Subharmonic Pressed Voice Sample
This short audio clip is of an adult male professional singer with a complaint of noise in his voice. The listener can hear the mild roughness in the quality. In this case, the laryngeal exam showed there was no lesion, but the vocal folds were "pressed" during phonation; that is, the closed phase of the vibratory cycle was long, and impact of the vocal folds was high. Also, the ventricular folds squeezed together somewhat when the tone became more rough. The resulting quality is known as strain. The "buzzy" quality is the result of a subharmonic, an irregular vibration at a frequency that is lower than the fundamental frequency of vibration. (Remember that the fundamental frequency provides the pitch.) The subharmonic is generated because of the irregular and asymmetrical pressure at the glottis.