Event
Special Seminar: Kiyoshi Honda, "Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Vocal Mechanisms"
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
2:00 p.m.
1146 A.V. Williams Building
Carol Espy-Wilson
espy@umd.edu
Special Seminar
Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Vocal Mechanisms
Dr. Kiyoshi Honda, MD, DMSc
Phonetics and Phonology Laboratory
CNRS-University
Paris, France
Host
Carol Espy-Wilson
Abstract
Development of medical techniques with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has increased our knowledge of voice production mechanisms in speech and singing. Our experience with high-resolution imaging techniques has also provided us new insights into physiological and acoustic aspects of voice production process. Physiologically, the larynx is under the control of the surrounding motor apparatus, and changes in voice fundamental frequency is dependent not only on the internal laryngeal functions but also on the external mechanisms influencing on the larynx mediated by the supra- and infra-hyoid muscles. This view was supported by observations with electromyography and has been revealed in depth with laryngeal MRI. Acoustically, the cavities of the hypopharynx (laryngeal cavity and pyriform fossa) give rise to characteristic spectral patterns that signal voice quality and individual characteristics at the frequencies above 2.5 kHz. The role of these cavities apparently differs from that of the main vocal tract for vowel production. Those discoveries derived mainly from male data, however, do not always agree with female data in detail. With this question in mind, our recent studies to search into singing formant in soprano voice will be discussed in relation to the roles of the hyoid-larynx complex for physiology and the hypo-pharyngeal cavities for acoustics.
Biography
Kiyoshi Honda graduated from Nara Medical University in 1976 and joined the Faculty of Medicine, University of Tokyo for voice clinic and speech research. While he was at Research Institute of Logopedics and Phoniatrics (RILP), he visited Haskins Laboratories from 1981 to 1983. He received a doctoral degree of medical sciences in 1985, and he moved to Kanazawa Institute of Technology in 1986. Dr. Honda joined Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) in 1991 to continue speech production studies. He was also a senior scientist at University of Wisconsin for three years from 1995. In 2006 he went to the Laboratory of Phonetics and Phonology (LPP), University of Paris. Recently, he conducted MRI-based physiological and acoustic studies with his colleagues at ATR, and is currently developing new instrumentation techniques with Dr. Shinji Maeda and Prof. Jacqueline Vaissière at LPP as a senior researcher.
