Pneumaphonie® (Serge Wilfart Method)

“Pneuma”: Breath and “Phonie”: Sound

A new approach to voice coaching, this is a unique method to generate power, presence and harmony.

In Verbo Veritas

A truthful communication can only be established through a truthful instrument and a right voice. But nobody comes out of adolescence with their authentic personality, or may we add, with their true voice: the instrument has been damaged from the first months of life by emotional and affective events.

The unavoidable psychological tensions and intellectual cleverness that follow distort the way breathing functions at the deepest level and therefore voice emission.

A radical cleanup and a thorough reconstruction are required to restore, before and beyond words, a true communication. Since every communication is vibration, the proposed exercises will aim to retrieve a true vibration through breathing and sound, as channelled by a reharmonised bodily instrument: re-establishing a right relationship between breathing and sound, re-unifying the animal and the intelligent being.

The universal Voice, the Voice of others

Breathing and sound are of universal nature. Each of us has in principle the capacity to vibrate with the other in spite of linguistic barriers, if s/he recovers the pneumaphonic availability present at birth. Since childhood and adolescence have disturbed this natural disposition, we have stopped breathing properly. We have become disabled in our breathing, and therefore in our voice.

An experiment was carried out at the University of Lille III on students of 50 different nationalities. It demonstrated that, as far as the deep level of breathing, the breathing system and the available phonemes are concerned, we are all identical. Any adult can rebuild him/herself, provided they are shown the way in the voice.

They will realise when they reach their destination that there is only one voice: theirs and the others’ originate in one and the same vibration.

Voice and vocal assessment

This extremely precise method allows a vocal assessment made up of exercises in reading and singing, which reveals the obstacles of all kinds hampering a harmonious phonic flow:

• Insufficient production of breathing or irregular flow
• Distorted posture pointing to a troubled verticality
• Affective blocs
• Sterile intellectualisation

These deficiencies of all kinds are directly and rationally perceivable by the analysis of the sound produced.

The voice, an integral reflection of the being at the various levels where it gets organised, is both revealing and healing.

A precise and adequate singing practice allows to rebuild healthy ventilation in a harmonious body: the individual is led to become aware of his/her deep abdominal breathing, as opposed to the limited superficial thoracic in-breath, which generated tensions in the upper body. The out-breath also recovers its natural amplitude and frees the natural flow of the voice.

Writing the voice, a liberation

It is possible to rewrite the history of an individual through their voice. The Pneumaphonie® method makes it possible to free them from deep angst, from firmly rooted anxieties and from psychosomatic disorders revealed by the body’s memory.

The true sound triggers an immediate agreement between the universal breath and the bodily instrument which channels and reveals it. The true sound reveals, liberates and conveys the message: it questions, solicits, signifies and communicates.

Singing must be an act of love, it bonds.

You and your voice

A person who, while mastering breathing at the deepest level, reads the phone book, holds the audience spellbound. If they read a literary piece at the intellectual level, without controlling the abdominal respiration, it bores and even irritates the audience.

Mastering inspiration-expiration-voice, a symbol for meditation and action (East-West), is a true art of living. This leads to the emergence of the true personality and to the authentic act. For an outside observer, something undefined has changes in the deportment, in the Voice, in the mental attitude and in the physical appearance of the speaker, in brief in their presence.