Christian Herbst awarded the Voice Foundation’s 2026 ‘Best Paper Award’

Founded in Philadelphia, the Voice Foundation is the oldest organisation dedicated to the study of both healthy and disordered human voice function. It publishes the Journal of Voice, the leading scientific journal in the field, and honours outstanding research through awards presented at its annual symposium.

Christian Herbst's award-winning study was conducted in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Iowa and the University of Arizona. The research examines the acoustics of "belting", the powerful, speech-like singing style commonly used in musical theatre and popular music. A widely taught principle holds that belting should be produced using unmodified, "speech-like" vowels throughout a singer's entire pitch range. Using a computational source-filter model of voice production, the research team carried out nearly 13,000 simulations covering pitches from C3 to C6 and 13 different vowels.

The findings challenge this long-established pedagogical principle. For most unmodified vowels, the characteristic belting sound – marked by a dominant second harmonic – can be produced only across a surprisingly limited pitch range, depending on the vowel. The study concludes that many pitch-vowel combinations are likely to require substantial vowel modification, suggesting that the long-standing recommendation to belt with unmodified, "speech-like" vowels may not be acoustically feasible across a singer's full range.