002 Every Sing w/ Dr. Matthew Schlonager on Voice Dosimetry

Welcome to episode 2 of Every Sing Podcast. Special guest, Dr. Matthew Schlonegger on voice dosimetry. This show is about singing from every angle because singing is as big as the world, and hearing about the driving passion of contributors to music enhances our own love and understanding of singing. This is Nancy Bos, the host, and I'm thrilled about today's guest, Dr. Matthew Schlonegger. Dr. Schlanegger is the 2017 winner of the Van Lawrence Fellowship. He is a tenor and a professional singer. He got into voice science while doing his doctoral work in voice pedagogy at the University of Kansas. Through his doctoral work, he got into an area of research called voice dosimetry. Voice dosimetry has to do with vocal health and how we use our voices. Dr. Schlanegger is a voice teacher at Friends University in in Wichita, Kansas. Notes and links from this conversation are available on the show's Facebook page, which is a public group called Every Sing Podcast. If you'd like a quick way to engage the Every Sing guests in conversation, join the discussions on the Every Sing Facebook page. If you'd like to donate to Every Sing so that I can devote more time and effort to making it the best it can be, you'll find me on Patreon at patreon.com/everysing. Where you can donate and get some pretty cool prizes for it too. Before we get started, I want to take a moment to thank our sponsor, Teadora at teadorabeauty.com, for supporting Every Sing. Teadora is offering 25% off to all of my listeners who enter "every sing," all one word, at checkout on teadorabeauty.com. And every time one of my listeners uses that code, I get rewarded by Teadora. That's how they support this show. Our favorite Teodora products around my house are the Beauty Butter, Brazilian Glow Radiance Oil, and the Sugar Scrub Mask. We also love the soap. I have it at every sink in the house, and it has a great smell that everyone loves, not just me. I'll tell you a little more about Teodora at the end of the podcast. I'm also offering some help after the interview for people who are new to listening to podcasts. After the interview, I'm going to tell you how to subscribe to your favorite podcasts, like this one, and how to rate them on iTunes so they get better ranking, and what the show notes thing is all about. Ready? Let's go!

As a young singer, I developed some vocal problems as a result of not understanding how my voice worked, overusing my voice, and I'm really passionate about helping young singers develop in a strong, healthy way.

Yeah, I've heard so many voice teachers or students say along the way that they've followed their passion, which was caused by something that went wrong in their background.

Yeah.

All right. So tell us about voice dosimetry. What is it and what are we getting into here?

Well, voice dosimetry is the study of how we use our voices using real-time technological feedback in a natural setting. Basically, you could describe it as a use of Fitbits for the voice. So if you think of what a Fitbit does, technology now enables us to wear devices through the day that can tell us how we use our voices, can tell us how much—

Yeah, but Fitbits are cute. What does a voice dosimetry device look like?

Well, there are several different models, but basically there is something that attaches to your neck right above the sternal notch, that little indention above your, you know, right below your Adam's apple. And it has a microphone called an accelerometer that measures skin vibrations in your neck. And by doing that, it isolates your voicing without measuring all the ambient sound around you.

Ah, cool.

And so that microphone then feeds into a little computer that you wear on your side. In fact, some people are even developing technology that You could do this eventually on an iPhone, which would be really cool. We're not quite there yet.

Okay.

Well, this sounds really not obtrusive. It's just a patch that's there in that little notch at the top of your ribs.

Right.

And so if you were— if you're walking around with it all day, it might look a little odd to somebody. But the device I use, it kind of looks like you're wearing— you have a pair of earbuds and they're just it's sitting around your neck.

Oh, of course.

And actually, I'll also say the device I've been using is really cool because it has two different kinds of microphones. It has this accelerometer transducer that measures the skin vibrations in your neck, and it also has a regular microphone that does measure the ambient sound. So it's capturing both at the same time, and you can do some comparisons and even look at seeing if it's loud in the room, are you using your voice differently? Are you, you know, if you've heard of the Lombard effect, we tend to— make our voices louder in order to match the ambient sound in whatever space we're in. And so you can do some of those kind of comparisons too. A lot of neat things you can do by capturing all this data.

Yeah, we've all experienced that volume control issue when we've had headphones in.

Yeah.

I got you sidetracked on hardware. Will you go back to telling us what is voice dosimetry? Even the definition of the word dosimetry would be awesome.

Yeah, well, it comes from the word dose. So if you use your voice for a certain amount of time at a certain loudness, you will come up with a dose of how much you have used your voice. So it's dosimetry, comes where we're getting doses. And so through this, the technology can tell us how much we use our voice, you know, how many seconds and minutes, how loud, What was the average loudness? What was the loudest? What was the softest? And how high? What was, what was the frequency you were at? And for each of those, we have things that we can call dose. So we can call, we could say time is time dose. We have, uh, and then there's even a really cool thing that, uh, Ingo Titze and some other scientists came up with, uh, called distance dose. They created a mathematical formula that combines the frequency and amount and volume to say how far your vocal folds traveled in a particular amount of time. Every time your vocal folds vibrate, every one of those vibrations, they move back and forth.

Yeah.

So there's a distance that goes, and the louder you are, the further the excursion of the vocal folds. So they move further and they created this formula called distance dose, which kind of combines all those things together. And so over the course of a day, your voice may travel the equivalent of 10 kilometers in millimeters.

Yeah.

In millimeters.

Yeah.

You know, the, the typical dose of, uh, your voice over the course of the day, uh, of, of the, the, the vibratory cycles of your vocal folds. We also have this thing called cycle dose is probably, if you are a typical person, more than a million vibrations per day, which is just remarkable. And if you are a high soprano that sings a lot, you may have 2 million vibrations, uh, in a day.

So this really goes like, like head to head with the Fitbit for walking. I mean, really measuring distance.

It really does. It really does. The other thing we can do now with the technology— when the technology was originally developed, that was all you could learn, and we— but we weren't able to then look at the quality of the voices. Uh, and oh yeah, now the technology has advanced far enough that we can also look at the quality of the tone that is captured.

Okay, so what is the definition of quality?

Well, there's a lot of things. So the clarity of the voice, um, is it rough or clear, uh, how stable the, the voice is, uh, in terms of frequency. If you've heard of shimmer and jitter, um, is the, this, the signal that is coming from the voice stable, or is it unstable and wavering? Uh, you know, if the voice is healthier, it'll be a more stable signal. And we can even look a little bit at the acoustic structure. Of the tone.

Shimmer and jitter are words that are kind of exclusive to the speech-language pathology area, so can you define that for our audience?

Yeah, so jitter is the amount of stability in the frequency of the tone. So does the frequency stay fairly stable, or is it unstable?

Frequency meaning, does it go higher or lower, like that, right?

Right, and so for instance, is the And this is— you may not be able to even hear this very well, but you could think of it as, is the pitch of the vibrato, does it stay even or does it vary a little bit?

So is this relevant to speaking also?

Yes. Yes. So basically, is it how stable the tone is? And shimmer would be the same thing with the volume or amplitude of the tone. Is that staying even? So that's one thing that scientists look at, is the tone stable or not? You know, if someone's having vocal problems or vocal issues, those things may not be as even or stable. They may vary back and forth a lot, whereas a strong, healthy voice is going to have a very stable volume and amplitude as the voice is held out. So you might ask someone to sing an ah, like ah, just a speech tone and for several seconds, and then you can analyze that data acoustically to see how stable and how clear the tone is. Is it clear or is it breathy and rough?

Okay.

And then, like I said, we can even look at the acoustic structure of the tone, you know, and if you studied voice science as a singer, you know that we amplify certain overtones in different ways and ways to project our voices. But you could think of it, if you're not a scientist, you know, is the voice very bright? Like this, or is it darker and more covered? Does it have those resonance characteristics that we want as singers?

Yeah, so just a basic definition of that that you're talking about, from, from my mind, is that we've got our basic pitch, which we call our fundamental frequency, right? But at literally at the exact same time that we're making that fundamental frequency, we're also making lots of pitches that stack up with a formula, with a pattern.

Exactly.

At higher frequencies than that fundamental pitch.

Right.

And those we call harmonics or overtones.

Right.

And so if we're amplifying some of those higher harmonics, then we're going to get a brighter, brassier sound.

And if we're kind of truncating or eliminating the higher harmonics, then, then on that same pitch, we might have a dull and not very lively sound. Darker.

Right. Yeah. And it depends sometimes on what style of singing you're wanting to use, how specifically what overtones you amplify or dampen. And so it's not one is better than another, but it's something we can look at.

Okay, so you can measure the acoustics by looking at the sound waves that this microphone picks up?

That is correct.

So it's measuring vibration and loudness, and we can also then hear the pitches, so that can be analyzed too. And then, and, and so part of analyzing the pitches is the shimmer and jitter, the stability. And then how does it—

backing up to your first point, clarity— how does it measure clarity?

Well, we— there are actually algorithms out there that can measure things we can hear, how clear the pitch is. Actually, one of the main things we use is actually a measure called pitch strength. So is the voice nice and clear, or is it breathy? Or is it rough? We can hear some of those things. So obviously we want to hear, uh, that the, the, the strength of the pitch, uh, would be higher in terms of the— it actually, you actually get a number. A higher pitch means the voice is clearer, or a lower number would be that it's rougher or breathier.

I think the way I translate that myself is that if I were looking at this on spectral analysis, which is right, we can visualize the overtones. If we see sounds that don't fit in that specific hierarchical formula of overtones, we call those noise. And so it's measuring the noise, the things—

exactly. So the amount of noise in the pitch, how much is actually, you know, yeah, fits into those nice clear overtones and how much noise is there in the signal. That's a great way to look at it.

Okay.

For my doctoral dissertation, I worked with Dr. Eric Hunter of Michigan State University and also the National Center for for Voice and Speech headed by Dr. Ingo Titze. And we tested a method of dosimetry developed by Eric Hunter. And I looked at college and university voice students because I'm a college teacher during a typical week of classes. So I had 20 students wear this device all day for 3 full days. And we saw how they use their voices throughout the day, how the voices changed throughout the day, and was there any changes, uh, over the course of the 3 days. And then we also did some statistical analysis to see, was there a difference in the clarity and the— of the voices, uh, depending on how much they use their voice? You know, in other words, if they used it a whole lot, did their voices deteriorate? Did they get stronger? What did we, what did we find? Um, and I should— I mean, this was a fairly huge project. We captured more than a terabyte of data and 800 hours of recordings, so we had a lot of, uh, things to look at. And so, uh, and I owe all of that to Dr. Hunter. Uh, I am just the voice teacher who analyzed that, and he is the technical guru who developed all this and developed all this amazing software to analyze things. And a lot of going back and forth so that he could tweak the algorithm so that we could make sure that we got the best data possible. And we're getting there. This is not ready for, yeah, like a something that you can plug your iPhone in yet. They're unfortunately not that far. So it may be a few years till you can plug this into your iPhone and do it yourself.

Wow.

But hopefully it won't be too long, but it's really exciting.

How many students did you measure?

We had about 20 that finished.

Wow.

I started with 25, but not everybody successfully completed full days of monitoring all day. Some people just failed, uh, their college students, and others had a couple technical, uh, difficulties. But I think we had, uh, I think we had 17 that did everything, uh, correctly, and about an equal number of men and women. But we found that there was, there were statistically significant correlations between how much students use their voices and how clear their voices were. So as voice use went up, their voices also became clearer and higher and louder.

Wait a minute, the more they use their voice?

Yes, the clearer and higher and louder their voices got.

Wow.

Which is the opposite of intuitively you might expect, right?

Uh-huh.

You might expect that it would get rougher and softer. Yes. Now what we don't know, and this is where we need to go with more studies is why that happened. It could be that students that use their voices more were warming up more. They got more warmed up. So as you warm up, you know, we know in the morning our voices tend to be rougher and lower, and then as the day goes on, they get stronger. And we did find that when we compared morning, afternoon to evening, we saw that happen. Very clearly. But if you took the overall average, that happened. So it could be warm-up.

Yeah.

But other possibility, and maybe it was some of both, is that students that use their voice more got tired and had to use more muscular effort to overcome their fatigue and make sound.

So the machine became more efficient as they went along?

It— well, it, it may have become either more efficient if it was a warm-up, or less efficient If it's less— if the vocal folds are swelling and getting, you know, if you're getting— if the muscle's getting tired, you have to use more muscular effort and you have to recruit more of the muscles that aren't— they're not the vocal muscles themselves, but other extrinsic muscles to help make those vocal folds come together.

Okay.

You know, and so muscle tension, you know, if you ever sung for a long time and you have, uh, you you get muscle tension in your neck. Oh yeah, absolutely. Has that ever happened to you, or maybe students, that if you over-sing, then all of a sudden your neck muscles get tired, and that shouldn't happen, right? So, but a lot of studies, uh, that have been done in laboratories analyzing, uh, vocal fatigue have shown that as our— as we start to fatigue, we recruit those extra muscles, and we in essence are actually pressing our vocal folds more firmly together. And when you press, your voice gets louder, it's higher. It actually— your speaking pitch will go up if even if you're just speaking, if you're more fatigued, and the voice will become clear because once again, there's more muscle. So there may have been some of that happening as well. We're not— I'm not, you know, I'm not sure which it was, and it may have been different in some cases.

So, Matt, I got to interrupt for just a second. I've got real-world experience with this myself because I've recently become a voiceover actor and I've done a lot of audiobooks. And so, yeah, and so with an audiobook, I'm generally comfortable reading for an hour and a half straight. So that's 100% talking for an hour and a half.

Yes.

And after that, then I need to just take a break. But, and I don't usually have to take a break for my vocal folds. I have to take a break for my body. I need some sugar or I need to walk walk around my feet or whatever. So point being, I'm going to make a few mistakes in there, and later when I come back and edit it, I'm going to need to correct those mistakes. So trying to match my tone after speaking for an hour when I'm just, you know, it's 9 in the morning, I'm fixing edits, and I have to go in and try to match that tone that I made the day before— very challenging. And I find that in order to match that tone, I have to use unusual amounts of tension in order to create a similar tone.

That is a brilliant illustration of this. Yes. And so you've noticed that your voice actually has gotten higher as you've been reading for a while.

Exactly. It's gotten higher, maybe a little bit thinner. And yeah, and it's hard for me to do that when I'm relaxed and fresh in the morning.

And so that is, that is what we noticed with, with these students. And once again, there may have been warming up. There may have been fatigue. And of course, there are so many factors involved in vocal fatigue. You know, there is certainly just the sheer amount of vibrations. You know, if you're thinking about these vocal cords slamming together more than a million times a day, you have to wonder how much vibration is simply possible until, you know, things start to wear out, right? But there is also vocal hygiene, vocal health, One thing that I struggled with when I had problems in grad school was, was with acid reflux and simple overuse. And then there's training and conditioning. You know, some people train to run a marathon. If you don't run very often, you're going to hurt yourself if you try to run a marathon. It's impossible with what I'm doing with these studies to tease out everything, but it does give us a little bit of an idea. And You know, what I want people to take away from this podcast today is to think about their voice use and how much they use their voice throughout the day. And one thing that I think a lot of students don't think about when they are working on developing their singing voices, especially if they want to be professionals, is that they have only one larynx. And the same larynx they speak with is the larynx that they sing with. So if they are singing but then, you know, going to a bar in a really loud environment and talking over that noise for several hours, yeah, or a lot of day jobs, you know, at one point I had a job as a telefundraiser. Oh, and that was so hard on my voice.

Oh my gosh, yes.

And yeah, when I was in grad school and had these vocal problems, I was— I worked at a place where I was a singing waiter. It was loud. I was using my voice to sing and speak and just, I was overusing it. And so it's so important for those of us who are singers to think about how much we're using our voices overall. And, uh, can I just, I just want to share some of the numbers here that I got my study.

I love it.

So over these 3 days of singing, the average phonation time was about 12%. So of all these waking hours that they wore the device, they were actually phonating 12% of the time. Now, when they were singing, they were phonating 35 or 40% of the time. And when they weren't singing, they were phonating a little less than 9% of the time. And granted, you have to think, you know, when I'm talking to you right now, I'm talking a lot, but I have to breathe. And I have to articulate. So even if I'm— if you took the last minute where it's just been me talking constantly, I'm probably still only phonating about 50% of that time.

Really?

Huh.

Yes, because I have all that articulation and breathing and those things to do. Maybe a little more than that. But if I looked at this over the course of the day, even students that were very busy in singing 2/3 of their voicing on average came from speaking, not from singing.

2/3?

2/3. Even though they may have an hour of choir, they may have a voice lesson, some of these people are singing 2 or 3 hours a day, but still only 1/3 of their voicing came from singing. We talk a lot. And so is your speaking voice efficient, and are you being attentive to how you use it? And obviously we're all different that way. Some people can talk forever and their voices don't get tired. I've always been somebody who has to watch it a little bit. If I use my voice too much, I'll have problems. I'll just give an example. You know, I was on tour with my— I have a vocal chamber music group. We were on tour this spring, and I was out in Virginia, and one of my best friends from college, friends from college, was there. And—

Oh no.

We decided to go out and have a couple drinks together.

Which doesn't help.

It happened to be St. Patrick's Day and we went to a bar.

Oh, geez.

The bar was packed. It was loud. Loud. And we hadn't visited in years. And so we spent 2 or 3 hours.

Is that all?

In this incredibly loud environment. And I know better than this, doggone it. But I suffered at the concert I had the next night because I had overdone it the day before. I know that the concert was not as good as if I had said, "Come on, Matt." And I'm, you know, this is my dissertation. I know better. And, but I, you know, I got to talk to my friend and it was, I struggled.

Oh, well, I imagine, I know this is a completely different study, but I bet the day after that your voice was in amazing shape. But that's just my theory.

Oh, like the second day after? Yes. I don't know, that would be, that would be a good study to have.

You know what, that's more of experiences that I've had and that I've seen my students had, but it also relates to sports medicine, about how you push yourself and you build the muscles and you build the strength and you build the— I don't know all the fancy sports words, but then you take the break and then it's amazing after that.

Right. Although that depends, you know, if you In sports, if you push too hard, too fast, then that's when you get an injury.

That's for sure. Yes.

And that's when you, you know, and that's basically, you know, when if we get nodules or a polyp or got a hemorrhage, that's when we, you know, we've pushed the voice too much. And that's what we still don't understand with the voice. I think we're 20 or 30 years behind where we are in sports science to really understand what is the optimum level of training to, to get us to where we, we want to go most efficiently. We don't know yet.

And actually, your voice asymmetry work that you've done so far makes me wonder what the optimal level of warming up is to get to your best voice for singing.

Yeah, and I think there are studies out there, but, but really we don't know yet what is the right amount of warm-up. It may be— and, and, you know, you and I know as singing teachers, uh, and from personal experience that that tends to differ for different people. Yes, absolutely. Why? I'm not sure we know. There's so much more we can learn to help us find the optimal level of— yeah, and yes, we need to push our voices so that we have that same kind of effect that you get when you, when you work out, so that things break down and then rebuild, but then without going too far so that, uh, that we hurt ourselves.

Yeah.

So I've got a couple of questions for you about what comes next. You've just won the Van Lawrence Fellowship, and so I'd like you to tell people what that is and what happens because of that.

Well, first of all, I'm very excited and honored and amazed that I've been given this award. It's really a great honor. The Voice Foundation and the National Association of Teachers of Singing, NATS, jointly give an award every year, to a NATS member, a voice teacher, uh, who has shown excellence in teaching and has an interest in voice science and, uh, proposal to do a study in voice science and, and to learn about voice science and advance, make advancements in the field. So I was awarded the fellowship this year, and my proposal is to— or my— the study that I'm going to, to undertake over this next year now is to explore ways that we can apply this voice dosimetry to voice repertoire. I want to see how I can help singing teachers. So we all know that certain songs and certain roles are more fatiguing than others. A lot of it sometimes is when we look at tessitura, kind of how high on average does a song sit. If you're a singer, you know that the difficulty in terms of the song— so, you know, you may have one high note at the end that's hard, but But often we can pop off one high note. It's kind of where it sits. So if a song sits very high, or the overall— yeah, the overall dose of high notes. Um, and there have been a couple people out there who have developed what are called tessitura grams, which is kind of a diagram of how high a song sits. So they would look at the vocal score and go through and say, okay, there are 10 beats that you're on an F above middle C. There are 20 beats when you're on a G, and so on. So you kind of get this diagram that shows how many, how long you are spending on each pitch. And then you have a visualization of on average how high or low the song is. You can also then with each, with an individual singer, do something that's called a voice range profile. And a real voice range profile takes a while to do, but it's kind of cool if you have your singer sing on each possible pitch they have from their lowest to their loudest pitch, and you have— can have a sound level meter if you're in a lab that has more fancy equipment that it can just do this on its own. But then you can see on each pitch in your range how soft and loud you can get. And obviously the pitches that are in our wheelhouse we have the biggest range of volume on, right? So if our low notes, we probably can't sing very loud, or maybe our highest notes, we can't sing very soft. Obviously, the more facility they have, the more range we'll have on those high notes. But, you know, there's a, there's a spot in the middle of our voice typically where we have the biggest range of volume. And so we can get this diagram and if you lay the voice range profile over the tessitura gram, the idea is if it matches up, if the greatest number of pitches on a song are in the area where your voice range is the, the widest, it will probably be the most comfortable for you to sing.

Right.

And so the idea is we can develop these tessitura grams and understand the singer's voice range profile. We can identify repertoire that is best for students at that particular time. Kind of scientific way to do it. And hopefully eventually we get to a quicker, more efficient way of doing this. It's kind of a process now, but some cool ideas. So, you know, the thing is about these tessituragrams that have been developed by hand, if you count number of beats, it assumes that every beat is equal, right? Which, as we know, especially in certain repertoire, if you have a lot of rubato, everything is not going to be equal. And it also doesn't tell us anything about weight. Obviously, you know, in classical music, you know, Wagner is not the same as Bach. You're going to sing, you're going to sing with a different amount of weight. And obviously every singer is going to sing with a different amount of weight. And so one idea that has been out there for a while but hasn't really been tested— every time I talk to Ingo Titze, he says, yes, we want to do this and we still haven't done it, so I'm going to do it. But is to actually put a voice dosimeter on singers and have several singers sing the same song with different kinds of repertoire and develop a tessituragram based on what we actually record, not just notes. And then actually we'll have— we'll measure singers' perception of how the songs fit, and we'll have an expert panel look and see how songs fit with students. And just to get— start to give us a better idea of, you know, how do we determine what the best repertoire for our students are. We're gonna start to try this this year and see what we find. So I'm really excited about it, and I'm really excited to see what we can find. We don't know, hopefully we'll find something helpful. But, but, but yeah, basically trying to take this idea of voice asymmetry and actually apply it to repertoire and see if we can help singers and teachers.

So, Matt, of all the singers that are going to be listening to this podcast, there might be some that are wondering if they can be helpful, can they build tessitura grams, or is somebody doing this in a way that people could jump in? Does that exist yet, or is that in the future?

I, I think that's in the future. Like I said, there are a couple of, uh, voice pedagogues, uh, singing teachers and scientists who have started to do this. But once again, the, the technology that we're using is either expensive or not yet readily available. I'm borrowing the technology and need Dr. Hunter's help to have me analyze it. There are some commercial voice dosimetry devices out there, but they're quite expensive. So if you're in a large university with a voice lab, you might be able to spend about $5,000 to get one of these devices. But hopefully, you know, and I'm sure as with everything else, the technology will improve eventually and the price will come down so that we can do this. So right now everything is quite in new experimental stage, but I'm really hopeful that we can get some of this out there so that, you know, right now I love the pedometer on my iPhone. I run and I use a running app, and that's incredibly helpful to me, and I would love to be able— I'm kind of a data geek that way. I love to count my steps every day and see how I'm progressing. To be able to do that with our voices, I think, could be very helpful in helping us to develop fitness plans for our voice, basically.

That brings me to one last question, and that is the, the coming together in the mind of a scientist and an artist singer. Like you say, you're a data geek, but I also know that you're an artist and an accomplished singer. So how does that work together?

Well, you can't let the data and the science influence your artistry. But it informs everything. I think the more that we understand how our voices work, the more we'll be able to learn to use them and build them efficiently. And if we have developed— if we developed strong, efficient voices, then we'll be able to be more expressive. We'll be able to have a greater range of expression, and our voice will sound— you know, I think if our voices are more efficient, will probably perceive them as being more beautiful.

And our voices will probably age better too.

And our voices will age better. Yes. If you take care of your voice throughout your life, then yeah, you hopefully won't develop that, that wobble that happens when some people's voices are overused and get old. So like when I am a teacher, I may have a real understanding of a lot of the voice science behind things. But I'm not going to inundate my college freshman with all this terminology. I'm going to help them be an efficient, expressive singer and to be an artist. I'm not going to expect them in there right away to understand all, you know, what, what shimmer and jitter is. I'm not sure that's helpful, right? But I also think that it's so important that we understand how our voices work so that we can be more efficient teachers. If I didn't have that understanding, I would probably just teach all my students in the way that my teachers taught me. And for those students where those methods happen to work, or if their voices were healthy, they would probably be just fine. But if a student didn't have that same kind of perception, or if they had some vocal health problems, if I didn't understand the anatomy and physiology behind it, I would probably not be a successful teacher and I wouldn't know how to help them. And so I think it's so important for those of us who are teachers and those of us who are singers or aspiring singers to understand as much as we can about the anatomy and physiology and acoustics of our voices. And that's going to help us to, to learn and progress much more efficiently than we would without those things. Wow.

So well said. Fantastic.

So Dr. Matthew Schlauneger, if people want to get in touch with you or read what you've published, where should they go?

Well, you can read a couple of my scientific articles if you have access to the Journal of Voice. I've published a couple of things there. You can find me on Facebook or Twitter or send me an email at mattschlauneger@gmail.com. I unfortunately do not have a lot of things out there especially outside of the general scientific realm that are in more easy-to-read language, I think, yet.

When you have time to write this up and publish it, I think you're going to be amazing at putting it in language that the rest of us can understand.

Really, thank you for this opportunity today, Nancy. It's fun to be able to share some of what I've learned and some of what I know, and I hope that this has been interesting and helpful to your listeners.

Thank you so much, Matt.

Fantastic.

That was great.

Matt mentioned a lot of great ideas to follow up on, so if you didn't catch them, don't worry, I've got your back. The notes and the links from this conversation can be easily found on the show's Facebook page, which is a public group called Every Sing Podcast. Before I wrap up, I want to thank Teodora at teodorabeauty.com for sponsoring today's episode. Episode. Without their help, I wouldn't be able to pull this off. So take advantage of their generous offer of 25% off to discover their terrific products. Teodora's natural products are inspired by ancient Brazilian beauty secrets using natural anti-aging ingredients from the Amazon rainforest. They're toxin-free, ethically sourced, sustainably harvested, gluten-free, and made in the USA. So for your 25% discount and to help this podcast Use the discount code word "EVERYSING," all one word, when you check out. If you know of any companies that would be interested in reaching the listeners of this show through podcast sponsorship, have them email info@studioboss.com to start the conversation. So to wrap it up, the takeaways provided in Writing by Dr.

Schloniger are: Dr.

Schloniger is really passionate about helping young singers develop in a strong, healthy way. Voicetosimetry is the study of how we use our voices using real-time technological feedback in a natural setting. The point of voicetosimetry—and we're still in the early stages of learning from this technology—is to learn about how we can best use and train our voices. If you're an aspiring singer, be attentive to your overall voice use and remember that you have only one larynx. Vocal hygiene and voice care are essential to your success as a singer, and that includes both good speaking habits and how much you use your voice overall. If you have an intensive singing week coming up, you may need to think about avoiding loud environments where you will speak a lot at loud volumes. If you are preparing a major role or a recital, you need to practice regularly and methodically in order to build up your stamina. Treat your voice with respect and it will treat you well. So go to the Facebook group, "Every Sing Podcast," 3 words, to get the notes and links from this episode. And while you're there, join the group to get advance notice of what podcasts are coming up next. If you like what you're hearing on Every Sing, do me a favor and hit the subscribe button on your podcast player to make sure you don't miss a single episode. If you don't know how to subscribe or you're new to listening to podcasts, you may you might be like I was and not have a clue how to subscribe, review, comment, or see the extra info provided through your podcast player. I'm going to go through how to do all of those things with iTunes, and if you are somebody who doesn't listen through iTunes, chances are your podcast platform will have similar features. If you're using Stitcher for Podcasts, go to the show page and click the plus sign on the right side to subscribe. So, about how to subscribe to a podcast, comment, review, that sort of thing. First thing is how to subscribe if you're on your phone. If you aren't already listening through the podcast app on your phone, first open the podcast app and search for "EverySING," two words, or "Nancy Bos," one S. Once you're on the show's page, you'll see a button on the right that says— or is it the left? You'll see a button that says subscribe. Tap that and you are all set. You'll get every episode downloaded to your phone every time it comes out. If you're listening on your computer, open up iTunes and click on the iTunes Store at the top of the screen. On the right-hand side of the iTunes Store, click the arrow next to Music and then select Podcasts. Search for Everysing, and once you open the show's page, you should see a subscribe button to click right under the gorgeous blue show logo. Next, how to review and rate. Getting ratings and reviews is super important to podcasters. If you've ever searched for a new podcast on a topic, you know that you are much more likely to visit podcasts with 5 stars, and the bigger the number beside those stars, the more likely you are to take a chance on the podcast. So the way to rate and review is to go to the iTunes Store again and search for EverySync. After you subscribe, you will see a tab in the middle of the page that says reviews. Go there and leave an honest rating and 1 to 3 sentences about what you value about this podcast. And finally, a lot of podcasts put show notes right in the podcast player for you. If you want to see the extra info in iTunes, look for the 3 little dots on the right side of the show when it's playing. Once you tap that, you'll see a bunch of options pop up, and one of them is "View full description." Many podcasters put loads of information specific to the show in this part. I'll try to remember to do that each time so that you can get to the show notes without having to open a browser. That's all for this episode. Thank you so much for tuning in.