In
2006, I was flown to
Hamburg by an esteemed group of
French and
German physicist to act as a vocal guinea pig. I'm useful to those studying the acoustics of the voice because
I'll try nearly anything (short of damaging my voice!)
Nathalie Henrich,
Lucie Bailly,
Markus Hess, Anna-Katharina Licht and
Frank Müller all coincided upon Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf for a few hours. Using a microphone, an
ECG, a nasal laryngascope (with a strobe at times, which matches the frequency of the sound being produced) and several white coats, they recorded me making a wide variety of sounds.
The video starts with the journey though my nose. Then there's some sideways yodeling (crossing the break from chest voice (and true head voice) into falsetto).
This is my favourite thing and my instructional video on this is at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_6nNWX7TTI )
Next, we have inbreath singing (starting with a triplet of chest to falsetto to inbreath).
Then there's throat singing. I'm not much of a throat singer (especially with an endoscope right next to my larynx), but to have one larynx doing each of the 4 different "growly voices" on roughly
the same pitch was rather useful to them.
First, there's the sob/whinge growl (no-one seems to know what to call this one).
Second is the vocal fry or croaky/morning voice. Thirdly, the
Louis Armstrong/
Fat Albert/
Fozzie Bear growl, which is where the epiglottus (which hangs off the back of the tongue) interacts with the ventricular folds (also called "false vocal chords"), firstly with and then without vocal folds (which is the
Dr. Claw "I'll get you,
Gadget" voice). An fourthly, there's the classic growl (which is akin to the
Tibetan/
Mongolian style). This leads into a scream and some heavy belting (not things I like to do for prolonged periods!)
Finishing with a snippet of my song "Got to Go" was apt, as I had a plane to catch and the others all had to race off as well. You might notice from the time code that
I've edited out quite a lot of coughing, gagging and chatting.
Fun stuff
... all in the name of science!
The above ways of describing vocal sounds are mine and I'm sure there are voice specialists out there who might disagree with me (and eachother) about how to describe these things... it's complicated in there! Bewdy, love, Mal
http://www.malwebb.com
- published: 24 May 2009
- views: 52793