Voice Research at the Antonio Salieri Institute

The voice laboratory of the Antonio Salieri Institute for Singing and Voice Research in Music Education was founded in 2019. Malte Kob has been the head of research activities since October 2022. Both the completed and current projects are dedicated to investigating the production, spreading and perception of the voice in the room on the one hand and vocal pedagogical issues on the other. To this end, the voice laboratory works together with other teachers at the Antonio Salieri Institute and also cooperates with other institutes at the mdw, including the Institute for Voice and Music Theater, the Institute for Popular Music, the Max Reinhardt Seminar and other institutions in Vienna, such as the Opera Studio, the Opera School, the Medical University of Vienna, the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Malte Kob regularly presents voice research at the mdw at conferences, congresses and workshops and as a science ambassador in schools. The team also includes Jeremias Thiele, a study assistant at the voice lab and sound engineering student at the mdw.

Voice research at the Institut Antonio Salieri serves as a foundation for updating and continuously renewing the pedagogical concepts of action in vocal training in the vocal pedagogy (IGP), instrumental music education (IME) and music education (ME) fields of study associated with vocal pedagogy. It deals with the physiology and physics of voice production as well as acoustic voice sound analysis in an artistic and didactic context with regard to singing and speaking in drama. In addition to a basic scientific understanding of this topic, questions from vocal pedagogical practice are dealt with in an interdisciplinary manner, and the resulting findings are incorporated back into teaching. In this context, aspects of psychoacoustic effects and vocal health are also relevant.

In a broader sense, voice research constitutes an interdisciplinary subject area with multiple points of contact:

• Musical acoustics: production and sound of different vocal styles
• Phoniatrics, speech therapy: prevention and therapy of impaired voice production in speech and singing
• Musicians medicine: medical aspects of artistic voice production in singing and acting
• Communication technology: basic principles of voice acoustics, also in terms of source-filter theory
• Signal processing: development and application of methods for analyzing and modeling the voice
• Phonetics: acoustic phonetics
• Systematic musicology, in particular music physiology
• Psychology: psychoacoustics, perception
• Physics: aerodynamics (breathing, voice production), mechanics/dynamics (vocal fold vibration)
• Room acoustics: interaction of voice - room - listener