Iannis Psallidakos
I think of the voice as a space you inhabit, somewhere between architecture and acoustics.
The starting point
As a child in Greece, I wanted to sing. I wasn’t allowed to.
In music class, the teacher asked us to sing a phrase, one by one. My turn came. I opened my mouth. My voice must have stayed somewhere behind my lips. He didn’t like it.
“Next.”
I was never included in a choir. Not at school, not anywhere. Not once.
So I found my own method: I pressed my face against the speakers of our stereo system, my mouth an inch from the driver, and turned the volume all the way up.
That way, nobody could hear me.
At least, that’s what I believed.
Years later, after studying architecture and learning piano, violin (my family’s ears suffered), and various other instruments, I attended a workshop on sacred chants.
It was 2013.
Above the voices, at the centre of the circle, harmonics began to draw a column of light — a light made of frequencies, startlingly clear.
That day, I understood two things.
That sound was a world I wanted to inhabit.
And that if it had taken me so long to enter it, perhaps it was so I could hold the door open for others.
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From architecture to acoustics
I trained as an architect at the National Technical University of Athens, where Iannis Xenakis also studied. His work has long interested me for the way a simple rule can generate a complex form, and how mathematical or architectural thinking can become musical.
That way of thinking gradually found its way into my work with the voice. In overtone singing, a small change in the shape of the vocal tract can reorganise an entire harmonic spectrum. A subtle adjustment of resonance can transform what we hear.
Architecture and music share an interest in form, proportion, structure, space and time. What interests me is what happens when these principles are no longer observed from outside, but experienced through the body — through hearing, resonance, breath and voice.
In 2026, I completed my architecture diploma with Ombrodechtis (Raincatcher), a project centred on the underground waters of Aegina. It explored the relationships between water, memory, light, sound and subterranean space.
The project clarified something that had been present in my work for years:
the room we build and the resonance we inhabit are not separate questions.
Architecture taught me to think about proportion, material, structure and lived space.
Voice taught me to experience those same dimensions from within the body.
Photo credits: Karol Jarek
The voice and its transmission
In 2021, I earned my voice teaching certification (RNCP Level 6, recognised by the French state).
I trained with Emmanuelle Trinquesse, and later with Kenneth Bozeman and Ian Howell in the field that has most deeply shaped my teaching: practical vocal acoustics.
Bozeman’s work gave me a framework for translating acoustic principles into practical tools for voice training. Howell’s research on the spectral envelope and vocal timbre gave me a way of thinking about tone colour with the same precision that musicians usually bring to pitch and rhythm.
Together, these approaches changed the way I listen to voices.
They taught me that acoustics is not something to add to vocal pedagogy afterwards. It can be one of the foundations of how we understand, teach and experience the voice.
I have also studied world polyphonic singing at the Philharmonie de Paris, the Buteyko breathing method, analytical Musicodrama with Xanthoula Dakovanou, and music therapy at the University of Athens (EKPA).
What these different transmissions share for me is a simple principle:
Listen before you correct.
I work with people who have never dared to sing, as well as with voice professionals, teachers, speech therapists and choir directors.
I have led sound meditation and overtone-singing workshops for autistic children, and collaborated with JMFrance to introduce harmonic singing in nine primary-school classrooms. These experiences have profoundly shaped both my listening and my way of teaching.
I also regularly work in academic and professional contexts, including the “Beyond Vowels” conference at the AFPC pedagogical days in Versailles, guest lectures at the Department of Music at the University of Macedonia, the 4th International Congress on Voice (ARTience) in Athens, and co-teaching with vocalist Savina Yannatou at the Music Village international workshop.
Deep listening - the root of the practice
There is a question I return to often:
What came first: the technique or the listening?
The more I work with the voice, the less convinced I am that they can be separated.
I am interested in the possibility that a vocal technique is not only something we learn through instruction. It can also emerge from a particular way of listening — from paying such close attention to sound that the body begins to respond to what the ear discovers.
This way of thinking was deepened by my encounter with Iégor Reznikoff, mathematician, philosopher, musicologist and pioneer of archaeoacoustics.
I attended only one workshop with him, but it changed how I think about the relationship between voice and place. His work on prehistoric caves, ancient sacred spaces and Romanesque architecture showed me that the acoustic character of a place can be approached not as an incidental property, but as something that may have shaped how people used, experienced and inhabited it.
It gave me another way of looking at architecture:
not only as something we see, but as something we hear from within.
Zeno, as reported by Diogenes Laertius, once told a young man who talked too much that we have two ears and one mouth so that we might hear more and say less.
Voice teaching often gets that proportion backwards.
Almost everything begins with the mouth, the organ we have one of. Much less attention is given to the two we were given for listening.
My teaching begins on the other side of that ratio:
before changing the voice, learn to hear what lies beneath it.
The research
I am not a scientist by training.
I am a practitioner who keeps encountering questions that require scientific investigation.
My current research focuses on overtone singing and vocal acoustics, including the interaction between harmonics and vocal-tract resonances, possible vortex-acoustic mechanisms, and questions around auditory and neural perception.
I develop hypotheses from practice and seek ways to test them through acoustic analysis, imaging and interdisciplinary collaboration.
At a glance
- Voice
RNCP Level 6 certified voice instructor, recognised by the French state - Architecture
Architecture degree, National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) - Research
Independent research in vocal acoustics and overtone singing - Performance
Performed at the Little Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus in Thēbae Desertae - Teaching
Masterclasses and lectures at the AFPC pedagogical days in Versailles, the University of Macedonia and the 4th International Congress on Voice (ARTience), Athens; co-teaching with Savina Yannatou at the Music Village international workshop - Further training
Vocal acoustics, overtone singing, spectral listening, sacred chant, world polyphonic singing, music therapy and breathing - Research profiles
ORCID: 0009-0004-2234-0476 · Academia.edu · Zenodo