THE AGING VOICE IN CHORAL AND SOLO

SETTINGS

Ingo R. TitzeDirector, National Center for Voice and Speech,

University of Utah

Distinguished ProfessorCommunication Sciences and Disorders and the School of

MusicUniversity of Iowa

OUTLINE• Anatomical changes• Voice classification and tessitura• Registers and singing mezza voce• Warm-up and voice conservation• What’s an ideal choir size?

ANATOMICAL CHANGES

Aging Effects

VIDEO CLIPS

Age (years)

VOICE CLASSIFICATION

Male-Female Difference in Larynx Size

Males and females:

• Are not an octave apart in their fundamental frequencies (125:190 Hz ratio in speech)

• Are not equally distributed across their voice classifications

The problem of tessitura in voice

classification

Domingo

Bjoerling

REGISTERS AND SINGING MEZZA

VOCE

What is a register?

• A plateau of vocal timbre (voice quality) as pitch, loudness, or vowel is changed

What is a register shift (break)?

• A sudden (quantal) change in timbre as pitch, loudness, or vowel is changed gradually

What labels are sufficient to describe register phenomena?

• Fry (pulse timbre)• Male Modal (rich timbre)• Female Modal (mixed timbre)• Falsetto (poor timbre)• Whistle (near pure tone)

• In addition: A percent mix between male modal and falsetto

Unregistered voice

Male falsetto

Male modal

Female modal

Mix

Fry

Whistle

Falsetto

Mixed

Modal

Extreme registration in speech often prevents mixed registration in

singing

WARM-UP ANDVOICE

CONSERVATION

Warm-up:• Is primarily an individual activity, prior to

choir rehearsal

• Is highly dependent on your fatigue and recovery cycle and is most effective in short intervals

• Platoon warm-up is only moderately useful

Studies on voice fatigue in school teachers

In a teacher’s day, there are:

• About 1600 occurrences of voicing per hour at work

• More than 10,000 occurrences of voicing per day, about the same as the repetitive finger movements in a busy stenographers day of typing

In a teacher’s day:

• The accumulated phonation time is about 2-3 hours

• The greatest accumulation of voicing comes from 0.3-1.0 s durations of voicing (vowels and voiced consonants)

• At 150 Hz average F0, this amounts to 1.3 million cycles of vocal fold vibration

VIDEO CLIPS

Warm-up and preservation with semi-

occluded vocal tract exercises

The Basic Concepts in SOVT Exercises

• Stretch the vocal folds• Un-press the vocal folds• Use the vocal tract to help the

vocal folds vibrate

Vocal tractpressure

Zero oral pressure

Lung pressure

Oral pressure

Lung pressure

My motto for healthy vocal folds

Stretch and unpress the vocal folds several

times daily!

WHAT IS AN IDEAL CHOIR

SIZE?

www.ncvs.org

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The End