AURAL meditation

After years spent molding her voice as a classically trained singer, ANJELINE DE DIOS now uses it as a tool for healing others, and herself.

- NANA CARAGAY

GROWING UP IN A MUSICALLY INCLINED FAMILY, Anjeline de Dios recalls a distinct opportunity where her voice felt like a true privilege and gift. She would be called to the hospital to sing at the bedside of those who were ill. "There's something in the way a sick person listens: their hearing is more sensitive, and it makes a different sound come out of you as a singer," she says.

"A sacred service," a kind of higher calling, is how she considers it. She had joined liturgical choirs and glee clubs, including the Ateneo Chamber Singers, but found that conforming to the conventions of classical vocal technique would not always make her feel at ease. "When you're a girl in the Philippines who loves to sing, you're put on a track," she observes. "We put ourselves into this path of progress to sound better, and then it tumbles very easily into self-punishment and pressure and competitiveness, hearing that we're not good enough."

It came to a point where she decided to abandon singing entirely. "I experienced a very slow erosion of my desire to sing," Anjeline says. "I felt stumped, like I have a voice, and I want to sing, and I don't know what to do with my voice." Turning instead to a career in the academe, she pursued her Master's in Applied Ethics at Linköping University in Sweden and then completed her PhD in Geography at National University of Singapore.

There, she found herself drawn back to the musical world, researching on the lives of migrant musicians, starting with friends working on cruise ships. "It was almost like I diverted my impulse to sing toward listening to stories of musicians who were doing things with their voices for a living," she says.

INNER VOICE