integration, on the body discovering how excellent technique feels and preferring it, students don’t need to force practice. The body, once it discovers what is possible, will pursue it. And if the love doesn’t translate into singing between lessons, my counsel is: quit and go pursue something you’re devoted to.
Bill told me that before our lessons he always half-sang with a hesitancy, a holding back. Three lessons in, he was singing at home spontaneously, aiming for a feeling he’d discovered in sessions. Once he found it, he said, it just rings out. What changed was not technique. It was permission.
Experience First, Name Later
In Relatefulness, the most powerful learning happens when a participant has an experience they cannot yet name, and then receives language for it afterward. The experience comes first, the framework comes second. If you reverse the order, if you teach the concept and then ask someone to have the experience, you get intellectual comprehension but not embodied knowing. The participant is performing the concept rather than discovering it.
I teach voice the same way. I do not explain breath support and then ask a student to do it. I create conditions in which their body organizes its breath well, often by working with their emotions, their imagery, their desire to express something specific, and then, once their body has done the thing, I name what just happened. “Notice what your belly felt like when that note sounded so good to you just now. Can you recreate it? Can we give it a name that works for you?” Now the technique belongs to them. It is not my instruction that they are executing. It is their own body’s discovery that they are remembering.
Dave and Isaac, a couple who take lessons together, described this as the difference between learning to make music correctly and learning to express what is real. Isaac said he was still working on connecting to music as an expression of something inside rather than something to be done correctly, and that the shift, when it came, changed not just his singing but how he related to making music with his partner and their nephew. Dave told me what he was really learning was not how to sing better, but how to be more himself, in music and in everything else. He said, “We came for the singing and stayed for the growth.”
What I Am Still Learning
Not every student thrives with me. Students who want the teacher to tell them exactly what to do find my style disorienting. Liam reflected that a younger version of himself might have taken thirty lessons to start singing. Elle said she would not have predicted this approach would work for her; it did, but it required a leap of faith. I’m still learning to signal that the open space is not the absence of direction but the presence of a different kind of attention.
What Relatefulness has given my teaching is a deep trust that what is genuinely present in the room is the most reliable guide to what should happen next. In a Relateful session, this means orienting toward embodied, relational presence rather than imposing a topic. In my voice studio, it means orienting toward the student’s actual experience rather than imposing a lesson plan. In both, my job is not to know the answer in advance. It is to create conditions in which the answer can emerge on its own, and to bring attention to it when it does.
Laila said the lessons were about “something on the inside that needs to come out, and that vocalizing helps you understand and give life to it.” Liam called what we do, at its essence, a presence practice with an underlying intention toward self-expression. I would not be teaching this way if I had not spent the last decade learning, in Relatefulness, what it means to be present with another person. Not fixing them, not directing them, but meeting them where they are, and discovering together what wants to happen next.
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