The Advancement of Voice Therapy and the Contribution of Vocal Function Exercises

The human voice can transmit multiple streams of information about a person including physical, emotional, and social state. Voice disorders can interfere with social relationships, work productivity, and ultimately, impair an individual’s image. Speech-language pathologists have developed several approaches to voice therapy over the past several decades. Vocal function exercises (VFE) are physiological in nature and aim to restore the balance between the three subsystems of vocal production: respiration, phonation, and resonance. With advancing technology and more sophisticated experiments, researchers have shown positive outcomes with VFE regimens in the normal voice population, superior voice population, and disordered voice population. Data continues to be collected to identify the specific elements of VFE that contribute the most to improving vocal function