National Center for Voice and Speech

18/07/2025

Sounds like envy to me.

17/07/2025

Interesting research at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

A new study shows that automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems trained on speech from people with Parkinson’s disease are 30% more accurate in transcribing similar speech patterns.

16/07/2025

🎤 Where does your voice really go?

When you speak or sing, sound doesn’t just pour evenly in all directions. It radiates outward in specific patterns. Let's look at a study that laid those patterns out in remarkable detail, especially looking at the high-frequency energy (HFE) that’s so crucial for clarity and intelligibility.

🔍 So what was in the study?
• 📈 High-frequency energy (8 & 16 kHz) is highly directional — it projects most powerfully straight in front of you. Move off to the side by just 45°, and HFE drops by around 3 dB, which is enough for the human ear to notice.
• 🗣 Soft vs loud? As people get louder, their voices do become slightly more directional, especially in those higher frequencies — probably thanks to changes in mouth shape and vocal effort.
• 🎶 Singing vs speaking? Surprisingly, singing isn’t more directional than speech overall. Even though singers often open their mouths wider, the effect isn’t large enough to change how sound radiates in a meaningful way across styles.
• 🚻 Men vs women? Tiny differences showed up at high frequencies (male voices being a touch more directional), likely due to anatomical differences like mouth size — but overall, gender didn’t dramatically change sound radiation.

💥 But the biggest surprise came from individual sounds.
Certain phonemes — especially voiceless fricatives like /s/ and /ʃ/ — are far more directional than others. They beam high frequencies forward much more strongly than, say, /f/ or /h/. This means the type of sound you’re making shapes where your voice energy goes.

🎧 Why does it matter?
• It helps explain why you’re easier to hear (and locate) when facing someone. That sharp, clear high-frequency content they rely on to understand speech is aimed right at them.
• It also shows why mic placement matters so much in recording or amplification — getting even slightly off-axis can cost you those crisp details.
• And it hints at how our ears use HFE directionality to solve the classic “cocktail party” problem: picking out one voice in a noisy room.

🧬 Bottom line:
Your voice is a beautifully complex directional instrument, especially at high frequencies. Understanding these patterns helps with everything from acoustic design to hearing aid tech — and might even help you be a more intentional communicator.

Text adapted from "Horizontal directivity of low- and high-frequency energy in speech and singing" by Dr. Brian B. Monson, Dr. Eric J. Hunter and Dr. Brad H. Story, published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, May 2012. Full text here:https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3407162/pdf/JASMAN-000132-000433_1.pdf

15/07/2025

Register here: https://www.dianeowensvoice.com/july-28-webinar-vocal-readiness-relief-rescue

14/07/2025

🧬 Your lungs and your voice are more connected than you might realize — and not just because air is the power source.

When you speak or sing, there’s a complex dance happening between your brain, your breath, and your vocal folds. Some of it is conscious, like choosing words or shaping vowels. But a surprising amount happens automatically — built right into your nervous system.

💡 Consider this:
• As you breathe in, your vocal folds reflexively move apart.
• As you breathe out, they move together (even if not fully closed).
This isn’t just a habit you learned to speak. It’s part of how your body manages airway resistance to keep breathing smooth and balanced.

🐾 Animal studies make this even clearer.
Researchers have shown that cats and dogs can keep vocalizing purely through brainstem stimulation — no higher brain input. But if you suddenly reverse airflow during that phonation, their vocal folds will instantly open, even with the brain still telling them to phonate. It’s a powerful reflex loop between the lungs and the larynx.

🎤 So what does this mean for singers, speakers, and teachers?
Some pedagogies lean into this natural connection. They argue that if you set up the breath right, the vocal folds will follow — snapping open and closed in sync with the airflow, no extra laryngeal fuss required. Just “ride the breath,” and the glottis responds.

Other schools of thought are more larynx-focused. They teach the vocal folds to operate with some independence, so that small hiccups in breath don’t automatically disrupt phonation. In this view, training the voice means giving the larynx control even when the breath gets messy.

✨ Either way, it’s clear:
• Your respiratory and phonatory systems are hardwired together by deeply rooted reflexes.
• Understanding this relationship can help unlock healthier, more efficient voice use.
• And it’s a rich area for continued voice science research.

Pretty incredible how your body’s built-in systems handle so much coordination — often before you even think about it. 🧠💨🎶

Text adapted from "Coordinated Breathing and Phonation" by Dr. Ingo Titze, published in the Journal of Singing, Sept/Oct 1985. Full text by subscription available at the website for the National Associate of Singing Teachers.

11/07/2025

The relationship seems strained.

10/07/2025

Interesting research from UC Berkeley.

Researchers have developed a brain-computer interface that can synthesize natural-sounding speech from brain activity in near real time, restoring a voice to people with severe paralysis.

09/07/2025

🔬 Measuring the micro-fluctuations of your voice: why it’s more complicated than you think.

Even the steadiest voice isn’t perfectly steady. Try to sustain an “ah” at constant pitch and loudness — your fundamental frequency (pitch) and amplitude (loudness) will still wiggle ever so slightly.

These tiny, cycle-to-cycle variations have names:
🎯 Jitter = frequency perturbations (tiny fluctuations in pitch)
📈 Shimmer = amplitude perturbations (tiny fluctuations in loudness)

Voice scientists and clinicians use these measures to help detect and monitor vocal disorders. But as Titze, Horii, and Scherer show in their classic work, getting reliable measures of jitter and shimmer is far from trivial.

👉 Why? Because when we try to capture these micro-perturbations, we run straight into the technical limits of how we digitize sound:
• Sampling frequency (how many times per second we record the signal)
• Bit resolution (how finely we break down amplitude levels)

For example, to measure jitter as low as 0.1%, you’d need roughly 500 samples per cycle — which means sampling at 100 kHz for a 200 Hz voice. That’s far beyond most typical setups! Even getting shimmer under control requires at least 9 bits of amplitude resolution.

But the good news? Clever techniques help bridge the gap:
✅ Interpolation (mathematically estimating between sample points) allows researchers to extract jitter well below what raw sampling would permit.
✅ Switching from peak-picking to zero-crossing detection for determining pitch periods dramatically improves accuracy, because zero-crossings are much sharper and easier to pinpoint precisely.
✅ Using windows of 20–30 cycles is usually sufficient for stable averages — though multiple repetitions (tokens) are essential.

This research also highlighted pitfalls:
🚫 Overly aggressive low-pass filtering smooths out waveform peaks and can artificially lower shimmer.
🎚 Recording on standard analog tape (vs. direct digital) introduces its own jitter and shimmer through wow, flutter, and tape noise.

✨ The bottom line:
Voice perturbation analysis is powerful, but only when the technical foundation is solid. Without careful attention to sampling rates, interpolation, filtering, and repeated measures, you might be measuring your equipment’s noise, not your voice.

This is why modern labs invest heavily in digital systems, interpolation algorithms, and rigorous protocols. Because these tiny variations — often less than a fraction of a percent — can be the first clue to a disordered voice.

🎤 Your voice may seem smooth to the ear, but under the microscope of perturbation analysis, it’s a beautifully complex landscape of micro-fluctuations. And getting it right takes some serious science.

Text adapted from "Some Technical Considerations In Voice Perturbation Measurements" by Dr. Ingo Titze, Dr. Yoshiyuki Horii, and Dr. Ronald Scherer. Published in the Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, June 1987. Full text here:https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ingo-Titze/publication/19561888_Some_Technical_Considerations_in_Voice_Perturbation_Measurements/links/5727bc0808aef9c00b8b4fc2/Some-Technical-Considerations-in-Voice-Perturbation-Measurements.pdf

08/07/2025

Need a good summer read? Check out the latest on the future of Vocology.

Sing and Shout for Health explores the remarkable impact of vocalization on human physiology, health, and well-being. Edited by renowned physicist Ingo R. Titze and vocologist Elizabeth C. Johnson, this groundbreaking book delves into scientific discoveries that reveal how singing, shouting, and oth...

07/07/2025

🧬 Biomechanics: A (relatively) bold new frontier of voice science

When most people hear “biomechanics,” they think of prosthetic knees, artificial hearts, or Olympic athletes studied on treadmills and strain gauges.
But what if we told you some of the most fascinating frontiers of biomechanics are happening inside your throat?

🎤 The human voice is often thought of in acoustic or neurological terms—sound waves, muscle signals, airflow. But at its core, voice production depends on the mechanical properties of the vocal folds themselves.
And unlike the steady, predictable properties of steel rods in a car, our biological tissues are constantly changing.

Consider this:
Consider this: The elasticity, mass, and even shape of the vocal folds can change over time, influenced by things such as aging, hormones, illness, and hydration.

Unlike machine parts, biological “machines” adapt in real time to these changes. Your nervous system fine-tunes control to keep pitch, loudness, and quality consistent—even as the underlying tissue subtly changes. 🤯

This is why researchers are so excited to bring biomechanical principles into voice science. It opens up profound questions, such as:
🔍 How does tissue elasticity evolve with age—and what does that mean for controlling pitch?
🥗 How do drugs or dietary factors impact the pliability of vocal tissues and, by extension, vocal performance?
💧 What happens to the delicate surface of the vocal folds when exposed to dehydration or irritants? How is the critical lubrication of the larynx maintained?
🩺 Could we one day use bio-compatible materials to repair or even enhance vocal fold function—restoring voice after disease or injury, or subtly modifying pitch and quality?

But this is not an easy science. Unlike legs or hearts, we can’t safely attach force meters or directly measure tension in live human vocal folds. Much of this pioneering work relies on careful studies using animal models, hoping to approximate the mechanics of the human larynx.

Still, the field is advancing. Researchers are not only studying acoustics, nerve signals, and high-speed imaging of the vocal folds—they’re also exploring how the actual material and geometric properties of vocal fold tissues determine vibratory patterns and sound.

And that changes everything.

Because it means the voice isn’t just a beautiful artistic instrument.
It’s also a marvel of biological engineering, balancing forces, elasticity, fluid dynamics, and neural control every millisecond you speak or sing.

🔬 As biomechanics continues to expand into laryngeal research, we’re on the cusp of understanding (and maybe even guiding) the most intimate mechanical system of all: the human voice.

Text adapted from "Biomechanics: The New Frontier in Voice Research" by Dr. Ingo Titze. Published in the Journal of Singing, May/June 1985

04/07/2025

We hope you have a wonderful day with friends and family.

03/07/2025

Interesting research being done at New York University.

Brain activity in vocalizing budgerigar parrots showed a pattern that harkened to those found in the brains of people.