The Beauty of the Human Voice Elisabeth Meister TEDxWarwick

for it is shine of De days are BL on wind the thank you very much indeed ladies and gentlemen thank you very very much to Lindy tenant Brown for playing so beautifully that was Rickard strauss's Morgan and tomorrow the sun will shine once more my name is Elizabeth meister and I've come to talk to you today about the beauty of the human voice over the next few minutes I'll be demonstrating how well I've just done that bit but how demonstrating how the vocal mechanism Works I'll be giving you brief history of the human voice and I'll be sharing with you why think singing is so important to us as culture I'm going to start by introducing you to set of vocal cords here are my VOC cords I'll just explain what you're seeing there so the camera was going up my nose and down my throat so the bottom of the picture you see is the front of my throat and the top of the picture is the back of the throat so everything's little bit reversed on the left you can see my vocal cords in that sort of shape can you see that position that's the open so my vocal cords were open was perhaps just breathing or not speaking and on the the left hand side you can see them in the closed position but how do we make sound with our voices so I'll just explain air passes up from the lungs through the vocal cords and if you imagine these are my vocal cords if you imagine this is the bottom and this is the top so the air comes up through the vocal cords and it creates gap at the bottom allowing little puff of air to travel upwards and it's always in this upward Direction and these puffs of air travel very very quickly creating sound and then these sounds are regulated and turned into words with the use of the tongue and the teeth and the lips and the pitches of these sounds are regulated by the lengthening and shortening of the vocal cords so the longer the vocal cords are stretched the thinner they become bit like an elastic band and the shorter then the lower so I'll just demonstrate thanks my vocal cords aren't that long and they don't stretch that long I'll just show you just to give you sense of perspective that these vocal cords are about the same length in diameter as 5 Pence piece in woman and in man just in case there's anybody here with any size issues your vocal cords men are about the same length in diameter as 10 pence piece well done that's enough of that think so I've been singing professionally for about 20 years now and Opera is My Chosen field Opera itself goes back several centuries more than 500 years but professional singing goes back way before then and in fact I've got picture here should keep this in my hand I've got picture here of tombstone dating back to 2424 BC and this lady here on the right is called ETI and you can see her gesturing towards her harest accompanist with her right hand and holding her left hand up to her ear so that she can hear herself more clearly that's the way that the professional singers were depicted in Egyptian pictures but speech and language goes back way Beyond 2424 BC research suggests that about 100,00 years ago is when our brains began to develop and grow and were able to cope with the concept of speech and language but what would we be doing before that 100,000 years before that we were we were using our voices to communicate and to create emotion or to to show emotion and to create empathy and to communicate with one another so we've spent 200,000 years using our voices to communicate with one another and think that's quite an astounding statistic I'm going to tell you story now to to highlight how our voices create empathy about two and half years ago was invited to party given by friend of mine called Barry and it was in his hospice where he was spending the last few months of his life and Barry knew that he knew that he wasn't going to make it to his 60th birthday and so he decided to throw what he called his thank you and good night party and he invited about 90 or 100 of his friends to come along and he asked if would please come along and sing few songs and Aras that held special meaning for us both over the course of our friendship and one of them those songs was that glorious one from Carousel You'll Never Walk Alone any Liverpool fans in you obviously know how it goes everybody else when you walk through the storm keep your head up high you know that one in the days leading up to the party was practicing this song and couldn't get more than few bars into it without breaking down and crying and thought well this is going to be bit of disaster if turn up to the party start singing start crying you know this is all about Barry this isn't about me and and so thought need to devise cunning plan and this cunning plan involved me gesturing to the audience at the point where thought couldn't continue anymore and then everybody could join in and then could drop out and the situation would be saved disaster averted and you know what clever little girl am well it didn't turn out quite like that turned up at the party and there was Barry sitting in the front row and and his his friends were in the just standing behind him and started to sing and excuse me bit like now felt this lump in my throat and felt my eyes prickling and thought okay need to go to operation Balck now and so gestured to the audience and got them to join in and for about nanc thought the plan had worked everybody started singing but what was happening at that moment was suddenly 200,000 years of vocal Evolution came crashing into the party everybody started empathizing with me and they could hear that was in vocal difficulty they started getting lump in their throat they all started crying disaster not quite Ed but you know it was quite memorable occasion Dr Annie Patel of The neurosciences Institute in San Diego puts it really well think when he says we feel music just Taps into this kind of precognitive archaic part of ourselves and it's this precognitive ability to emote and to empathize with each other that think brings us together as species and this is why we sing together it's why we go to football matches it's Why We Sing You'll Never Walk Alone it's why we sing happy birthday it's Why We Sing hymns in churches at weddings and funerals it's why we go to pop concerts to listen to our favorite singers and it doesn't matter whether you're trained singer it doesn't matter whether you're Pavarotti or whether you're Louis Armstrong or whether you're Bob or whether you're George Michael singing in the shower the fact is that singing brings us all together as species and it forms that unbreakable Bond of communication and think that is the real beauty of the human voice