Balancing the Art and Science of the Singing Voice

Abstract

Voice therapy for elite singers developed alongside the emergence of performing arts medicine in the 1980s. By this time the field of clinical speech pathology had already established close working relationships with otolaryngologists and voice-related clinical research studies were being conducted to define treatment methods and their outcomes. In the intervening years, the art of delivering various therapy techniques, coupled with the science of vocal fold wound healing, have provided speech-language pathologists who specialize in voice a new foundation on which voice therapy is predicated and has allowed clinicians and their elite voice patients to expect epithelial vocal fold changes as a result of behavioral intervention.