EGGs for Singers

EGGs for Singers is an outgrowth of the quest that produced VoceVista: the desire to get past the subjectivity that limits all descriptions of voice and to arrive at its factual, objective features. In the second half of the 20th century, spectrum analysis allowed us to peer into the patterns of frequency components that determine voice quality and the various vowels. By the mid-nineties affordable personal computers had developed to the point where they could display spectrum analysis in real time. At the Groningen Voice Research Lab Harm K. Schutte and Donald G. Miller, who were pursuing research on the singing voice in the wake of Janwillem van den Berg and William Vennard, decided to integrate the two most important non-invasive signals for the singing voice -- from a microphone and an electroglottograph -- in a computer program that would analyze and display them. At the national conference of NATS in St. Louis (USA), VoceVista made its public debut on the final day of 1996.

One year later Garyth Nair visited in Groningen, bringing acquaintance with Richard Horne , an extraordinary programmer whose freeware spectrogram program "Gram" had attracted the attention of early users of spectrum analysis, among them Nair. Horne joined the enterprise, and he and Miller then began a cooperative, continuing upgrade of VoceVista as interest gradually grew among forward-looking singing teachers.

Even as the effectiveness of the software advanced, the price was reduced to a level that was affordable for singing teachers. What did not come down, however, was the price of the electroglottograph (EGG). While the microphone signal gets the major part of the practical work in the VoceVista program, the contribution of the EGG, which tracks key aspects of vocal-fold behavior, is also of vital importance. Nonetheless its high price meant that it was usually restricted to use in laboratories, rather than in voice studios where it could shed more light on the process of training singers.

A solution to this problem appeared when the engineer Gerrie Goeree took on the task of miniaturizing the EGG, spending three years alongside his "day job" at Sony-Ericsson. The result is a light-weight precision instrument, with its electronic core manufactured by the Dutch firm Variass, perfectly integrated in a unit with microphone and the software VoceVista-Pro. That this can now be purchased within a singing teacher's budget can be attributed to the combined labor of love of two highly qualified engineers and a retired singer.