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Dr. Jennifer Long: “Sometimes procedures to improve breathing or swallowing interfere with a patient’s voice. We often need to strike a delicate balance.”
“It’s amazing that
when we are talking,
our vocal cords are
robust enough to
bang together about
100 times a second,
without stress or strain.”
22 U MAGAZINE
vocal titans play their voices like fantastic musical
instruments, but the truth is that every healthy
human voice is a complex and nuanced instrument.
The f lexible, versatile and emotional sounds
produced by our bodies have been the envy of
composers and musicians for generations.
Ironically, our vocal cords, also called
vocal folds, have humble origins. Early in our
development as human beings, they were simply
a barrier to protect the airway against food
passing into the lungs. Eventually they evolved
to produce the array of sounds that form the
basis of our voice. Located in the larynx, the
cords consist of loose tissue that vibrates in a
wave-like manner at 80-to-300 cycles a second
when air from the lungs is pushed through
them. “It’s amazing that when we are talking,
our vocal cords are robust enough to bang
together about 100 times a second, without
stress or strain,” says Dr. Berke.
The cords are operated by specialized muscles
that have exceptionally fine control. As we talk
louder, the folds are closed longer and are pressed
together more firmly. To manipulate the pitch of
our voice, we automatically tighten the cords to
make our voice higher or loosen them to make our
voice lower. “It works in the same fashion as letting
the air out of a blown-up balloon,” Dr. Berke says.
If you pull the neck of the balloon, it changes the
sound coming out.
What makes each of our voices unique is
the size of the cords we are born with — superstar-
tenor Pavarotti, for instance, had massive vocal
cords that could push large amounts of air
through at high pressure — combined with
the way we modulate sound through our throat,
mouth, tongue and lips. “We learn how to control
our voices as infants,” Dr. Berke says. “A baby
making seemingly meaningless baby talk is
probably the child first experiencing how its
voice works.”
But to this day, the actual mechanism that
causes vocal cords to vibrate is not very-well
understood. “Because the cords are down low in
the throat, and they vibrate so fast, it has been hard
to study and measure the process until recently,”
says Dr. Berke. Only in the last 20-to-25 years have
researchers had instruments that can examine