Thank you very much, Juan Carlos.
I am totally agree with you because they are able to professore
or Philip Alla to this university open although of doors to our state.
So thank you, Philippa, for your preparation,
your knowledge and your generosity. Thank you.
Those are moments that you can explain us some of the surprises of today.
Thank you.
Thank you both.
I really wanted. To.
Thank you both.
I really wanted to say
that I feel at home.
It's was with great pleasure that Junior
has open their arms
to me.
So without further view
and not being emotional at all,
are we
I would like to start to present you the voice, music and language
research laboratory that we have built
that I am the present director. And
why voice?
Why music and why language?
Well, the voice is like a diamond when there is light
that crosses the diamond.
It is refracted into many beautiful colors.
And by studying the voice, we can study crucial phenomena
and to phonetics, to linguistics, to cognition, to education,
to mathematics, chemistry, physics,
biology, culture, art, technology,
communication, psychology and perception.
And of course, this interdisciplinary nature of the human voice
required a multidisciplinary, collaborative network of researchers.
So I am not alone in this lab.
And besides having the back up of the Faculty of Education,
my department and the rectors,
I have with me a gynecologist,
Swiss is an expert in psychology and in menopause.
And he's the president of the Spanish Society of Menopause.
Dr. Bloorview, Coronado.
I have a specialist
in linguistics and phonetics that works at the philology,
the faculty of this university, Nuria Paulo.
I have an expert in statistics.
That is my colleague at the faculty of Education, Diego Adora.
And then I have my right in left arms, my research assistants,
who are also doctoral students at the Faculty of Education,
the musician and Voice Pedagog Mauro Fuser
and the clinical psychologist and Amatil's Matthias Sorry,
and of course, like in any lab,
we should not we should not be closed in our shells.
So we have already opened our doors and collaborated
with the Portuguese University, with two Brazilian universities,
with two universities in the United States
and with four universities in Sweden from where the consultant
of this project, Professor Stanton's STEM, comes from, Katie H.
And also my former mentor, as opposed of students to whom I own a lot.
What I know that is Professor Johan Sandberg.
So with this international collaboration network
we have already published 26 articles, three under the gender
studies umbrella.
One looking at the characteristics of a herd,
including singing tradition called the tuning
that is sung only by females
then and now, another classical traditional,
the music from Portugal that is only sung by males.
Fadel from the Queen Brain.
And then together with my colleague Maria Paulo,
the attractiveness of the female voice and the different phases
of the menstrual cycle and one taking a contraceptive pill,
how is that attracting attraction comes to a male here?
Then we also develop the three publications
in the under the umbrella of health education study
the importance of glottal airflow and glottal area.
We form for a normal speech
in LCA adults also aerodynamic
measures and acoustical evaluations of the voice source.
And recently a paper that the unit has given a prize to my colleague
Nuria Paulo on the self-perceived voice handicap
during COVID 19 compulsory face mask use.
And so let us tell you about how all this started, shall we
Well, it started with the research project under the finance
the financial support of Comunidad, the Madrid, that is a program
of attracting the research talent to the Comunidad in Madrid.
And that has allowed me in the first year to do an outreach activity
with a collaboration of Glasgow, the local business in Madrid.
That was a symposium on voice science and pedagogy.
Add to the scholarly superiority, come to the Madrid, then
I was able to incorporate my brilliant human
resources and acquire research equipment.
And we these we prepare the first specialization online
course on pedagogy and technology, voice and singing
voice that is being delivered
in three languages Spanish, Portuguese and English.
And we started also to do a publication record.
Then we launched the first edition of that online course
and we created more national and international collaborations,
continue to develop our publication record.
And we designed a website that it's now fully completed.
And we
will like to invite you to go and see because
it has lots of interesting activities
that is unheard voice la dot com.
And currently we launched a second edition of Pity Voice.
We are collecting data at Ospital Clinical The San Carlos in Madrid.
We also continue to develop our publication
recorded as a research group, and we do outreach activities
such as the one we are developing today,
but also others that are in our YouTube channel.
Don't miss it, Mauro.
We'll talk more about that
So what is a research current research project we have?
Well, we wanted to know the extent to which
menopausal voice changes affect female professional voice users.
So under the umbrella of gender studies and health
female health education, we want to document female voices,
speech and communication with respect to menopause.
For doing
that, we are using the multi mythological approach,
doing interviews, self-perception, scales, multi-channel voice,
recordings, and multi-media educational packages.
And the ultimate, ultimate goal is to promote sustainable voice
related working ability
and health in menopausal female teachers and singers.
Why Female Professional Voice Users?
Well, healthy voice is essential to societies because of impacts of voices
or their own work on quality of life and on health costs.
For example, if you use us, approximately 30% of
the population is a professional voice user and we think that
these numbers will be more or less the same in other countries.
And five to 10% of this population are heavier occupational voice users,
meaning that they are greatly exposed to formal trauma,
especially if you are level one professional voice users.
According to this classification tone of voice and voice use and vocal
demand in which we include classical singers, singers from other
genres, actors and radio and TV broadcasters,
and then also level two, where we include teachers,
public speakers, politicians, school center workers,
clerical workers, salespeople, judges and lawyers, for level
to moderate vocal difficulties may prevent adequate job performance.
But for level one, even slight
vocal difficulties may impair a working ability.
And if you are a female, that is even more important. Why?
Because female vocal folds collide much more times per second than male
vocal folds.
Then females have less resistance to fatigue less they have less chronic
acid and collagen fibers in the lamina properly of their vocal folds.
And also they are very sensitive to sex.
They are hormonal variations in here.
I bring you a graph where you can see in blue
the variations in concentrations of testosterone and estrogen
for males, and in red the variations of estrogen.
Estrogen that is the most common estrogen
for females and also testosterone.
And you see that during puberty, which is this phase here,
there is a huge increase in these hormones and that brings
voice changes that are very significant
and can be perceived, especially in boys
and in the reproductive life of the female
These variations continue and they continue to affect the voice.
And during menopause, you can see here
a significant depletion of concentrations of estrogens
but also of progesterone and testosterone.
And of course, these may impair voice production.
So the first work we've done was we wanted to know
the extent to which these changes may affect voice metrics.
And together with my colleague, the who are the older
we then the maternal is, that is the energy of the top
of the air of evidence according to study design.
And in our results, we saw that there is a lower
a lowering of the pitch in pulses compared with premenopausal women.
That lowering is only about one semitone,
but these were female in general, not specifically female
professional voice users.
So now the question is what about, for example,
elite singers, level one, professional voice users?
So we've done a set of investigations looking at singers perceptions.
So why studying singers?
Well, they can be compared to elite athletes.
Look at this.
If you want a female music theater singer,
your vocal folds during one rehearsal.
This place a distance of about what,
a two way England trip between Lisbon and Madrid.
This is a lot of vibration distance those.
So we
wanted to know the perceptions of singers during menopause
and together with my REFUS and Maria Luisa Saviano, we need a publication
in which we found that singers complain about a decreasing pitch
and alterations in timbre that the majority of them
report the voice source alterations, that these alterations
at the level of the vocal folds that relate to a loss of power
loss of flexibility and problems with the upper range of the voice.
So menopause seems to disturb Fornitori physiology of singers,
but the good news is that these can be minimized
by functional health voice education.
Then we also developed and validated the singing voice function.
Self-efficacy, scale.
What self-efficacy well is one's beliefs in the ability
to successfully achieve specific tasks we know that low
self-efficacy reduces effort
and increases likelihood of accepting lower level solutions.
And these to a musician is crucial because it can compromise
performance quality.
So the question is what about singers during and after menopause?
So we compared the applied scale that has 18 items
distributed in three pitch and loudness dimensions and compare
their scores between pre and post-menopausal singers
and what did we find that
perceptions of self-efficacy for two dimensions
high range and transitions and middle range
are lower in pose as compared to premenopausal singers.
So what about
teachers that belong to level to professional voice users?
What are their perception about menopause?
Well, teachers speak for long periods of time, usually loud
and in noisy environments
without sufficient rest for vocal tissue recovery.
If you are a kindergarten teacher, your vocal folds
travel per day, 4.6 kilometers.
I mean, I don't know if you know but the vocal folds are only like
the size of a small finger
nail.
So they are really very tiny in the female
and so by doing these kilometers is a lot to these tissues.
If you are an elementary school, you also
your vocal folds also travel for kilometers.
And also if you if you compare teachers with known teachers,
teachers are more likely to report with reports multiple voicing items.
These voice symptoms are related to their occupation
and teachers miss more often work because of their voice problems.
So really, it's important to understand
what happens during the menopause.
And we developed and validated the menopausal voice related work
limitations scale.
Why because menopause can inflict self-perceived difficulties at work.
Menopausal women, for example, feel unsatisfied
with the way they are treated by their employers and managers.
Also, menopausal women perceive less ability
to work due to menopausal symptoms, especially vasomotor ones.
So what about if you are a professional voice singer?
The voice user, the teacher?
During menopause we applied to a 13 item scale.
This scale with one dimension that these limitations work
and compared to scores between pre and post menopausal professional voice
users among which teachers were highly represented.
And guess what?
Self perceptions of limitation to work are higher in post
as compared to premenopausal professional voice users.
Also, we've done interviews
with the boss and perimenopausal teachers
and asking about their views and opinions on the meaning of voice
gender and menopause to them
and possible implications in educational settings.
But Mattel's is going to talk more about these results.
So what are we doing now while we are trying to measure
impacts of menopause on voice
speech and relative cognitive ability of singers and teachers?
And we wanted to guarantee that what we are recording is the produced,
the voice and not the reverberated voice
for you to understand the reverberation.
Time is the time in seconds that the sound takes to decrease 60
DB below the original label.
So it means that if you are in the church,
you cannot record the voice.
There or let's say you can record.
But what you will be
studying is not the produced sound, but the reflected sound
because the churches have a very long reverberation time.
Whereas if we go to a recording radio studio there, you have a shorter
reverberation time because you aim at clarity of speech.
Well, with a few resources, but very effective ones,
we build a portable recording booth and our reverberation time there,
that is the one we use at the hospital.
Hospital hospitals are normally noisy environments
and you don't want noise in your recording the recordings.
Our reverberation time approximates is even a bit lower
than a radio studio.
So these are wonderful news and we that we record
women as the one you see this figure.
We've noninvasive equipment.
The last thing you want,
if you are a singer is to things stick to your nose.
I know the deep will disagree and maybe Evgenia
because they are
not specialists, but me as a singer, I don't like very much that.
So I prefer noninvasive methods of studying the voice.
But we also take blood samples and we do cognitive tests in prayer
preparing and post-menopausal singers and teachers.
And through these equipment we can
and this approach
we can measure six straight hormone concentrations of these women.
We also can study lung volume during formation.
That is the power source of the voice.
We can study the vibratory patterns of the vocal folds through electro
tomography that you held
externally in the neck, and you study the voice behavior
over a wide range of fundamental frequencies and intensities.
You also can study
measuring, support, the pressure, how mobile are your vocal folds?
And of course, we do very good audio signals.
You can study the result of the some of the power
of the soul, of the voice, the vibration and the modifiers.
And you can assess neuro motor control of foundation,
for example, with vibrato rate and extent, intonation, verbal
fluency, acoustical characteristics of the voice and foundation types.
And we also collect with standardized
questionnaires the cognitive skills of these women.
So future activities we aim at published
is that that that we are currently correct the collecting
we aim at continuing developing outreach activities.
Now we are involved in a four events of World Voice Day.
That will be the 16th of April.
We chose the 1st of April to commemorate
the 50th anniversary of United,
but also the beginning of the last year of this research project.
But we will commemorate the World Voice Day on the 16th of April,
also with Belgium, with Peru, with Spain and with Mexico,
We also are organizing together with each day to do the former swing
vote and for good governance of Horizonte in Brazil,
the International Physiology and Acoustics of Singing Conference.
We also want to continue develop
educational activities like the one we are going to do at the college.
The local papers the Madrid
that is initiation course, objective evaluation of the voice metrics
and of course to last the third edition of the Voice course
And last but not least, we want to educate
Fornitori physiology with a tested tool that provides
Real-Time visual feedback of Fornitori Airflow.
We have already published two articles that show that the flow ball
that is the tool the tags apply to the teaching
of the visual feedback of Fornitori,
so that these tools stimulates formation with increased airflow,
assisting healthy Fornitori habits by avoiding pressed foundation.
And therefore our ultimate goal with do an online open course and loop
a tool need aiming at happily dating the female voice
with function exercises using visual feedback tools.