An Investigation of a Modal-Falsetto Register Transition Hypothesis Using Helox Gas

This study concerned the effect of the first subglottal formant (F1') on the modal-falsetto register transition in males and females. Phonations using air and a helium-oxygen mixture (helox) were used in a comparative study to tease apart possible acoustic and myoelastic contributions to involuntary register transitions. Recordings of the first subglottal formant and its accompanying bandwidths, and the lower and upper shift point marking the outer boundaries of abrupt register transitions, were obtained via a neck-mounted accelerometer, and analyzed using spectrograms and power spectra on a K-5500 Sona-Graph. The four subjects had their hearing masked bilaterally with speech level noise to increase the likelihood of involuntary register transition via minimized auditory feedback. In three of the four test subjects registration was surmised to be primarily a laryngeal event, as evidenced by the similar frequency dependency of voice breaks in both air and helox. It may be hypothesized that subglottal resonance influenced register transition in the fourth subject, as voice breaks rose with helox-induced phonation; however, this result did not reach statistical significance. Therefore, in this experiment subglottal resonance was not found to have a significant influence on register transition as originally hypothesized.