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[0:06] Gordon Cox: Welcome to Stagecraft, Variety's Theater Podcast, bringing you backstage and behind the scenes with the stars, creators, and industry leaders on Broadway and beyond.

[0:16] Gordon Cox: I'm your host, Gordon Cox. On this episode of Stagecraft, we're talking about the vocal demands of musical theater and what performers should know about keeping their voices fit.

[0:27] Gordon Cox: Just how hard to sing are the roles in Broadway musicals? How much belting is too much? What do singers do that hurts their voices? And what can they do to keep their voices fit and healthy? These are important questions for everyone working in musicals, and even more so now, when COVID has made respiratory health a primary concern for all of us.

[0:46] Gordon Cox: My guests this episode, Professors Ana Flavia Zuim and Professor Celia Stewart, are doing the research to answer those questions. Zuim is the Associate Director of Vocal Performance at New York University's Steinhart School, and she's also a rehearsal pianist for Hamilton. Zuim's colleague Stewart is an associate professor in communicative sciences and disorders at the Steinhart School, and also runs a private practice specializing in vocal care.

[1:11] Gordon Cox: Zuim and Stewart are co-authors of a new study just published in the Journal of Voices. In it, they arrived at a methodology for quantifying the demands of musical theater roles with the aid of a kind of vocal Fitbit that captured vocal fold vibration data from performers in rehearsal.

[1:28] Gordon Cox: Did you get all that? Yeah, I didn't either, so it's good Zuim and Stewart are in the virtual studio with me to break it down for us. Hi Anna and Celia, thanks for joining me.

[1:36] Ana Flavia Zuim: Hi Gordon, it's a pleasure to be here.

[1:38] Celia Stewart: Yeah, welcome.

[1:39] Gordon Cox: Um, I wonder if we could just first start off by talking about your backgrounds, both of you, and how you what got you to what you are doing today. I wonder if, Anna, let's start with you. How did you what is your background and what led you to the work that you're working on now?

[1:57] Ana Flavia Zuim: That is a loaded question. I'll begin by saying that I'm a native of Brazil. I was born and raised in Brazil, moved to the US when I was 23, had to learn English and language and music and voice has always been a part of my life and my trajectory. Um story short, I did my undergrad in Brazil, my master's and my doctorate in the United States, and had a passion for understanding more about the voice. I began as a pianist and conductor, working on shows, working with musicians, singers, and you name it. And then I went to the Vocology Institute at the University of Utah in 2015 to get a vocology training under Dr. Chizza, who happened to be our co-author on this particular article that we're going to be talking about today.

He couldn't be here with us. Um that opened my eyes to a lot of the nuances of physiology and anatomy, functionality and science behind the voice. So that's a little bit of how I got to do what we're going to be talking about here today. I also work at the vocal performance program at New York University. Prior to that, I worked at the University of Miami as director of contemporary voice, always working with singers, Broadway singers, um, directing shows, music directing, and so on and so forth. So that's a a little bit of a summary.

[3:16] Gordon Cox: Yeah. And what about you, Celia? Tell us about uh your journey.

[3:21] Celia Stewart: Well, I have had more of a curvilinear path than Anna. I I started out and uh I I got a degree in speech language pathology, and I really started working with adults because I found it to be fun to work with adults who had problems with communicating. They might be individuals who had neurological diseases like amotropic lateral sclerosis and stuff like that. Or um people who had voice problems, actors, actresses, singers who had problems with their voice. It didn't work for them in the way they wanted it to. So they would come to me for help to uh make the voice be to meet their needs so they could really produce the voice they wanted to. And uh so in working with individuals who had voice problems and speech problems.

Um I I started doing my PhD, and my mentor Elizabeth Allen, her background had been she was an opera singer who then became a speech scientist who focused on analysis of the voice. So that really opened a door for me in terms of making what we hear visible and really understanding the way that voice is produced. What is happening with the muscles to make sound, and what happens to that sound as it moves through our vocal tract? And um there, Anna and I met and we were talking about um voice, and she said, you know, it'd be really wonderful if we could look at dose, how much the vocal folds are moving when students are performing in a show. And that's called dose, like to acquaint us with the terms, it's it's called dose, that how much the vocal cords move when singing.

[5:07] Celia Stewart: Okay, great. And it's it's exactly that. How hard they're working, how much they're they're uh it's like with aspirin. You would take two aspirin as a dose. With singing, you sing for 30 minutes and that's a 30 minute dose, or you sing for an hour and that's an hour dose. So, how much singing you're actually doing? And so that's about the time then as opposed to intensity, that particular word. Oh, oh, but oh no, it's all of that. Oh, no one will see that that's the complex piece is so cool. It's how loudly somebody is talking, that makes the dose larger. And what pitches the person is using, that also affects the dose. So it's it's actually a very complex uh item measuring the dose. And when Anna said we could do this wonderful study looking at some of the students in her program and how much they were using their vocal folds, how how far the vocal folds were traveling, if you will, as they were rehearsing. I thought this was just the coolest thing I'd ever heard of.

[6:12] Gordon Cox: And this is how would you characterize the state of our knowledge about how the voice works, particularly for professional performers like Broadway, Broadway performers? What do we know and what are still the things that we are still figuring out?

[6:30] Celia Stewart: Well, that's really kind of a two-piece question. There's the very basic mechanics about how we produce voice, but then on honest side, there is the very exciting artistic piece in terms of how do we make that voice convey the emotion or the thoughts that we are wanting to do we want the person to belt? And that is all done with Anna and her magic with what she can do with students.

[6:58] Gordon Cox: Right. And for a little bit of context, we should say that the Broadway singing that you would be looking at in your study, for instance, is different from the singing that people on Broadway did 50 years ago versus the singing that they did a hundred years ago, right? Can um Anna, could you tell us a little bit about that evolution and what those factors are and in what specific ways uh you would characterize the singing that is done right now on Broadway?

[7:28] Ana Flavia Zuim: Absolutely. Um it's even hard to put into words what is done right now because there's so many layers of what is done right now based on the traditions and the history and everything that went on since the beginning of Broadway, right? Um in terms of a trajectory of vocal sounds and what were the trends throughout the years. When Broadway first started, it came out of opera, which was a lighter type of opera. So we know that the style there was very close to opera, but lighter, and then we had burlesque and vaudeville, which also changed the scope of things. Then in the 40s, we had what is known as book musicals, which is when songs started being creative for the actual show. But in terms of vocalism, the styles were still fairly lyrical.

There was a lot of head voice usage. Uh a lot of the traditions of classical singing were still adopted, even though we start seeing some trends of the the Broadway belt being introduced, but in a different context than what we know now. It wasn't until when rock came to be and that whole idea of how the radio and Broadway intersect. And if you think about it, when radio became radio, the songs that everybody was listening were Broadway tunes from Golden Age, you know. But then when Elvis Presley came in, that actually influenced Broadway. And then we have the rock musicals, which also changed the vocal styles that Broadway was producing. Then we had the jukebox musicals with songs like Abba and Christilla Queen on the Desert and other shows that all of a sudden were literally bringing the styles that were being done in shows.

And now we have Sarah Borrell is infiltrating and Carol King and so many other musicals that are specific about the pop culture of singing on Broadway. And now there's this rotating door of while book musicals were creating not only songs particular to that particular character and in a particular vocal style. Now we have jukebox musicals bringing stories being intertwined through songs that pre existed. So we see that shift between what order the story or the songs came first and how that affect the vocal style. And now with Hamilton, we see a lot more hip hop and a lot of patterns, the need for very fast speech and fast production of sound and so on and so forth. So the array of style is so broad that when Celia and I are looking, for example, in this particular musical, one of the reasons why we really wanted to do this is because there's not a lot of research done in terms of how demanding belting is in terms of the muscle, the physiology of what it takes for you to produce that sound eight shows a week, which is the requirement on Broadway.

[10:50] Gordon Cox: Can I ask you a basic question, which is can you define belting for I think we can all we know I think a lot of us know belting when we hear it, but we can't identify what's going on in our body when we're doing it.

[11:02] Ana Flavia Zuim: Uh-huh. I have a I have a love-hate relationship with that question because there's so much that we do not know, and so much that is talked about belting in the industry in general, and there's a lot of this stigma of what is belting. In my concept, trying to help singers find a healthy belt, it takes a lot more, it's takes as much training as it takes for an opera singer to get their head voice totally in tune and develop this vocal coordination. But in simple terms, belting is uh an acoustical quality that you hear that, and this is not in simple terms in terms of explaining the science behind, but you have the matching of formants and harmonics, and how the the thinking of the formants as your body is almost let me give you an example.

[11:50] Ana Flavia Zuim: If you are inside a cathedral or a concert hall and you see how the sound reverberates in that space, the person producing the sound inside, imagine that as your vocal folds and the cathedral as the body of the person.

[12:02] Ana Flavia Zuim: Okay, so the frequencies that are inside this cathedral or in your body resonate with the sound that is being produced at the level of the vocal folds.

[12:12] Ana Flavia Zuim: And so think of pitch being produced at the level of the vocal folds and the form and frequencies being a resonance of your body.

[12:20] Ana Flavia Zuim: If there's a match between the two, and however that match is happening, you're gonna get either a boost in the first harmonic or the second harmonic.

[12:29] Ana Flavia Zuim: And that determines if your sound is more of a call or a yell, which is pretty much what belting is.

[12:35] Ana Flavia Zuim: Or if it's more of a hootie sound that has a little bit more of like that Julia Child type of approach and head voice into it.

[12:42] Ana Flavia Zuim: So how you change acoustically determines what belting the belting quality really is.

[12:48] Ana Flavia Zuim: Yeah, yeah.

[12:49] Ana Flavia Zuim: And therefore the anatomy of the vocal folds also change because in head voice singing, you're dealing a lot more with the edges of the vocal folds, the outer layer of the vocal folds.

[13:01] Ana Flavia Zuim: They're stretched a little thinner, there's a little more tilt in the mechanics of everything.

[13:07] Ana Flavia Zuim: And when you're belting, you have a lot more muscle involvement and a lot more of the bulk of the vocal folds bumping against each other constantly.

[13:17] Ana Flavia Zuim: So there's a little bit more uh contact in the medial part of the vocal folds, which is why we wanted to do this study to see the dose, the intensity, the frequency, and what is a map.

[13:28] Ana Flavia Zuim: One of the interesting things about this study is that it gives us what's known as the voice range profile, which is a graph that colors which notes are being sung the most and the louder throughout the vocal usage of that one day.

[13:45] Ana Flavia Zuim: Okay.

[13:46] Ana Flavia Zuim: In a particular part in a particular role or track or correct.

[13:51] Ana Flavia Zuim: Yeah.

[13:51] Ana Flavia Zuim: So actually, explain that better when we get to this study.

[13:56] Gordon Cox: Yeah, well, that's that that's that's our next stop. I'll have more with Professor Zuim and Professor Stewart right after the break.

[14:10] Gordon Cox: And now here's more with Dr. Ana Flavia Zuim and Dr. Celia Stewart. Let's talk a little bit about uh the study and well, first of all, when and where it happened and why the the situation in which you conducted the study was the right situation for something like this.

[14:29] Celia Stewart: Absolutely. So I'll begin this by saying that I have to give a huge thanks to Darius Schmetter from the Harvard School who actually allowed us to have the machine. Like this all happened when I was at a meeting with him years ago, and he had this machine, which is the disymmetry device, which is really hard to come by.

[14:49] Celia Stewart: Like you it they don't make the machine anymore. And Dr. Hillman and him, they had one at their lab. And when I was talking about my desire to do studies like this, he said, well, if you want to collect data, here's a machine, take it and just collect some data, see what you can find, and then we'll talk about it because they also are very interested in this type of study.

[15:10] Celia Stewart: So huge thanks to them because without this uh trust, this study wouldn't have been been possible because it's it's a hard device to maneuver.

[15:20] Celia Stewart: So I had the device in my office for quite some time trying to figure out how to use it, how to best collect everything.

[15:27] Celia Stewart: And the device measures what specifically?

[15:30] Celia Stewart: Can you it measures pretty much everything that we did in this study, including so it is a symmetry um device that you attach on your notch here?

[15:41] Celia Stewart: I don't remember.

[15:42] Celia Stewart: Yeah, here at the bottom of your neck right there.

[15:43] Celia Stewart: Yeah, no. The bottom of the neck.

[15:47] Celia Stewart: It's a little round circle that has a wire that attached to a box that is the size of two phones approximately.

[15:56] Celia Stewart: And that would go into a pouch that you would carry around your waist, and you would have to carry that. So the students actually carried that for about eight hours a day.

[16:04] Celia Stewart: Wow. We plugged them in at 10 in the morning or nine in the morning. I don't remember the exact hour.

[16:10] Celia Stewart: And then they kept that until rehearsals were over.

[16:13] Celia Stewart: So we got not only their vocal usage during the day while they were in classes and going out and about, as when they were actually singing to see what is the entire dose of that day.

[16:25] Ana Flavia Zuim: Right.

[16:26] Celia Stewart: And rehearsals for what? Talk us through sort of who the students were and what they were doing.

[16:31] Celia Stewart: Absolutely. And to continue where where it started, after we got the machine, I happened to be conducting the show Wonderland at NYU Steinhardt. And Celia and I had a meeting in my office, and I mentioned to her, I said, I have this machine. I would love to do a study looking into this. Would you be interested in joining me in doing something of this caliber?

[16:53] Ana Flavia Zuim: And we had all the students, we had everything set up, and the show was perfect for this because it was a contemporary uh show requiring a lot of belting from the main fingers.

[17:04] Celia Stewart: This is the Frank Wildhorn Alice in Wonderland uh adaptation.

[17:07] Ana Flavia Zuim: Yeah, exactly. And because we only had one machine, we had to be very strategic into how we were gonna collect data, what we needed to collect throughout the period of a month of rehearsal and show.

[17:20] Ana Flavia Zuim: So we mapped that out and we saw that with one machine we could do up to six participants so that we could collect enough data in multiple days to have a baseline and then see them during the rehearsal process and then doing a run of a show.

[17:36] Gordon Cox: And then what what did you have at the end of the study?

[17:41] Ana Flavia Zuim: And then how did you extrapolate the conclusions that you arrived at from that?

[17:47] Celia Stewart: Well, it was really exciting because we had all of this information about the number of times the vocal folds vibrated. So across the six individuals with four days each, they did about 20 million vibrations over eight hour periods.

[17:54] Ana Flavia Zuim: 20 million.

[18:06] Celia Stewart: And if you I mean, it it it's sort of a hard number for me to wrap my head around. And I guess one of the most sort of surprising results to me was if you added up the distance that the vocal folds moved on each vibration, it added up to about five miles.

[18:26] Ana Flavia Zuim: And you think that the vocal folds vibrate, they're moving millimeters during a vibration. It's a tiny, tiny movement.

[18:34] Celia Stewart: But if you add it up what six individuals did over eight-hour periods, four eight-hour periods, it was five miles worth of movement.

[18:44] Ana Flavia Zuim: That's a tremendous amount of movement of these vocal folds. And like I say, 20 million times when the vocal over 20 million times when the vocal folds actually came together and touched each other.

[18:57] Celia Stewart: So just the sheer dose, just the sheer number of vibrations that these students produced can give us a bit of insight into what is a safe amount of phonation for individuals to do when they are preparing for a show.

[19:15] Ana Flavia Zuim: And luckily, all of the students did very well. They did not experience any type of trauma or irritation.

[19:21] Celia Stewart: So this is seems to be a dose that would be very okay for them to do. It would not be a harmful dose in any way.

[19:28] Ana Flavia Zuim: And this really, I guess it supplements what we sort of know about rehearsals. Obviously, during a rehearsal, the students get better at what they're doing. They can sing the songs better, they can produce the songs in the way that they want to, and it's not harmful.

[19:44] Celia Stewart: And that's that's very exciting. Another thing that I thought was really interesting from the data is that we measured out the score. We identified the notes, the highest notes and the lowest notes in the score.

[19:58] Ana Flavia Zuim: And then we looked at the sounds that individuals produced. And this would be when they're warming up, when they're singing, when they're talking, when they're joking around.

[20:08] Celia Stewart: And at both ends, people, everyone, all males and females produced higher notes than were in the score and lower notes just as part of their uh production that day.

[20:21] Ana Flavia Zuim: And I I don't know why it surprised me, but it did. I somehow had this thought in my head that if you're singing, those are going to be, you know, some of the highest and lowest notes that you're producing.

[20:34] Celia Stewart: But it's not necessarily so.

[20:38] Gordon Cox: And how do you take this information or the beginnings of this information? I've seen some of the visualizations of the data that you got for this. It's kind of these, I don't know, smudges of like clusters of where the most frequently sung notes or frequencies uh are, right?

[20:58] Celia Stewart: Per role. There were six different roles that you measured. Um, how do you how do you imagine using that, or is this something that you might imagine using on a kind of day-to-day basis with professional singers, particularly working on Broadway or in theater?

[21:13] Ana Flavia Zuim: I love what Celia just said about the range, because when we think when we think of vocal range, we think of think of your shoe size. Your shoe size is your shoe size. There's nothing you can do to increase that.

[21:25] Ana Flavia Zuim: Your vocal range is your vocal range based on how low and high you can sing. Of course, with learning how to operate the instrument, you discover that maybe you have a higher range than you originally thought, or a lower range, and they're so on and so forth.

[21:39] Ana Flavia Zuim: So let's take a trained singer who already knows what their vocal range is, and they know that it's it goes approximately two and a half octaves to three octaves. That range is the includes the extremities of the lows and the highs that you're capable of reaching.

[21:56] Ana Flavia Zuim: That doesn't mean that that particular score will be utilizing your entire range. And we have been noticing a trend, especially on Broadway, that while opera scores hit really high notes and high C's and above, musical theater uh works tend to be much lower in terms of range, going up to a high G, but not to a high C or above.

[22:21] Ana Flavia Zuim: And the only score that has uh not the only score, but the main score that is very well known that has a high C is the Phantom of the Opera. And it is known that that one particular note is actually pre-recorded, so the singer doesn't have to sing it eight times a week.

[22:29] Celia Stewart: Eight times a week, because in opera we should say you don't do opera singers don't sing eight times a week in the way that Broadway and theater musical theater performers do, right?

[22:44] Ana Flavia Zuim: Okay, so I'm sorry, go on. And to answer your question into how do we think that this is helpful? I think knowledge is power, as we all know, and it's very cliche to say, but I think we we're still learning about what is the vocal demand of a Broadway singer that has to do eight shows a week, especially in a score that requires lower range of usage of notes, but a more concentrated amount of those notes within Passaggio and also within belting regions that have high impact of collision on the vocal folds.

[23:18] Ana Flavia Zuim: So the demand and the difficulty of each role can be tremendous.

[23:25] Ana Flavia Zuim: So when we're talking about this as a possible Fitbit for the voice, what does that mean? It means that when you are doing cardio versus muscle work versus intensity training and this and that, you see all the parameters of what is going into your workouts and in your body with the voice, we are yet to develop the knowledge and the understanding of all of these components.

[23:48] Ana Flavia Zuim: So the more we can educate singers and casts and production teams to take all of that into account, the better it will be for the stamina of that singer to be able to cope with whatever their vocal load is, and having to use the dose required for that particular vocal score.

[24:07] Gordon Cox: Yeah.

[24:08] Ana Flavia Zuim: And how has what you have learned from that study impacted what you would like to study next? So that I would say the graphs that you were referring to before, which are the graphs that have the color coded, which is all black and white, but the darker the spots means that this the singer was singing those notes more often and loudly throughout this course.

[24:37] Ana Flavia Zuim: That gives us a little bit of an understanding of the demands through Passaggio and not and how much muscle activation there probably is in terms of the acoustical parameters of that particular note, so that we know okay, if there's a lot more collision here, the recovery time is going to be needed afterwards.

[24:55] Gordon Cox: Okay.

[24:56] Ana Flavia Zuim: Well, we don't know yet from the research is how much is too much. Uh how how many hours does it take for all the fibers to recover? We know that there's fiber one and fiber two, and they do recover at different paces. One recovers probably in about a few hours, and then the other one, depending on the amount of load that you put in a voice, may take a day or two.

[25:18] Ana Flavia Zuim: So all of that, this research can lead into further understanding some of these parameters so that once we understand what your threshold of phonation is, then we can estimate okay. Uh, similarly to how your iPhone nowadays tells you, oh, you listen to music a little too loudly this week. You heat your threshold of hearing. Watch out because we don't want you to get a hearing impairment due to overuse.

[25:46] Ana Flavia Zuim: That would be the same idea for the voice of okay, it's not that we're saying you're gonna get a vocal pathology, but like in the prevention stage, we see that you used up to a particular amount that has been considered. We we still don't have that in voice. We don't have an amount that is considered a threshold of use.

[26:01] Gordon Cox: I see.

[26:05] Ana Flavia Zuim: And what for folks who are working on Broadway night right now or would like to become Broadway performers, what what would you warn them are sort of the biggest challenges uh to vocal health for the people who sing professionally at times a week? Because the industry still doesn't have the parameters. We don't have with the science the parameters established.

[26:31] Ana Flavia Zuim: The lack of knowledge and understanding of how this can be impactful to voices leads to this stigma of if you have an injury, you don't have good technique, or you are words that used to be used before, abusing your voice, which are things that imposes in the singer a guilt about something that is simply part of their journey. You don't tell a soccer player that they're they busted their knee because they don't have proper technique, you know.

[27:01] Ana Flavia Zuim: It it almost becomes a badge of honor of like you're so tough, you are and this was said by one of our colleagues from the voice center, Dr. Quak, in uh in um an article that I really like called Stop Shaming Adele, talking about vocal technique, and that article in itself, um, and other articles that came throughout that time were very enlightening and controversial at times too, because there is a little bit of this stigma on the singer.

[27:29] Ana Flavia Zuim: So the more we can destigmatize voice injury, and the more we can have knowledge to empower singers to take ownership of how they're taking care of the instrument, the better it's going to be not only for them, but also for the industry, in the sense of right now there's a fear of calling out, because let's say that I'm a performer and I have eight shows a week. All of a sudden I start feeling a little bit of vocal fatigue, but I know that there are 10 people down the line dying to do my part.

[28:00] Ana Flavia Zuim: And if I start calling out, producers may see, oh, this person's calling out too much, they're costing us too much, or X, Y, and Z. So the lack of understanding is leading to a lot of anxiety of people actually not taking proactive measures about taking care of their instruments for fear of the competitive nature of the industry they're in.

[28:22] Ana Flavia Zuim: So a lot of productions, they will actually have a physical therapist on staff. But it's very rare that they will have a speech pathologist or a vocal coach or somebody to actually guide these singers through their journey, and they're doing as much singing as they're doing dancing in most shows.

[28:42] Gordon Cox: Right.

[28:43] Celia Stewart: Yeah.

[28:44] Gordon Cox: Go ahead, Celia. Did you want to add something?

[28:46] Celia Stewart: Yeah, and I just wanted to add to that, and I think that that's really important to get rid of some of this stigma. It's it's when sometimes when singers will come to me, they'll say, Don't tell anyone that I'm here, don't tell my coach, don't tell anyone that I'm here. And it makes me just feel sad inside when somebody says that because as a singer, at some point you probably are going to run into trouble.

[29:12] Celia Stewart: And when that happens, it's really important to know that there is help there that can get you back on track. This doesn't have to be anything permanent, it's nothing to be ashamed of. It's just one of those things that happens. And as we better understand dose, as we better understand voice use, we may be able to have guidelines that will say, you know, maybe you should only do six shows a week. Maybe that seventh show should be done by somebody else, and it shouldn't be, you know, that they'll take the part away from you, but it may just be too much, or uh figuring out another way that will make it work.

[29:50] Celia Stewart: But right at this point, we don't understand the effect physiologically of using the voice long term and producing high pitches, producing high loudnesses, producing um a voice that fills the entire theater. We don't have good data on that.

[30:10] Celia Stewart: So it's really important to capture that data so we can you know be wiser in what we do.

[30:16] Gordon Cox: Yeah.

[30:16] Ana Flavia Zuim: One thing that I really love that Celia said before about our data is something that it's a dream of mine. If we can actually have more machines to quantify more things in terms of shows, because if you think about different roles and different musicals, if we could quantify the distance that the vocal folds are required to run for that particular role, let's think of alpha, but just because it's a very well-known role that everybody understands how demanding that probably is.

[30:44] Ana Flavia Zuim: Yeah, if we knew how many miles that voice would run, the extent to which like the pitches and the intensity required for that, and we could have a parameter say this role the demand is X for this ensemble role, the demand is one-third of that X or whatever that is. You know, the more data we have, and the more we can quantify things like that, the more we can know how to address and tackle because maybe what Celia is saying about this particular role should be played performed six times a week. Then we have data to back it up.

[31:17] Ana Flavia Zuim: Y versus another role that might have a few belting numbers in them, but they have quite a bit of um voice resting between. Let's say that they have a 30 minutes of scene work that other characters do, and that character can rest until they do it again. If we can take into account the voice rest periods for vocal fatigue recovery time, and so on and so forth, we can actually put thresholds into which role is more demanding versus something else.

[31:46] Celia Stewart: Yeah.

[31:47] Celia Stewart: And if I can just jump off of what Anna said, this is this is really really important, these rest periods. And rest periods don't necessarily mean silence. It may be doing a phonation that is very quiet. Just a very quiet, gentle sound. And that may be something that will help the vocal folds to recover. But basically, we need more data.

[32:09] Ana Flavia Zuim: So uh it's just one study after another. It based on what you know now about vocal dose and what you know of Broadway. Are there particular roles or shows right now that you consider really really demanding?

[32:26] Celia Stewart: Mm-hmm. Many is there amazing.

[32:32] Ana Flavia Zuim: Yeah, yeah.

[32:33] Celia Stewart: But Alphabet sounds like one of Alpha Band Wicked, I mean, sounds like one of them, and yeah, yeah.

[32:38] Ana Flavia Zuim: Dear Evan Hansen is also really demanding.

[32:41] Celia Stewart: Oh, sure.

[32:42] Ana Flavia Zuim: Mm-hmm.

[32:42] Celia Stewart: Yeah. You know, there are many shows that are extremely demanding. And there's actually an article that Ben Platt um mentioned how he copes with taking care of his voice and his life, and how he changed the habits, the regular habits. And that's another thing to be taken into account too, the daily habits of someone, because when you're doing a show, you're ending the show late, you're going home. Some people prefer not to eat before the show, but then they eat after the show.

[33:09] Celia Stewart: Then a lot of them actually end up going to bed, and how acid reflux and the lifestyle in general can affect. So there's a lot that goes into it that needs to be taken into account. And this is just one piece of the puzzle. We're just calculating how the dose can affect, so then you know how you need to take care of your voice the day after. So that you can maintain your voice throughout the the HO week.

[33:37] Gordon Cox: Right, right. Um, well, thank you. Thanks for uh sharing the knowledge with us and uh I look forward to hearing what insights come out of the next study that you're working on. Um thank you both. Thanks for joining me.

[33:49] Ana Flavia Zuim: Thank you so much for having us.

[33:55] Gordon Cox: That was Professors Ana Flavia Zuim and Professor Celia Stewart, the co-authors of a new study about vocal dose and vocal demands in contemporary musical theater, recently published in the Journal of Voices.

[34:06] Gordon Cox: If you like what you're hearing on this and other episodes of Stagecraft, I'd really appreciate it if you took the time to rate and review us wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps us grow our audience of folks who love theater as much as you and I do. Or tell a friend about Stagecraft, or give us a shout-out on social media. Find past episodes and subscribe on all the pod places, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and on the Broadway Podcast Network, which is a great place to find more theater for your ears.

[34:32] Gordon Cox: I'll be back in two weeks with another new episode. Until then find me on Twitter at G Cox Variety. Thanks for listening and see you at the theater.