My cat ran away for 2wks then came home and is now more vocal. What may have caused this?

The most common cause of vocal damage is ignorance. People figure that since their fav singer seemingly just opens his/her mouth and lets some good sound out, that there shouldn't be much to it. But singing can be hard work!

A simple comparison- most everyone has two legs, so it would be logical to think, everyone can run, right? Okay, I can make it to my bus stop if I need to hurry, but that's about it for me. I see lots of folks out jogging, so that's a bit of training, right?

What about the people out there, training for a marathon? They really have to love the sport to invest that much time and training. What about Olympic runners, the very best of them all?

They don't know that anything else besides running exists. ( Well, okay, eating and sleeping, but just as a way to keep fit for running) the people who make their living singing are that way. They put in lots of time and energy for training.

Stuff that you don't see in performance. Folks who want to sing for a hobby may not have to invest all that time, but they really ought to know something about how a voice is built inside the body, and a couple of hard-and-fast rules to avoid putting the fragile mechanism under stress. For example, when we speak, we feel the vibrations of the voice in the throat where the voice box, or larynx, is positioned.

Most people think;"okay, if I want more sound, I need to work that part of my body more." this is false logic. What really powers our sound is our breath. We need to learn about a good, consistent breath stream that provides the motor for the sound.

That leaves the small muscles of the larynx alone so they can go about their built-in job in the best way possible. Another hard-and-fast rule is knowing for certain that the voice you hear inside you is not the voice that the rest of the world hears. You are the only one who can hear the inside voice.

We train the "outside" voice. That means. We need to find the best and easiest way to get the sound outside.

That means we have to relax our jaws and tongue base muscles to let the sound out without controlling it. This is where a singing teacher comes in handy. They do the listening for you, and give you the feedback to say, nope, sorry, you're still holding on, let go, relax your jaw, connect to the breath, and all sorts of things like that.

You learn to feel what's right ( you already know the sound is different) and associate that with the big smiles on everyone else's faces. Trying to push or force the voice without knowing these things is the shortest, surest path to vocal danger. The vocal cords ( in an adult body, just over an inch long) are not built to withstand constant pounding.

The surrounding muscles, not much bigger themselves, are a support system, but they can't handle the stress either. The most common symptoms of misuse are: tight throat during singing, a sore throat after. One day or two of this won't hurt, so having a good loud time at a party now and again will fade after a couple days' rest.

But consistent, deliberate forcing will hurt. The cords get blistered. The blisters turn to callouses.

The voice gets husky, continuously hoarse, no amount of throat clearing helps. The singing voice is always tired, and it gets harder and harder to produce an adequate sound. The callouses turn to nodules.

The first step towards recovery: 6 weeks of silence. If that doesn't work, surgery. And there's still no 100% guarantee that one's voice will be restored.

Nuff said?

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.