Voice Science and Technical Vocology
Analysing and modelling the human voice apparatus is important both for synthesis of speech and singing and for supporting evidence-based health care pertaining to voice and speech. This quest brings us into contact with a wide range of disciplines, including acoustics, continuum mechanics, biomechanics, psychoacoustics, phonetics, phoniatrics, speech-language pathology, and the related signal processing. Hence we have long-standing collaborations with clinicians, phoneticians, pedagogues and practitioners. Currently the main themes in this field include how to account for the large variability in voices, improving the fidelity of synthesised voices, and selected topics with applications to solo and choir singing. The general topic is appealing to the lay person, and so outreach is an important part of our activities.
The research group was started in 1967 (!) by Prof. Johan Sundberg as the Music Acoustics Group, and has since diversified, with Sound and Music Computing being mostly at the HCT-MTID department, while Music Informatics and Auditory Perception and Voice Science are mainly at IS-TMH. Historically, we have studied instrument acoustics, especially violin, guitar and piano; rules for music performance; acoustics of singing and choir singing, voice loading in the workplace, vocal imitations , and large-scale physically-based simulations of human voice production.