How New Research Can Help Keep Broadway Voices Healthy

variety.com:

Gordon Cox Theater EditorJust how vocally demanding are roles in Broadway musicals like “Hamilton” and “Dear Evan Hansen” — and how much singing is too much?

If two professors at New York University had their way, Broadway singers would soon have access to a “vocal Fitbit” that could help them answer those questions.Listen to this week’s “Stagecraft” podcast below:“Similar to how your iPhone nowadays tells you, ‘Oh, you listened to music a little too loudly this week; watch out, because we don’t want you to get a hearing impairment due to overuse’ — it would be the same idea [but] for the voice,” said Ana Flavia Zuim, a musician and conductor who is also the associate director of vocal performance at NYU’s Steinhardt School. “It could tell you, ‘We see that you’ve used [your voice] up to a particular amount that has been considered a safe threshold of use.'” Zuim appeared on the new episode of Stagecraft, Variety‘s theater podcast, with her colleague Celia Stewart, associate professor of communicative sciences and disorders.

The two were co-authors on a recent study in which an early iteration of a “vocal Fitbit” was used to measure the demands — the “vocal dose” — placed on six musical theater students during rehearsals for a production of Frank Wildhorn’s “Wonderland.”The test was the first step in filling in some of the information about vocal health that still isn’t known — including what levels of usage and intensity cause damage. “As we better understand dose and voice use, we may be able [someday] to have guidelines that say, ‘Maybe you should only do six shows a week; maybe that seventh or eighth show should be done by somebody else,'” said Stewart.Stewart and Zuim delved into the specifics of their study on the.