BVA ARCHIVE: Profiles
Nathalie Henrich (PEVoC6 plenary speaker)
Nathalie Henrich is a physicist studying voice production at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France's national science organisation.
Her PhD concerned the glottal source in speech and singing, under the supervision of Michèle Castellengo and Christophe d'Alessandro. She then undertook post-doctoral research on non-classical singing voice production in Stockholm, in collaboration with Sten Ternström and Johan Sundberg. In 2002, she entered the Sciences du langage section of the CNRS, joining the Music Acoustics Laboratory (Laboratoire d'Acoustique Musicale, LAM) in Paris.
Thanks to a range of collaborations with experts in different fields, her current research projects cover diverse aspects of the human voice from production to perception, from the physical aspects of sound generation through acoustical propagation to perceptual aspects related to voice quality.
Some of her recent work has involved acoustical and electroglottographical analysis of the glottal source in speech, classical and non-classical singing, together with Michèle Castellengo. In a collaboration with Cédric Gendrot and Markus Hess's team in Hamburg, she has been combining electroglottography with high-speed cinematography. She is also working on glottal flow modelling and estimation, and the inverse filtering methods with Boris Doval and Christophe d'Alessandro in Paris. Since 2004, she has been collaborating with Joe Wolfe and John Smith in Sydney on the study of resonance strategies in singing. Finally, to relate all of the above to what we hear and how we describe it, she has been studying the cognitive perception and verbalisation of voice quality in western classical singing together with Maëva Garnier and the psycholinguist Danièle Dubois.
Dr. Henrich has always been interested in bringing together voice scientists, speech therapists and singing teachers. From 1998 to 2001, she initiated and convened a bi-monthly workshop on the singing voice, the Atelier Voix Chantée, where current topics about the singing voice were presented and discussed. Since 2003 she has led a research group concentrating on the definition and verbalisation of voice quality.
