Belcanto for the sick — the breathing Buteyko pointed at and never asked about

The fifth paper of the series After Buteyko, following No. 4, Everybody is doing Buteyko; the series begins with No. 1, The invisible breath. Near the end of a readers' hotline in 1997 Buteyko said that Ukrainian singing, like Italian, sets the breath most correctly, that songs with long o, u and m normalise breathing, and that a thousand "oum" a day would make his method unnecessary. In that aside he named the oldest school of the still belly and the full breath, and he never followed his own hint. The paper reads the measurements of singers and speakers (Watson & Hixon 1985; Hixon, Mead & Goldman 1976) together with De Troyer's account of the abdominal muscles: the abdomen tunes the diaphragm and the rib cage, the rib cage drives the pressure, the diaphragm refills the lungs, and the Italian school calls the arrangement appoggio. Talking raises ventilation in every healthy speaker measured (Hoit & Lohmeier 2000), and in tetraplegia an abdominal binder lengthens the sustained vowel (Wadsworth et al. 2012). Belcanto wanted a reliable voice under the stress of a stage, the clinical condition in its purest form; the paper takes the stage as the laboratory and the voice as the instrument Buteyko left out.