Paper: Peta Walzak, Patricia McCabe, Cate Madill and Christine Sheard. Acoustic Changes in Student Actors' Voices After 12 Months of Training. Journal of Voice. In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 23 May 2007.

Link to PubMed and abstract: PMID 17512170

First Commented on July 10, 2007

Overall Feeling: Nice little paper which discribe the acoustic changes in some acting students after initial training.

First Comment: Big time OOPS!!!! on the part of the authors and the reviewers. In the abstract it says:

Female participants’ pitch range significantly increased after training, with a significantly lower mean frequency for their lowest pitch.

So guess what the range was? At the commencement of the course, they reported a minimum and maximum pitch range for the female students as 144-813 Hz. Very standard and believable. After 12 months, they report the range as 56-991 Hz. Now 991 Hz is possible but 56 Hz is highly unlikely. Likely the software doing the pitch extraction was confused. This is a common artifact for pitch extraction software and any voice researcher worth their salt would know this. This one mistake sheds doubt on the entire article. Someone should have caught this, the authors or the reviewers.

Oops!!!! Oops!!! Oops!!!!

UPDATE: 2007-05-10 pm: In terms of full disclosure, while I had seen the paper briefly, I had not read it in detail but a colleague did and pointed out the error. We had a good laugh trying to figure out what a 56Hz female sounded like (considering the paper called that the mean minimum, I guess that isn't even the lowest).

Possibly more later...

UPDATE: 2007-12-14 am: The Article is still listed as "In Press" but is available online. However, Table 2 is now different and been changed with the low frequency of 94.67 Hz. While that is much better, I still have two problems with the paper. (1) That is still pretty low for any female, even one undergoing 'training'. (2) I still wouldn't trust anything from Authors or Reviewers that allowed the first frequency through. That is just poor, poor work!!! Well, at least they were able to get it changed before the Journal was actually in print.

UPDATE: 2008-1-21 am: I realized that I should put the main table in question from the original publication before the change. Anyway, I just put it up top. There it is, a woman speaking at 56 Hz.