Cathrine Sadolin and Julian McGlashan have been collaborating since 2006 on studying the singing voice.
Cathrine has more than 30 years experience as a singer, singing teacher, author and researcher in Copenhagen, Denmark. Julian McGlashan has been a Consultant Laryngologist and Head & Neck Surgeon working as part of a multidisciplinary team since 1996 in Nottingham, Great Britain.
Cathrine has developed the Complete Vocal Technique (CVT) as a practical pedagogic technique for teaching and since Julian heard her give a presentation at BACO in 2006 he have been impressed at modular nature of the teaching method. The ease with which the novice (mostly non-singing doctors!) audience could identify the modes with minimal training suggested to Julian that Cathrine had identified distinct vocal characteristics that could be produced in a specific and reproducible way and that it should be able to identify the laryngeal gesture and voice characteristics associated with each one.
Cathrine and Julian started their first study in early 2007 in Nottingham, Great Britain, on assessing the ability of speech therapists to recognize the four vocal modes. The conclusion was that with relatively little training speech therapists could be trained to identify these four vocal modes with a high degree of accuracy.
In June 2007 the three came together again in Copenhagen, Denmark. Julian brought all his laryngeal voice examination equipment over to Complete Vocal Institute (CVI) in Copenhagen with the help of Olympus Keymed and Laryngograph Ltd. Cathrine invited 20 CVT trained singers and authorized CVT teachers (10 male, 10 female) to take part in an exhaustive protocol of voice and laryngeal assessments. It is the results of this effort that much of the following work is based.
Much of the work has been presented at international conferences and they are working on writing papers in peer reviewed journals. However this takes time and they also want the information to be available to those that have a curiosity to understand more about the singing voice but perhaps do not have easy access to journals or a deep understanding of scientific methods and language.
Thank you for checking out this website and we hope you find it informative and stimulating.
Written by: Julian McGlashan
Julian, Cathrine and Henrik meeting up in London to do some data analysis for their research.
Photo: Henrik Kjelin
Julian and Cathrine at Pevoc 10 (Pan-European Voice Conference), in Prague, Czeck Republic, August, 2013, infront of their poster ‘Can singing teachers trained in a pedagogic method (Complete Vocal Technique) reliably identify elements of sung sound examples?’