Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Stutterers "can" sing fluently

As a regular reader, you know how much I sacrifice myself for the cause of stuttering. And here is another example. Myself and Einar have undertaken a dangerous self-experiment last summer.

Here is the abstract that I want to send to the journal:
In this article, we show that people who stutter are able to sing fluently. To test our claim, we set up a Karaoke system in Tom Weidig's garage. Two male right-handed stutterers ("E" and "T") were used. They each were asked to sing Robin Williams' Love Supreme. Our findings show that both subjects were able to sing fluently, and did not deviate from the controls. One of them, "E", sang noticeably better, however the other subject ("T")'s dancing and entertaining abilities were clearly superior. We speculate that the difference in singing performance was due to either the higher level of alcoholic consumption in subject "E" or an inherent genetic predisposition. We have included two video recordings below.


Subject "T" video (the faces are darkened on purpose in order to adhere to restrictions imposed to us by the ethics committee.)



Subject "E" video (the faces are darkened on purpose in order to adhere to restrictions imposed to us by the ethics committee)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What about putting on a fake accent? Does that have the same effect on fluency as singing?

Bricolage said...

Have you ever spoke about Amy Winehouse? No one seems to bring up the fact that she stutters pretty bad. It could be why she has constant problems with drinking... being in the public eye and having to do interviews as a stutterer is quite stressful.