"Melissa Cross" is a voice teacher from New York City. She was a student for many years at Interlochen Arts Academy and the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in England. Though her background lies in theater and traditional opera, she is the creator of The Zen of Screaming Instructional DVD, a DVD that teaches the art of singing referred to as 'Screaming (music)/screaming'. The DVDs are distributed world wide by Alfred Music and also at the website http://www.melissacross.com. Over 50,000 copies have been sold to date.

Although Cross has instructed all genres for over 20 years, she is best known for her training with extreme phonation and working with vocalists including Randy Blythe and Corey Taylor. She has garnered national media attention as an expert in helping vocalists minimize and avoid damage to their vocal cords. She has appeared on numerous late night network television shows, NPR, MTV, VH1, the Discovery and Smithsonian Channel. She is internationally featured in several countries where seminars were conducted. At the 2009 Voice Foundation Annual Symposium she presented to classical voice teachers and international voice physicians and therapists her method to enable awareness of contemporary stylings. She continues to present workshops there annually as well as seminars for teachers and artists.

More Melissa Cross on Wikipedia.

The genre is up and coming, but I'm not interested in the money. I'm interested in helping these kids to not hurt themselves, because I see that they're doing a lot of damage.

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Expletives, if they have vowels in them, can make a big difference. Expletives that are full of consonants and emotion that is ill placed (does not). In other words, a scream should never feel like it sounds. It should never feel angry. It should never feel aggressive.

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I don't know anybody else that has a specialty. There may be somebody in the acting world that has concentrated on this. But in terms of the musical thing, I have yet to find someone.

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Absolutely. Like a lot of music, there's a movement that occurs in the underground and it's a bunch of kids uniting under the idealism that music spawns. In the '80s there was this aggressive music because kids were pent up, and they needed to get it out. So the ultimate expression is to scream your guts out.

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A good scream is when you can order dinner afterwards, or call your mom. A good scream is one that has a lot of overtone, meaning that it has a lot of highs and lows in it. It has a spectrum of frequencies that is actually pleasant to listen to. Well, that's all relative.

170

Someone took my parking space and I just lost it. And I started screaming, not at her but in the car. And my throat was like (makes a burning gesture). I stopped and regrouped and then I got out of the car and screamed at her the right way.

161

So they don't injure their voices. Basically, screaming is a part of a new up-and-coming generation of real-life rock 'n' rollers where passion and sincerity and reality is absolutely necessary and required. I don't want to see them damage their vocal cords.

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A good scream is when you can order dinner afterwards, or call your mom.

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Basically, screaming is a part of a new up-and-coming generation of real-life rock'n'rollers where passion and sincerity and reality is absolutely necessary and required. I don't want to see them damage their vocal cords.

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