And our next speaker will be Marco Rubio refusal.
So here in the room with us.
He's a teacher of singing a voice researcher and he's currently
a doctoral student in education at two near the Madrid, Spain,
where he also works as a research assistant
excuse me at the voice, music
and Language Laboratory at the Faculty of Education.
He's a tutor in the specialization course in pedagogy and technology, a
voice and singing a tune that he holds a degree in music education
and a master's degree in speech language pathology from Brazil.
He's a founding member
of the Brazilian Association of Teachers of Singing Pro Canto.
He's also a founding member of the Brazilian Association of
excuse me,
a coordinator of the World Voice Day website, where all the events
that relate to the World Voice they can be sent to.
He is also
an expose, an expert in
distortions of voice, but without causing you any harm
because he was a former rock singer.
So without further delays.
Welcome, Mauro. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you for just words.
Hey, can you hear me?
All right.
Okay.
So as of October,
said, I am a doctoral student
here, and I'm also a research assistant.
But I'm also a singer, a teacher of singing
And that's why I'm going to talk about
using the voice lab to teach voice
But why should we do that?
Why should we use a voice lab to teach voice
first?
Because in the voice lab, we have a lot of technology
for analyzing and understanding voice.
And this technology can provide us
real time visual feedback based on meaningful information.
And this information relate sound with physiology
or how we are producing the sound
It improves students attention and it assists
not 000.
But these
I think my
no and don't say oh.
So it assists
teachers auditory perception
and it reduces risk of misinterpretation
and loss of information during what we call the critical points
in the traditional verbal feedback model.
We, the teachers, we provide the similes or the, the voice model.
And then the student will give us the vocal response.
After that, we will provide another model
or give another feedback.
And in this time,
there is a time so
the information can be lost in there.
And this information can also be misunderstood.
But when we use the real time feedback,
this feedback happens during this vocal response, it's instantaneous.
So the student provide gives the the
the work a response and see
in real time what's going on with his voice.
And it happens a lot to to him to understand what he's doing.
And then the voice lab will have,
as I said, a lot of equipment, a lot of tools
for providing these Real-Time feedback
and for providing voice analysis.
We have different microphone types for different situations.
We have we have monitors of sound pressure level sub little pressure.
We can understand the contact of the vocal folds
we can understand the breathing system.
So we need to use this information for helping the seniors
and all their teachers or speakers
or other voice professionals.
And this information is on the subsystems
of the voice production
We have Philippe told us about the three main
subsystems of life position of voice production.
And with this equipment and with these analysis tools,
we can look at the power source and understand
breathing patterns, lung volume, simple blood pressure
and we can look at the voice source
and see the airflow and the vocal folds, contact and mobility.
And also we can look at the sound
modifiers and see what's going on with the vocal tract
gestures and resonance and sound radiation.
And when we are talking about controlling these structures
and systems, we're talking about vocal technique.
So we're talking about improving vocal technique
and vocal technique.
Serves the expressive purposes of communication.
So it works for singers, for teachers, for lawyers, for politicians
and now let's look at
every subsystem
of the voice production, starting with the power source
and in the power source domain.
We can start with the breathing patterns
for reading breathing patterns.
We have this track system, which is basically two bands,
two elastic bands, the way for an electric electric coil inside.
And we put one of them on the rib cage
and another one on the abdominal wall.
And it provides this tree signals
So here we have four signals.
The first one is the audio signal from a microphone
and a regular microphone or a specific microphone.
And we have three others. Now,
I invite you to see some things in this signals.
This is,
uh, an excerpt of Summertime and the living is easy.
Everybody know the song.
And let's see what happens with the breathing of this singer,
in particular, the lung volume, which is the second line here.
We see that right before
starting the singing part,
the person breathing in, which is good.
And then during the singing, the air starts to go out.
And so the language dims and starts to decrease.
After the second part, she breathing again.
Good.
And then the sound, the air starts to goes out once again.
All right.
That's expected the rib cage
and to follow these movements.
So it's
like parallel, but the abdominal wall
makes something curios here
right before the summer time.
Part She expands a little bit of the abdominal walls
and, uh,
abruptly contract these abdominal walls.
But it's a very small movement.
So, uh, we cannot see
much think of much things happening here.
After that, the wall keeps constant.
Constant.
But for the second part, during the breathing, she expands
the abdominal wall once again and quickly contracting once again.
But this is a larger movement.
So we see this peak here in the abdominal wall movement,
and we can see what it causes to the audio signal.
We see this cushion here.
So the voice makes something like and the living is easy.
It's like a explosion
that if the singer could see
what was going on, if the if her abdominal wall,
she probably would avoid the situation
hopefully.
And when we're talking about breathing,
we must understand that basically
controlling breathing is is finding balance between the passive forces,
which is the lung elasticity and the active forces
or the muscles are doing.
Speak to your experience or your muscles.
When our lungs are full
the elastic
the elastic forces of the lungs try to exhale the air.
So we have this pure tarry passive force.
And if we want to sing in this situation,
we have to activate our muscles, too, in an opposite way.
So we have to act so active.
Our inspiratory muscles during this isolation
and the opposite for the situation where
when the lungs are getting empty,
and we for some specific reason
still wants to keep singing or using or sustaining our voice.
So we have these elastic force trying to have to breathe
into to push the air to to pull the air.
And the, the the
the muscles, the expiratory muscles should be activated
But besides the
deep breathing patterns, we also can see what's happening
with the blood pressure, which is basically the air coming
from the lungs, the pressure that this creates.
And it varies according to voice type.
The music genere and voice tire.
We are singing and the pitch we are singing.
Also, we have here in this graphic
by Professor Johann Sander
compiled information of different types
of singing in different pitches we have here in the horizontal axis
the pitch and in the vertical axis, the similar pressure
we see in this graph that the baritone and the belter, which is
we can think of a musical theater singer,
they reach the highest level of subgroups growth, little pressure
the better a pitch a bit higher in pitch than the baritone
below.
Then we have the country singers, the red line here
and the dramatic soprano
also reaching a good similar pressure level.
But the d the the dramatic soprano which is the same pressure
and not of above the country singer.
Here we have this division by say my tones and 12 sing my tones it's
one of 12 and we see
almost the same a similar pressure level.
But here one note below, above
below we have these solid lines
showing the PTB is the definition threshold pressure
which means the minimum the amount of pressure
that we need to start for 19
and we see that
when the pitch goes up
the pressure needs to go up to more for males and females
because of the mass side and the size of the vocal folds
so we can extract
meaningful information with this small monitor.
Here is the the subgroup pressure monitor from Noto enterprises
and similar pressure is affected by the land volume
that we saw previously So when we have a high lung volume,
we have higher volume levels of similar pressure to
and similar pressure is the most important parameter
for increasing sound pressure level and perceived loudness.
So if you want to sing loud,
you'll need a lot of simple blood pressure
and we can see this in this other graph.
We have once again the audio signal first and below
we have the similar pressure peaks measured by the monitors.
I showed the task was up bar
and diminuendo pop, pop
So start the singer,
start in a loud, moderate, loud voice and decrease the volume.
Then intensity.
And we easily see that when the intensity
starts to decrease the blood pressure also decreases.
So it's related also actually it's
ruled by the similar pressure
okay.
Let's move to the voice source and for understanding the voice source.
We have some tools also,
but we need to understand that if we combine
a reduced airflow,
a strong little reduction, I would talk about those.
So with a high some low pressure that result
and in a high loudness
where you have a higher collision forces
of the vocal folds, which could lead us to a final trauma.
So we should avoid these evil combination for voice
and the voice sources the interruption of the air flow
by the closing of the vocal folds like we see in these animation here.
We see the air coming from below the larynx
and the vocal folds cut in this air and we see this puffs.
And then we have the voice source.
We can measure the voice source using masks like this,
and we can extract the graphic
that we called Flow Blood to Gram
in this graph
shows us that when the airflow starts to increase,
we see this way form also going up.
And when the airflow starts to decrease, the waveforms go goes down.
And it's related to the vocal folds action.
When the vocal folds are open, the air starts to passes
for the vocal folds, so the airflow increases.
And here we have this time where the vocal folds are closed
and we have no airflow or no airflow
passing through the vocal folds.
Okay.
And so the degree of glottal reduction
or how types of the vocal folds are together
determine the airflow and the amplitude of the voice source.
Fundamental. What is this?
The amplitude of the voice first fundamental is something related
to Phoenician types or how we produce our voices,
which affects voice timbre, which show you
we if we have an induction, are we conduction?
As we can see here in this, the larynx.
So the left
these
this vocal folds has a gap in between.
And so it means that the addiction is weak
and there is a lot of airflow passing through this vocal folds.
And we will have
a strong amplitudes of the fundamental you see in the next slide.
When the adduction is strong, as in this other larynx,
they are really tied together
the airflow is reduced.
It's kind of easy to understand the relation
and the amplitude of the fundamental is weak.
And we can use real time feedback
for controlling and understanding this airflow also.
And we can do it by seeing these really
exactly these amplitude of the flow blow to Graham waveform
in a breathy voice, which is basically a voice
with a lot of air going like this.
I can sing like this
if I sing bossa nova from Brazil, for example,
we will
have a huge amplitude of this wave form
in a flow formation.
And a flow formation is something like this.
We also have
a huge amplitude of the glottal gram,
but we have, uh, small close phase
here that we don't have in this breath a formation
in a neutral formation.
Look, the difference
neutral formations like an AR,
like I'm talking with you right now,
we have a dramatic decrease
of these amplitude and these close phase is longer.
And in a brass one nation,
if I talk to you like these,
you will have really small amplitude
and the long,
close phase.
So the vocal folds not rest
and we can use these information to teach voice,
but we can use also some other tools
like the flow ball which Dr.
Philip Allen told at the beginning of this conference.
And here we see here again demonstrating this flow ball device
let's see
so it looks like a kid's game
but it's actually
a very technological thing.
In this graph.
And this graph shows that when the air flow starts to increase
and it happens when the ball lifts
and starts to go up and up
so we can use the the distance
or these flight of the ball
to understand and to control the airflow.
So if we won a bigger airflow,
we need to send the ball to the end.
We can use another kind of equipment to the electrode.
Graphene, also called by egx
and this egx
shows us the contact of the vocal folds.
And now I will show you this video
also with different foundation types.
And we can see that for these different
foundation types, we have different shapes of the wave grams
first of breath information
0020.
Oh. More
oh. Now
Press. 00.
Oh God.
And this last one wave some super melodic structures
vibrating to interfere in the way how the vocal folds vibrate.
So we saw that increase in the context of the vocal folds.
The wave shape was getting broader and rather
and it promotes also a noninvasive
observation of the whole, how the vocal folds vibrates.
And we can have information instrument estimation on local folds, contact
a voice registers and vocal folds, periodicity
the wave shape you saw
we can understand like the phases of the
galactic cycle, which means the
the phases of the cycle of the vocal folds opening and closing.
With these equipments, we put this electrodes here on the neck.
We try to find the larynx
and it send an electric current
from one to the other without pain.
And this current measures our electric impedance.
So how well our body conduct the electorate
in the tricity when the vocal folds are open,
there is no conductance and there's electricity.
So the line is here below you can relate it to the open
phase of the motorcycle, but when the vocal folds
it starts to get together
the wave form starts to go up.
Here at the top is the full contact of the vocal folds
and then when it starts to open again,
the way form starts to go down.
And so the different shapes of these wave form
tells us different things
and we can understand it that we have a bit training
so we can use these zig
with a program
called funding from centers from and from Sweden.
And this program, it it groups
similar types of waveforms from the EEG.
And with these clusters we can understand, for example,
the formation types in different of voice ranges
in the low range, in the high range.
And with this cluster clusters
we can easily identify
patterns, for example, in a pre and post intervention.
So the singer on the student or the the the person
arrives, if one voice it, he or she trains.
And then we see the results in this graph.
For example, here we have the precondition
that before condition who have this big area, this pink area here,
which means that in all of this area, this is pitch and this is loudness.
So from a low note to a high note
from a quiet voice, so soft ground swell voice,
we see that in this
extreme of the pitch and loudness
so the the person here used a lot of breath information
and almost
we cannot we cannot see the the red the red signal here.
This red signal is non-contact,
which means the voice we we heard the voice being produced
with a vibration of the vocal folds without contact.
And after all, what's this after
the intervention
we see that this pink area, this breast area is reduced.
The green area of the moderate area here, the moderate contact
increased and also the red area, the non non-contact increased also.
So we can understand that after this intervention,
the of the context of the vocal folds
the carriers in general, which is good,
we avoid that combination, that evil combination
and the sound modifiers Let's see
how we can analyze it, how we can use it for training.
This is an image of a vocal tract we see here the tongue
and the pharynx and the lips and the nose and everything else.
And this vocal tract
is controlled by the articulatory movements,
the jaw, the tongue,
and this articulatory movements, they change
the resonances of the vocal tract, so it modifies timbre.
It can affect the voice source and also the vocal folds vibration
and the variations of these positions can be monitored
through Real-Time Spectral Analysis and Real-Time Visual Feedback.
Of the acoustic signal is something that is good because it's,
uh, really cheap
and sometimes free and it can be applied.
And then as an estimates of glottal adduction
register transitions, which means I can, I can make
a registration transition like oh or oh.
So in the second case, you saw
this break
resonance strategies, for example, I could talk to you like this
if the voice like my voice like this, I could talk to you like
you have a voice like this to there are different
resonance strategies and also we can see some musical
and prosodic features and you can see this
this pitch
modulation.
This is a figure of a program called What You Have is the video
which is a Real-Time
feedback of the acoustic signal
we see here for types of pollination.
Here we have the harmonics of our voice,
which line is in harmonic.
And for this, for different information
types, we have some different characteristics
in this first one, which is press information.
We see much more information
here on the high frequency this.
So this is frequency.
And this time
we see a lot of information here in these high frequency.
And this is this is this amount of this number of harmonics here
is reduced for the neutral foundation, which is reduced
for the flow formation and reduced for the breath explanation.
So we can understand that the stronger the contact of the vocal folds, the,
the, the higher the number of the, the harmonics in the high frequencies
and the remember the amplitude of the fundamental.
This is the fundamental.
And in this graph, the stronger
color means stronger energy.
And we see stronger color here in the breath
and in the flow pronation like we saw in lots of ground before
and in the voice lab.
We believe that this
knowledge we have should go off the voice lab.
So we should disseminate this knowledge.
So that's why we have the websites.
We have
information and texts, tutorials and videos
showing the equipment we have
and presenting the analysis we can do with them.
So I recommend you to check in that voice lab dot com.
And we have also our YouTube channel,
United Voice Lab.
You can find it on YouTube where we interview
many voice scientists, voice better goals, voice therapists
that are reference in the world of voice
so if you work with voice
signs and voice teaching and music,
you know people like you on some big
TV, Deline Christian types and they are all
they're interviewed by Philippa and me and Anna Matteo's
so the voice
used to be invisible, but not anymore.
As voice science advances the understanding of voice
function increases, and so possibilities to optimize it
according to individual needs.
We don't want a rule of how the voice should be done.
And also artistic goals.
Thank you very much
thank you.
Thank you very much,
Mauro, for sharing
with everybody what we have in our lab and how we can be used
not only for research purposes, but also for educational purposes.
And nowadays in education
There's something called Evidence-Based Teaching.
And what is your opinion about all this type of equipment
and how can it serve the purposes of Evidence-Based teaching?
I mean, in your presentation, clearly there is a focus on the adult voice
and the development of adult voice, but these tools can be applied
with young children and the research on that area is very few.
So we we hope in the future that we can also explore that.
But in a lifespan and development
of a person's voice and the ability to communicate.
How do you see that these tools can improve teaching
from these perspective of Evidence-Based Pedagogy?
You know,
if we see the hierarchy of
evidence, we're not there at the top,
but we are climbing.
And this kind of information can help us to climb these
the steps of this pyramid
so the idea is having more informed
practices so we can understand better what we are doing
and not only based on our personal experiences.
And yes, it's
more drive to, to, to adults,
but it can be used to have kids, of course.
But as as a result,
we don't need to fully understand the graphics and the forms.
We need to understand, oh, this is bigger than this.
This is broader.
Than the other one in any any kid can recognize it.
So I believe we are
growing in this idea of
well informed the science informed practices,
but we still are not there at the evidence.
Strong evidence level.
But maybe instead of calling it
evidence based practices, we could talk a bit
about bearing in mind the definition that there is in medicine. Yes.
Because we made this in Evidence-Based Practices mean to do Meta-Analysis
and know from many results and that complicated statistical
analysis is what works for patients in terms of medication for example.
But to apply to pedagogy.
This evidence Evidence-Based goes towards the meaning of
or goes towards providing meaningful
feedback in in in a class in the room.
And I see here the potential also for offers pain
because all the movies are doubled in Spain by actors
and by having visual feedback can help them achieving especially
spatial qualities in the voice but without damaging their voices.
And I believe the the main
goal of these
tools and analysis are not for the singer themselves,
but for the teachers of the singers, because it requires at this level,
it requires specific equipment that not everybody is going to abide,
but the teachers can have access to some of these things
or can have education from some people that have access to these things,
like the course we have here at the unit, for example.
So we can take these well, science, informative or meaningful information
from the lab to the singer
at the end or the the the
what's the, the word for the guy.
So the, the guy
who could tell the movie in Spanish,
I forgot the word for it. The
the actors who drew the impersonator.
Well, no.
Yes, I don't want any.
But those who do want
the role, the character in Spanish.
Exactly. Or in other languages.
And it also can be applied.
Not so that the actors
are dubbing babbling.
No, Debbie, I mean actors. Thank you.
And also it happens for four games.
We have a lot of people narrating games and creating voices.
I have a friend, for example, that he's a monster voice or
he's contracted to be the monster in the game.
So, yes, he can we can help a lot.
Okay.
Well, thank you very, very much for your contribution once again. And.