A | speech, sing, music - Life - The Orange County Register

Lazaro Arbos knew he'd just nailed "Bridge Over Troubled Water." Before the four surprised "American Idol" judges spoke, tears began streaming down the young man's face.

Mariah Carey told him: "I think you have a beautiful voice." Arbos blurted out: "I love you so much." (Watch the video on YouTube.)

With a unanimous "Yes!" the judges stamped his audition performance with a seal of approval, securing him a coveted trip to Hollywood for this week's round. That's when the water works really cranked up. Arbos brought his hands to his face and grimaced with joy, relief, disbelief ? a scene to which we've grown accustomed over the course of 12 years of "Idol" auditions.

But there was something else in his reaction, something that a person who stutters knows well: One could almost feel the years of pent-up anguish flowing from his body. For a rare moment, he had triumphed over his impediment. And no matter how far he advances on the show, the stuttering community has a window of opportunity to inform the public about the science and mythology of this little-understood disorder.

"It's like 'The King's Speech' all over again. It's marvelous," said Jane Fraser, president of the Memphis-based Stuttering Foundation. "It's really thrilling for this man to attempt to say his name, and attempt to say the name of that song, and just open his mouth and have this remarkable ability to sing. That's the dichotomy of it: He sounds so incredibly good, and yet he stutters."

Music as therapy

Music has long been incorporated into speech therapy, since the way our brain forms speech differs from the way it forms speech that is sung. In "The King's Speech," the Oscar winner for best picture two years ago, speech therapist Lionel Logue has the Duke of York listen to music through headphones while reading aloud, which he does perfectly; the melody distracts him from his own constricted voice.

Dr. Gerald Maguire, a psychiatrist and professor at UC Irvine who founded the school's Kirkup Center for the Medical Treatment of Stuttering, explains the connection between music and stuttering this way:

An area in the left side of the brain called the striatum is the "timer and initiator" of speech, Maguire says. Research has shown that when there's an excess of a brain chemical called dopamine, it can inhibit the work of the striatum and interrupt speech. There are drugs that can block the excess dopamine, increasing activity of the striatum. But singing takes a different pathway in the brain than spoken speech, working around the excess-dopamine problem.

(For more details read this paper Maguire co-wrote on the phenomenon.)

A long tradition

Singing is different from spoken speech: There's a flow to it; the words are spaced out and delivered more slowly. For some people, this difference is like a miracle. The country singer Mel Tillis, perhaps the most famous stutterer of all, was lucky enough to have a teacher who recognized his gift early on, when he was 6. She had him sing a solo in front of the class, and he sung so well she took him to other classes to sing.

"I wasn't scared or tense whenever I sang. I didn't stutter at all," Tillis wrote in his 1984 autobiography. "The kids and teachers noticed that, and they talked about it. People still do today. They wonder how somebody who struggles so hard to get out a single sentence could sing so easily. There are other professional entertainers who can sing with no trouble, but stutter when they speak. Why is a mystery to me. Maybe it's the Lord's way of evening things out."

Opinions differ about the exact nature of the why. Several experts say one explanation of how singing unlocks a stutterer's halting speech is that the singer doesn't have to go groping for words. "You know all the words by heart, so there's no word retrieval," says Caryn Herring, a speech pathologist with Our Time, a New York City nonprofit organization that uses music, poetry and plays to help children who stutter.

Maguire insists that's not true, because stutterers still choke on words when reading from prepared texts. "Just knowing the words doesn't make you fluent; it's the rhythm and timing of singing that induces fluency," he said.

'Just sing all the time'

Tillis went on to become one of the most accomplished singer-songwriters in country music. He not only didn't run from his impediment, he embraced it and even made light of it, in concerts, TV appearances and movies from the 1960s through the '80s. His memoir is called "Stutterin' Boy."

Whether Arbos, 21, will have any kind of musical career depends largely on how he performs on "American Idol" going forward, but there's no doubt the guy can sing. During the Chicago audition, after struggling to squeeze out only a few words about himself (Carey finished the title of the song he said he was going to sing; he couldn't make it past the "T" in "Bridge Over Troubled Water), he unleashed a deep, soulful rendition of the Simon & Garfunkel classic.

The judges were impressed. "Just sing all the time," a smiling Keith Urban urged him. His colleague Randy Jackson agreed.

If only it were that easy. Although the rhythm and syncopation of music can be helpful to stutterers to build their confidence, it's not practical in everyday life. A teacher probably wouldn't look kindly on the distraction of a stuttering student singing the answer to a problem.

"It can be done, but I personally would prefer to talk like myself and stutter every now and then," said Herring, who began stuttering at age 8 but, after years of therapy and practice, says "more of what I want now."

(The group has an annual summer camp in North Carolina, with kids coming from all over the country, including California. For more information, check out the Camp Our Time page.)

A chance for awareness

Arbos' inspiring story is clearly part of his appeal as a contestant, and Fox maximized it before his performance. The on-screen titles made sure we knew his occupation was "ice-cream scooper." In a prepared segment, he described in heartbreaking detail how he was treated by other children after he began stuttering at age 6. "No one wanted to hang out with me in school," he said tearfully. "I had no friends to go out with, so I'd be home."

His mother said his problem only worsened after the family arrived in Florida from their native Cuba. His father said "music is his life."

If Arbos survives Hollywood Week and goes on to become a finalist, the pressure on him will grow. But so will the awareness of stuttering, even in the famous "American Idol" judges. After Arbos awkwardly introduced himself, twirling and pointing his right index finger (a common timing device for stutterers), Carey said: "Tell me about the way you speak. Is that something you're working on, or ...?"

He's probably "working on" it every minute of the day, actually. "It's like a roller coaster," he said.

And for the record, Mariah, it's "Bridge Over Troubled Water," not "Waters."

Contact the writer: lhall@ocregister.com or 714-796-2221

Source: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/speech-494954-sing-music.html

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