Postdoctoral researcher at UNSW (Sydney)
Music Acoustics Group
Address : School of Physics, UNSW, Sydney NSW 2052, Australia
Email : mgarnierfr (at) yahoo.fr
Research projects
Vocal straining and communication efficiency
Why are some people more likely than others to develop voice disorders ?
Beyond the anatomic and environmental factors which may influence vocal health, we aim in that project at understanding how the subject may actively contribute to the developpement of voice disorders by his own behavior. We could then envisage some prevention and rehabilitation of vocal straining at the behavioural and not only at the physiological level. To that goal, we are exploring 3 main questions :
- What vocal techniques do singers and actors use to produce sounds very efficiently without hurting themselves ? Could some of them be used to prevent or rehabilitate vocal straining ?
- Are the inter-individual differences in vocal effort regulation related to the different ways speakers perceive and analyse the communicative situation ? Could we envisage a rehabilitation of vocal straining at the psychological and communicative level ?
- What are the communicative strategies (both acoustic and linguistic) which realise the best compromise between intelligibility and vocal load? Could we envisage teaching these strategies ?
Colleagues : Joe Wolfe, John Smith and Jer Ming Chen (UNSW, Sydney), Nathalie Henrich, Marion Dohen, Lucie Bailly, Helene Loevenbruck and Pauline Welby (GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble), Daniele Dubois (LAM-IJLRA, Paris).
Voice quality
Are there some acoustical and physiological correlates to the different "timbres" of voice we can perceive ?
In that project, we have developped a cognitive and semantical approach in order to couple verbal and perceptual fields to the acoustical and physiological ones, as we assume that "information" on voice quality is not in the measured signal itself but in the listener's cognitive representations, which allow him to give meaning to physical parameters according to his knowledge, his aims and the listening context.
Therefore we have chosen to start from the listeners' point of view in order to first explore from a precise linguistic analysis the meaning and consensus of the verbal descriptors and criteria which are used by singing teachers to describe Western classical voices. Only in a second step, we have started to find some acoustical and physiological parameters accounting for the perception of these relevant and semantically clarified criteria.
Collegues : Joe Wolfe and John Smith (UNSW, Sydney), Nathalie Henrich (GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble), Michele Castellengo, Daniele Dubois, Jacques Poitevineau, David Sotiropoulos and Luiza Maxim (LAM-IJLRA, Paris), Pascal Bezard, Robert Expert, Christian Guerin, Claire Pillot, Sophie Quattrocchi, Bernard Roubeau and Boris Terk (GQV).