newsletters

YorVoice and RNID

The YorVoice project team is working with partners from the national hearing loss charity RNID to put together an exciting programme of research into how deaf people perceive their own voices and how this is mediated by use of speech and hearing technology such as hearing aids or voice assistants. YorVoice co-lead Sophie is a profoundly deaf hearing aid user so this is something that’s particularly close to our hearts. Our proposal has been chosen by the university as one of seven projects to be put forward for the UKRI cross research council responsive mode pilot scheme- watch this space!

Research priming funding

The 2025 Spring Call for research priming funding opens on 17/03/25 and closes 25/04/25. We think this is a great opportunity for the YorVoice community to secure follow-on funding for the Research Lab subprojects, or start up new lines of research that address our strategic priorities. We’ll be scheduling community events to discuss and build proposals targeted at this funding call– see  ‘Upcoming events’ below.

Valuing Voices funding

Rebecca Chalkley (Research Development Manager) joined us at the last Research Forum to talk about the Valuing Voices for Equitable and Responsible Research project. Valuing Voices is a Wellcome Trust funded project involving a partnership with colleagues from Mahidol University in Thailand. The project will develop a toolkit to support best practice in research and research culture. Rebecca also discussed funding available through the Valuing Voices Agile Funding scheme to 

(a) apply the principles to their own research design and / or project implementation, b) develop practical models to establish equitable teams, and (c) develop practical models for establishing global equity. A recording of Rebecca’s talk is available on our website. 

Upcoming events 

Wednesday 15 January, 2-4pm: Researchers’ forum: Involvement@York edition!

Come and hear from Involvement@York about public involvement and participatory research. There will also be an opportunity to share your own work and discuss possible submissions for the Spring Research Priming call.

After this, there will be a regular YorVoice research forum every two months on the last Thursday of the month. Click here to add our research forums to your calendar. 

The Voice of Fate

Crying in the Anechoic Chamber asks, “My funding bid for my dream project just got rejected– what should I do next and how do I heal from this?”

Announcing the YorVoice conference 2025 - in conjunction with UK and Ireland Speech (UKIS) 2025

We are delighted to announce that York will be hosting the UK and Ireland Speech (UKIS) conference in 2025. We will also host our inaugural YorVoice conference as a satellite event. Stay tuned for more information about the conference, including dates. 

If you’d like to join the organising committee, or be involved in another way, please let us know! 

YorVoice at Festival of Ideas

In May we took part in the Discovery Zone at Acomb Library, part of the family-friendly activity programme at York Festival of Ideas. Our activities helped to demonstrate the individual variability of the voice at power, source, and filter level - as well as making loads of noise!

YorVoice at Dagstuhl

In June, YorVoice representative Amelia Gully and steering group member Helena Daffern were invited to the Dagstuhl Seminar on Computational Analysis and Synthesis of the Human Voice. During an inspirational and productive week we spoke about the importance of understanding individual variation in voice, and how we can work together as an international, interdisciplinary community to promote voice research. The seminar ended with a series of plans and recommendations for sharing expertise between groups. Watch this space for information about how you can get involved with the resulting initiatives. 

Upcoming events - YorVoice Researchers Forum - Last session before the summer break!

When: 24 July, 2 pm to 3 pm. Where: Church Lane building, room CL/A/027. What: Coffee, biscuits, and engaging discussions! 

Please bring your own mug.

We’ll be talking about YorVoice plans for next year, discussing upcoming funding opportunities, and there will be an opportunity for you to update the community on your own research. Sign up here.

Learn more about YorVoice’s interdisciplinary research on the human voice here. 

The Voice of Fate

Shy Singer asks, ‘I’d love to join a choir, but I’m worried my singing voice isn’t good enough, and I’m really self-conscious about it! Can the cards help?’

Research Lab Launches 

On 24th April, the YorVoice Research Lab officially launched, with each of our five projects giving an overview of the exciting work they will be undertaking over the next year. 

We are delighted to welcome the following five projects to the YorVoice family:

• Finding your voice: Exploring vocal authenticity through a documentary approach

• Enhancing self-perception in singing voice

• Breathing for speech app

• Setting the legal tone: Towards a framework for the protection of rights in voice personality

• Perception of atypical voices

You can find out about each project by viewing the recordings on the YorVoice Community Hub. 

Some of our YorVoice research lab members, left to right: James Tompkinson, Eva Kimel, Karen Quigley, Jennifer Chubb, Julie Parker, Peter Harrison, Sarah Knight, Marina Cantarutti and James Cave. 

YorVoice Public Engagement

Members of the YorVoice Research Lab will be at this year’s Festival of Ideas talking to the next generation of voice researchers. We’ll be in the Discovery Zone at Acomb Explore Library on Thursday 30th May between 11am and 2pm, where you can play with a crocheted larynx or calculate the size of your vocal tract. The event is free and open to everyone, so please come along! 

If you would like to be involved in delivering the event, we are running a public engagement workshop on 14th May between 2pm and 3pm. Please sign up via our registration form. 

Support available for all voice projects at York

Are you or a colleague working on a project at York related to the voice? As part of our remit to support voice research, YorVoice can offer a range of support, including:

• Student interns to help with project delivery

• Research software engineering expertise

• Support to share your code and data

• Finding collaborators at York or further afield

• Research development support to explore funding opportunities

• Engaging with non-academic partners and the public

• Peer-review of publications and funding applications

Get in touch with us at yorvoice-project@york.ac.uk if you’d like to discuss the support we can offer. 

Voice of Fate

Audy O’Gramme, the ASTRAL ARTICULATOR, tunes in to the FREQUENCY OF FATE with the help of her mystic deck of voice research fortunetelling cards. The cards… know all!

Regretful Revise & Resubmit asks Audy, “Reviewer 2 really savaged my paper- how can I turn things around?”

Research Lab Launch 

Wednesday, April 24th, from 2-4 pm 

Following the success of the YorVoice sandpit in January, we're thrilled to announce that YorVoice will be backing five exciting research initiatives this year.

You're invited to join us in launching the YorVoice Research Lab. Come along for an engaging session where each project team will introduce their work, covering topics including Voice Rights of the Individual, Perception of Atypical Voices, Breathing for Speech App, Self-perception of singing voice, and Vocal authenticity.

Come mingle, enjoy wine, non-alcoholic beverages, and nibbles while learning more about these projects and networking with fellow enthusiasts. 

To RSVP, please fill out the sign-up form to help us arrange catering and ensure accessibility for all attendees. If you can't make it but wish to stay connected, please complete the YorVoice Community Membership form. 

Grant Writing Workshop

We are planning a grant writing workshop for the YorVoice Community. We'd really appreciate it if you would complete our feedback form about the challenges you experience in grant writing, so that we can tailor the workshop to the community's needs. 

Public Engagement & Events workshops

Wednesday, 1 May 3-4 pm; or Tuesday, 14 May, 2-3 pm  

The YorVoice Team will be running family-friendly activities at the Festival of Ideas on Thursday 30th May. We're excited to offer a diverse range of experiences, from exploring a 3D virtual reality speaker space to crafting vowel articulators. This workshop will include an introduction to public engagement, and developing activities for the Festival of Ideas.

If you have an innovative engagement activity in mind, please get in touch. 

Choose from two sessions by completing the sign-up form:

• Wednesday, 1 May, 3-4 pm, HG/017 Dawson Room

• Tuesday, 14 May, 3-4, HG/019 Carr Room (It will be possible to join the introductory sections of this session via Zoom, but please keep in mind that this is an activity based session.)

Highlights:

• Introduction to Public Engagement: Discover the essential concepts behind effective public engagement.

• Practicalities: Learn about the logistics of the Festival of Ideas, including shifts and timings, to ensure smooth operations.

• Engagement Activities Explanation: Dive into the details of the planned activities and how to facilitate them effectively.

• Practice Session: Get hands-on experience by trying out the activities yourself and practising presenting them to fellow volunteers.

Project highlights

In the run up to the launch of the YorVoice Research Lab on 24th April we wanted to pique your interest about some of the projects we have selected to fund!

Vocal Authenticity: A Documentary Approach is a collaboration between Hasmik Gasparyan (ACT), James Cave (Business & Society) and Ben Gibb-Reid (Language & Linguistic Science), with North East Opera

This project explores the ways in which singing and performance activities with marginalised groups can enhance or impede a person’s relationship with their own voice– their ‘vocal authenticity’. Community singing and acting activities have been shown to have a wide range of benefits from improved respiratory health and cognitive function to better social functioning, confidence and positivity. But do these activities also alter the relationship between a person and their voice for the better?

‘Funding from YorVoice has given me the opportunity to work with amazing creators and researchers from across the university and beyond, to shed new light on the amazing work carried out across the North East in helping marginalised people find their voice. This grant will enable us to use documentary making in an innovative way, and reach out to audiences far beyond the usual research community’.

Voice Rights of the Individual is a collaboration between Peter Harrison (York Law School), Jennifer Chubb (Sociology), James Tompsinson (Language and Linguistic Science).

The project aims to explore the legal, linguistic and ethical issues around artificial intelligence (AI) voice cloning, Despite emphasis on the legal and ethical implications of rights pertaining to both image and voice (the recent SAG  “Actors strike” being one notable example), the legal and ethical implications of this are relatively under-explored. Many of the existing intellectual property tools which have been successful in protecting intangible concepts fail when it comes to protecting the voice - particularly the voice of the ordinary person. Through our work on this project, we aim to understand how the voice could be better protected by combining legal, linguistic and AI ethics expertise. Our goal is to explore how a framework could be developed to more robustly protect an individual's right to their own voice, and how such a framework could be implemented in practice.

'The YorVoice sandpit event provided the time, space and environment for the development of this hugely exciting interdisciplinary project. We're hoping that by combining expertise in Law, Linguistics and Sociology, and with the financial backing of YorVoice funding, we'll be able to take a big step forward in addressing what we believe will be a real societal challenge in the future. We can't wait to get started and will look forward to updating everyone with our findings as the project develops.'

Enhancing self-perception of singing voice is a collaboration between Karen Quigley (ACT), Julie Parker (ACT), and Eva Kimel (Psychology).

Anecdotally, significant numbers of people feel or think that they cannot sing. Research (e.g., Hutchins 2012) into problems with basic singing skills suggests that only around 2% of people struggle to perceive pitch, which impairs their ability to differentiate between musical notes, and so to sing them. However, not all of the remaining 98% have confidence in their singing voice, or even in their ability to sing at all. There is reliable evidence for positive effects of singing on well-being in adults (Campbell et al 2022, Daykin et al 2017), and thus those who do not sing because they think they cannot, do not have access to the same well-being potential outcomes as those who do sing.

Our project, therefore, aims to create a pilot study with a small group of participants (N = 10) who self-identify as unable to sing. We will work with them via group and individual interventions, analysing their self-perception of their own singing voice before, during and after the series of interventions, with the hope of increasing their self-confidence in their singing voice, overcoming their negative beliefs about their voice. We will also assess whether the intervention leads to a more general enhancement of self-confidence, potentially resulting in an increased well-being, ability to communicate personally and professionally.

'This feels like an exciting opportunity to meaningfully and genuinely collaborate on a project from scratch with interdisciplinary partners. Our core project team had never spoken before January 2024, and now we're embarking on a year-long exploration of a research question we've co-designed and will co-research. This would be completely impossible without YorVoice's 'sandpit' methodology, which drew colleagues together from across the University and encouraged them to find common ground, be creative and vulnerable, and come up with research ideas in collaborative and collegiate space. In terms of the project, we're deeply invested in exploring the complex question of facilitating people who believe they can't sing to work with their voices, and we can't wait to recruit our participant group and dive in!'

A word from the Voice of Fate

What does the future have in store for YorVoice?

Audy O’Gramme, the ASTRAL ARTICULATOR, tunes in to the FREQUENCY OF FATE with the help of her mystic deck of voice research fortunetelling cards. The cards… know all!

Vexed Voice Researcher asks: How can I stop participants fiddling with the microphone during my recordings?”

Come to our Sandpit for YorVoice funding!

SAVE THE DATE: 9th, 11th & 18th January 2024

Do you want funding for exciting, interdisciplinary research into the human voice? Do you want to meet voice researchers from across the University and find out more about the equipment and resources available for your research?

YorVoice has money to commission around 4 to 6 interdisciplinary research projects of around £20k each. Funding will be allocated via a Sandpit event which will take place across two half days online (9/11th January) and one full day in-person (18th January). More details about the event are available on our website. We’ll also send out the information in a separate email to follow.

Our website

We now have an internal-facing website for YorVoice where we will share information about the project, events, and resources, as well as information about members of our community.

Researcher Panel from October

At the end of October, we held an in-person Researcher Panel where members of the YorVoice community gave a short presentation on their research. We had nine really interesting talks from across Linguistics, Psychology, Computer Science, Archaeology, ACT, and IT services. For those who couldn’t make it, information about our speakers and their slides are available on the YorVoice research community page.

Upcoming events

December 1st (2-4pm, online): Researcher Panel

Following the success of our event in October, we are holding another Researcher Panel, this time fully online. The Panel meetings are an excellent way to find out what’s going on in voice research across the University, to share information about your own research, and to network. Please complete our sign up form, if you’d like to attend (and indicate if you would be willing to do a 5 minute talk).

December 15th (1-3pm, hybrid): Research Culture Workshop

Graham Gill and Iain Larmour from the "Valuing Voices for Equitable and Responsible Research" project will be joining us to share the results of their work on research culture and run an interactive workshop. We will discuss best practice in working on interdisciplinary projects, and reflect on how best to build and nurture collaborative research relationships. Sign-up here.

And finally… the voice of fate

Audy O’Gramme, the ASTRAL ARTICULATOR, tunes in to the FREQUENCY OF FATE with the help of her mystic deck of voice research fortunetelling cards. The cards… know all!

Amelia asks: What can the cards tell us about the YorVoice project?

The Astral Articulator replies: I have drawn a three-card fortune for you, representing THE PAST- where you have come from- THE PRESENT- the here and now- and THE FUTURE- that which is yet to come.

Your first card, FULL ECONOMIC COSTING, symbolizes the importance of attending to details and learning of the Deep Mysteries, such as how overheads are calculated. Drawn as the Past, this represents the period of preparation essential to being awarded funding and beginning work. I sense that spreadsheets were of critical importance to you during this period.

Now your hard work is coming to fruition, the Present is represented by THE FUNDAMENTAL FREQUENCY. Just as the frequency with which the vocal cords vibrate shapes our perception of many vocal features, so too is the work you are doing now crucial to developing the public face of the project. Now is a time to focus on the foundations, with a view to building a community of researchers that complement and boost each other, akin to resonances in the vocal tract.

Finally, the Future reveals THE SANDPIT. Metaphorically, this is a space for creativity and free play- the exploration of new ideas and exciting outcomes. On a more literal level, this is a reminder to sign up for the sandpit event coming in January. See you there!

Next time: a vexed voice researcher asks Audy, “How can I stop participants fiddling with the microphone during my recordings?” Tune in to find out what the cards can tell us!