loading the larynx — 173,000 triangles from a real body…

THE VOICE · ACT 01 — air, before it is sound

THE BREATH

Every word starts as a breath out. The muscles of the chest and belly push air from the lungs up the windpipe, and at its top — behind the Adam's apple — the larynx turns that steady stream into a buzz. Talking takes surprisingly little: a pressure under the folds of about 5–10 cm of water, and a flow of roughly a tenth to a fifth of a litre a second. When you speak, you breathe in quickly between phrases and let the air out slowly across each one; at rest, in and out take more equal turns.

  • SCAN Skin, lungs, airway, larynx, hyoid, jaw, tongue, pharynx and neck vertebrae: BodyParts3D, one adult male body, in their measured places.
  • FACT Conversational subglottal pressure ≈ 5–10 cm H₂O; phonation flow ≈ 0.1–0.2 L/s (Titze 1994). Speech breathing: a quick breath in, a long controlled breath out (Hixon et al. 1973).
  • DRAWN The airflow particles. Their path follows this body's airway; their speed is illustrative.
  • DEBATED That the human larynx sits low in the neck because it evolved for speech. Red deer and other mammals lower their larynx when they call (Fitch & Reby 2001).

Hear voices together in The Long Zoom → pick the road “Singing together”: a choir in Harpa, Reykjavík.

sources
  • BodyParts3D 4.0, © The Database Center for Life Science (DBCLS), CC BY-SA 2.1 Japan — every scanned structure on the page (is_a set); the derived meshes are re-shared under the same licence.
  • Peterson GE, Barney HL. Control methods used in a study of the vowels. J Acoust Soc Am 1952;24:175–184 — the 1,520 vowel tokens (as distributed in the phonTools R package, dataset pb52, S. Barreda).
  • Hillenbrand J, Getty LA, Clark MJ, Wheeler K. Acoustic characteristics of American English vowels. J Acoust Soc Am 1995;97:3099–3111 — the re-recording.
  • Fant G. Acoustic Theory of Speech Production. Mouton, 1960 — source–filter theory; Chiba T, Kajiyama M. The Vowel: Its Nature and Structure. 1941.
  • Titze IR. Principles of Voice Production. Prentice Hall, 1994 — speaking pitch ranges, subglottal pressure, airflow, the string model of pitch.
  • Titze IR. Parameterization of the glottal area, glottal flow, and vocal fold contact area. J Acoust Soc Am 1984;75:570–580 — the kinematic fold model of act 03.
  • Titze IR. The physics of small-amplitude oscillation of the vocal folds. J Acoust Soc Am 1988;83:1536–1552; van den Berg Jw. Myoelastic-aerodynamic theory of voice production. J Speech Hear Res 1958;1:227–244.
  • Ishizaka K, Flanagan JL. Synthesis of voiced sounds from a two-mass model of the vocal cords. Bell Syst Tech J 1972;51:1233–1268.
  • Hirano M. Morphological structure of the vocal cord as a vibrator and its variations. Folia Phoniatr 1974;26:89–94 — the layers and the body–cover idea.
  • Stevens KN, House AS. Development of a quantitative description of vowel articulation. J Acoust Soc Am 1955;27:484–493 — the three-parameter tract.
  • Klatt DH. Software for a cascade/parallel formant synthesizer. J Acoust Soc Am 1980;67:971–995; Rosenberg AE. Effect of glottal pulse shape on the quality of natural vowels. J Acoust Soc Am 1971;49:583–590 — the synthesiser.
  • Fitch WT, Giedd J. Morphology and development of the human vocal tract: a study using magnetic resonance imaging. J Acoust Soc Am 1999;106:1511–1522 — tract length.
  • Fitch WT, Reby D. The descended larynx is not uniquely human. Proc R Soc B 2001;268:1669–1675.
  • Hixon TJ, Goldman MD, Mead J. Kinematics of the chest wall during speech production. J Speech Hear Res 1973;16:78–115 — speech breathing.
  • Kramer RZ, Bella J, Mayville P, Brodsky B, Berman HM. Sequence dependent conformational variations of collagen triple-helical structure. Nat Struct Biol 1999;6:454–457 — PDB 1BKV, from the RCSB Protein Data Bank (CC0).
  • Hodge AJ, Petruska JA (1963) and later work — the 67 nm D-period and the quarter-stagger of collagen in fibrils; the molecule ~300 × 1.5 nm.
  • Stachler RJ et al. Clinical Practice Guideline: Hoarseness (Dysphonia) (Update). Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg 2018;158(1_suppl):S1–S42.

Geometry: BodyParts3D, © The Database Center for Life Science, licensed CC BY-SA 2.1 Japan; the derived meshes (public/anatomy/voice.glb) are re-shared under the same licence. Collagen: RCSB PDB 1BKV, CC0. Vowel data: Peterson & Barney 1952.

EDUCATION ONLY Education only, not medical advice. The movements and sounds are computed from simplified models. They are not measurements of anyone's voice. Hoarseness that lasts more than four weeks, or comes with trouble breathing or swallowing, a lump in the neck or coughing blood, is a reason to see a doctor (AAO-HNS guideline, 2018).Not medical advice. Hoarse for 4+ weeks? See a doctor.