Vocal Musical Expression with a Tactile Resonating Device and its Psychophysiological Effects

This paper presents an experiment to investigate how new types of vocal practices can affect psychophysiological activity. We know that health can influence the voice, but can a certain use of the voice influence health through modification of mental and physical state? This study took place in the setting of the Vocal Vibrations installation. For the experiment, participants engage in a multi sensory vocal exercise with a limited set of guidance to obtain a wide spectrum of vocal performances across participants. We compare characteristics of those vocal practices to the participant's heart rate, breathing rate, electrodermal activity and mental states. We obtained significant results suggesting that we can correlate psychophysiological states with characteristics of the vocal practice if we also take into account biographical information, and in particular mea- surement of how much people "like" their own voice.