As the primary means of communication, voice plays an important role in daily life. Voice also conveys personal information such as social status, personal traits, and the emotional state of the speaker. Mechanically, voice production involves complex fluid-structure interaction within the glottis and its control by laryngeal muscle activation. An important goal of voice research is to establis...

Previous studies have investigated the relationship between muscular tension, body posture, and voice quality. The aim of this paper is to study the postural pattern during voice production in healthy subjects compared with patients affected by voice disorders and in the same patients before and after vocal treatment by means of static posturography. Classic posturographic variables and spectra...

INTRODUCTION After total laryngectomy (TL), three methods of speech production are commonly available: esophageal, artificial (i.e., electrolarynx or equivalent), and tracheoesophageal puncture (TEP) voice. TEP is a highly successful voice restoration method for the majority of TL patients and allows for the production of intelligible, more natural sounding and fluent alaryngeal speech. Althoug...

BACKGROUND Obese people often have altered breathing patterns and therefore may experience difficulties in voice production. AIM To verify the presence of vocal complaints and the correlation between the auditory-perceptual analysis of voice and vocal self-assessment of a group of women with morbid obesity before and after bariatric surgery. METHODS A longitudinal, exploratory, descriptive ...

The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of laryngeal anatomy and physiology, characteristics of vocal fold motion, transformation of vocal fold vibration to sound, and mechanisms of vocal fold vibration. Throughout the chapter computational models have been used for demonstration purposes to generate examples of vocal fold motion and resulting waveforms representing various quantities.

Human voice production is studied as an acoustic process inside the vocal tract using the wave equation for air, and compared with large-scale databases of simultaneously acquired microphone and electroglottograph signals. The following theories are confirmed: For voiced sounds, the process starts at glottal closures. Immediately before a glottal closure, there is a continuous airflow in the vo...

Over the past three decades a variety of surgical techniques have been developed for voice restoration following laryngectomy. The underlying principle of these procedures is to divert pulmonary air into the gullet where vibrations of the tissue creates the sound used for speech production. To achieve successful surgical voice restoration voice production must be compatible with normal deglutit...