Resonant voice therapy focuses on increasing oral vibratory sensations (such as in the lips and alveolar ridge) for easy phonation, and also encourages sensory awareness.
Methods include gentle vocal warm-ups such as humming and lip trills, as well as gradual starting techniques that focus on starting phonation smoothly and gradually. Resonance shaping techniques and voice modification to increase first formant tuning may also be employed.
Effective Treatment for Vocal Disorders
Voice disorders can severely alter the quality, pitch and loudness of your voice, leaving it sounding strained, husky or weak. Some cases are the result of medical conditions or lifestyle habits while other possible triggers could include vocal overuse, acid reflux, allergies or nerve damage. Resonant voice therapy may offer relief.
Voice therapy focuses on training the vocal cords to vibrate more efficiently and healthily, helping you speak more clearly while relieving throat irritation, shortness of breath and fatigue. Your speech-language pathologist may teach a range of vocal exercises designed to strengthen speaking skills, increase your range and find your optimal pitch and volume for a healthy voice.
Resonant voice therapy begins by sensing oral vibratory sensations on lips and teeth or higher in the face (including nose) as you listen. Your therapist will use these sounds to guide you towards easy phonation (a controlled method of producing sound without strain), then onto humming, voiced or voiceless productions which form phrases and conversational speech shaped into phrases with minimal effort to promote healthy vocal cord function without risk of injury and promote healthful voicing. The goal is achieving the strongest, smoothest and clearest voice possible without strain or effort or impact stress on vocal cords so as to minimize injury while encouraging healthy voicing practices and promote healthy voicing practices.
The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association defines voice disorders as anomalies in how your voice sounds, feels or functions. This can range from laryngeal diseases like vocal nodules or polyps to granulomas and paralyzed vocal folds to functional disorders such as muscle tension dysphonia caused by imbalanced musculature of the vocal tract.
Voice therapy is a necessary treatment option for all forms of voice disorders. Resonant voice technique has proven itself effective; particularly useful in functional voice disorders. Your therapist will create an individualized treatment plan tailored specifically to you; typically including both behavioral and medical approaches in their approach. Be sure to abide by their recommendations, taking all prescribed therapies as scheduled.
Enhanced Vocal Projection
Enhancing vocal projection allows a speaker to deliver messages more clearly and with greater intensity, which is especially helpful when public speaking or engaging in activities that require louder vocal output like singing or shouting. Strengthening voice muscles and practicing techniques such as breath support may be effective methods for increasing projection.
To maximize vocal projection, a patient must first learn to balance their oral and nasal sound energy. This can be accomplished by identifying vibration sensations of mouth and jaw joints, adjusting tongue positioning accordingly, and training velopharyngeal port to close or nearly close during easy phonation. Vocal exercises like sighing from highest note to lowest note comfortably with head resonance/chest resonance switching can further help achieve this balance and enhance vocal power.
Consistent practice and proper vocal technique is key to increasing both strength and volume of voice, including maintaining upright posture, engaging core muscles, and diaphragmatic breathing for optimal airflow and support. By perfecting these skills along with healthy diet and sufficient rest, patients can train their voice without straining or damaging vocal cords.
Enhancing one’s voice quality can greatly enhance vocal projection by allowing it to resonate and carry through space more effectively. This can be accomplished through proper articulation and the use of an enunciated, louder tone when speaking or singing, as well as finding a room with natural reverberation that allows their voice to project more easily.
Other methods for improving vocal projection include vocal exercises like humming and lip trills, as well as trying different pitches while speaking to see which sound best. By working to develop these techniques and practicing consistently, an individual’s voice will become stronger, clearer, and easier to use allowing them to deliver their message with confidence and ease – providing long-term benefits both personally and professionally.
Improved Breath Control
Resonant voice therapy aims to increase breath control and build vocal capabilities across various activities. SLPs often advise individuals through various exercises and techniques designed to increase resonant voice quality as well as increase ease of production of this sound.
While every voice therapy treatment approach focuses on specific elements of vocal signal, there are certain effective general strategies. SLPs use their knowledge of throat anatomy and physiology to teach patients various breathing patterns that will produce more resonant voices for improved health and resonance.
SLPs assist their patients in producing sounds with more forward resonance while decreasing throat tightness through various sound templates such as an “ol” buzz, pitch glides, half-swallow boom and flow phonation techniques. Muscle tension dysphonia may also be treated by encouraging patients to focus on airflow during vocalization without straining the throat muscles during voicing.
Other treatments that can help improve the quality of a patient’s voice include multitalker noise therapy that requires them to speak at an intensity (dB) 3 dB above their personal speech level, providing opportunities to practice resonant voicing at soft intensity while maintaining requested musical notes, and encouraging abdominal breathing techniques.
The RTSS-Voice method offers an exceptional contribution to voice therapy research and practice. Unlike other clinical trials, this trial employs a structured questionnaire with regular feedback among experts to collect uniformly structured data, minimize facilitator bias, and enhance clinician comprehension of results.
Therefore, in this study ingredients and targets were standardised across each round to focus on clinician actions that directly impacted Organ Functions and Functional Skills and Habits identified in previous research. This allowed researchers to compare results across studies in an attempt to establish reliable patterns.
Reduced Stress
Resonant voice therapy promotes fuller and richer sounds in the upper chest and head that allow individuals to project their voices with less strain. It also assists individuals in discovering and making use of natural resonating spaces within their mouth and neck that support these efforts. Reducing strain on vocal cords means less need for hoarseness, breathiness or loss of quality in voice production resulting in reduced need to strain them during sound production; which could otherwise cause hoarseness, breathiness or loss of quality altogether.
Novafon local vibration voice therapy was evaluated in an 11-person clinical trial, and proved to have a significant positive impact on self-reported vocal functioning, spectrography and multiparametric indices of voice quality during and post treatment. Aerodynamic measurements such as phonation quotient or voice range profile parameters did not show any noticeable improvements during or post voice therapy treatment.
Participant were evaluated during 10 voice therapy sessions using vocalization, singing, and voicing exercises combined with video-stroboscopic, perceptual, and aerodynamic ratings to ascertain whether symptoms had resolved or improved.
Researchers discovered that patients receiving resonance voice therapy experienced more balanced oral and nasal resonance, as well as improved perceptions of their own vocal quality than in the control group, with reduced need for voice strain resulting in less episodes of loss of voice and increased endurance. Acoustical analysis also showed improvements in terms of jitter, shimmer and signal to noise ratio.
White and Carding (2022) conducted a qualitative interview study of expert voice therapists to gain more insight into their perspectives regarding pre- and postoperative vocal rehabilitation for patients undergoing phonosurgery for benign vocal fold lesions. Ten clinicians, with an average experience level of 22 years, were interviewed. Discussion included how type and intensity of therapy affected outcomes as well as any factors which influenced intervention decisions.
The authors concluded that current literature regarding voice therapy was limited and suggested more research be conducted to determine effective interventions for different pathologies and populations. They pointed out that many of the studies included in their review were small-scale uncontrolled observational ones whereas large-scale RCTs are necessary to ascertain effectiveness of voice therapy among various pathologies and populations.
