Why are some people more likely than others to develop voice disorders ?
Beyond the anatomic and environmental factors which may influence vocal health, we aim in that project at understanding how the subject may actively contribute to the developpement of voice disorders by his own behavior. We could then envisage some prevention and rehabilitation of vocal straining at the behavioural and not only at the physiological level. To that goal, we are exploring 3 main questions :
- What vocal techniques do singers and actors use to produce sounds very efficiently without hurting themselves ? Could some of them be used to prevent or rehabilitate vocal straining ?
- Are the inter-individual differences in vocal effort regulation related to the different ways speakers perceive and analyse the communicative situation ? Could we envisage a rehabilitation of vocal straining at the psychological and communicative level ?
- What are the communicative strategies (both acoustic and linguistic) which realise the best compromise between intelligibility and vocal load? Could we envisage teaching these strategies ?
In that project, we have developped a cognitive and semantical approach in order to couple verbal and perceptual fields to the acoustical and physiological ones, as we assume that "information" on voice quality is not in the measured signal itself but in the listener's cognitive representations, which allow him to give meaning to physical parameters according to his knowledge, his aims and the listening context.
Therefore we have chosen to start from the listeners' point of view in order to first explore from a precise linguistic analysis the meaning and consensus of the verbal descriptors and criteria which are used by singing teachers to describe Western classical voices. Only in a second step, we have started to find some acoustical and physiological parameters accounting for the perception of these relevant and semantically clarified criteria.
Grenoble Images Parole Signal Automatique laboratoire
UMR 5216 CNRS - Grenoble INP - Université Joseph Fourier - Université Stendhal