A FUNCTIONING voice is highly significant for a quality life. It is a musical instrument when singing, thus, making it a part of art and culture. The voice provides the main tool for both semantic and emotional communication, and is, therefore, relevant to auditory perception, psychology, neurology, cognition, linguistics and phonetics.
It is a crucial tool, not only in academics, but also, in the daily work environment for over 30 per cent of the entire working population.
The voice is more important than ever— in school, on the job, and for social interaction. But many abuse their voice by smoking, shouting, drinking, or poor speaking technique.
To address some of these problems, World Voice Day was established as a special day to recognise this great gift from God, as well create awareness on how to value and maintain it in different areas like: acting, public speaking, singing, poetry and broadcasting.
The day also serves as an education campaign to inform the public of the importance of the human voice and the need for preventive care.
However, both the general public and professionals in many disciplines lack an understanding of the great significance of the voice.
Commemorated every year on April 16, the day owes its roots to a group of Brazilian voice care professionals, who decided to celebrate this important tool of communication in 1999, by establishing Brazilian Voice Day.
Since then, it has grown to become a global event. But this wouldn’t have been possible if not for members of the academies of speech and voice, and the Swallowing Disorders Committee, which began a series of networking that involved colleagues from Brazil and Europe to establish the global voice day.
For the first time, on April 16, Nigeria joined countries around the world to celebrate the human voice, with music and poetry unique to this great nation.
The celebrations, which held at the University of Lagos, was organised by the school’s Creative Art department.
Hosted by Patricia King of Midnight Crew fame, the event, which attracted comedienne Helen Paul, popularly known as tatafu, and some other Nigerian actors, had high dose of music. The Unilag Choir and other organised chorale singers serenaded guests with good voice performance.
Prior the Nigerian celebration, last year, following a meeting in Erlangen, Germany on July 4, an ad hoc group has been formed, consisting of the following members — Mario Andrea, Michael Döllinger, Norma Enns, Tecumseh Fitch, Natalie Henrich, Christian Herbst, Markus Hess, David Howard, Filipa lã, Dirk Mürbe, Ken-ichi Sakakibara, Ron Scherer, Johan Sundberg, Jan Svec, Sten Ternström, Ingo Titze, and Graham Welch — to share the excitement of voice science, pedagogy and the vocal arts.
The group also had a mandate to organise a global choral concert, internationally broadcast in real time, going from country to country, starting in the far east and ending in the far west, as well as arrange a global series of talks, internationally broadcast in real time, as well as videotaped for internet distribution, about the many different facets of the voice, more importantly, to identify and ask one person, a in as many countries as possible, who assumes the responsibility to initiate and coordinate various events in that country, on the World Voice Day 2013, and lastly, to create a web page where all the events are listed and that also contains information about the voice and voice science, and interactive voice analysis programmes.
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