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The American bass-baritone and voice teacher, Donald Gray Miller, completed his formal studies at the Yale University School of Music. He continued with singing lessons in Milan and Berlin, making stage appearances in both cities.
After a further year’s engagement with the Wiener Kammeroper, Donald Miller joined the faculty of the Syracuse University School of Music, where he taught for over two decades, rising to the rank of Professor. During this time he was very active as a bass-baritone, singing over 25 leading roles from the standard repertoire, along with many roles in contemporary works, including the celebrated American premieres of Ernst Krenek’s Life of Orestes and Philip Glass' Satyagraha. He has also performned as a Lieder and oratorio singer.
Donald Miller's interest in the relevance of voice science to the singing voice grew in the late 1970's, and in 1984 he spent a semester in Groningen, the Netherlands, on a project with Harm K. Schutte and the late Professor Janwillem van den Berg. In 1987 he moved permanently to Groningen to devote himself to research on the acoustics and physiology of the singing voice as an associate of the Groningen Voice Research Lab. This work has resulted in a number of scientific publications together with Professor Schutte, as well as a doctoral monograph, Registers in Singing, published in 2000. His book on the practical application of spectrographic and physiological signals to voice pedagogy, Resonance in Singing: Voice Building through Acoustic Feedback, became available in July, 2008. The book doubles as an extended manual on the use of VoceVista and the electroglottograph (EGG) in singing instruction and a textbook for courses on singing pedagogy.
An important result of his work in Groningen has been the program VoceVista (Visual Feedback for Instruction in Singing), which was introduced in 1996, when personal computers became powerful enough to perform real-time spectrum analysis. Since then it has been regularly updated and further perfected and is now in use in voice labs and facilities for training singers world-wide, particularly in university training programs for singers in the USA, Germany, and the Netherlands. A recent addition to the program, VoceVistaVideo (VVV), adds the video signal to those of the EGG and spectrum analysis of the audio. |
