Ten years of voice research in Freiburg
The University of Music Freiburg i. Br. is celebrating its 70th anniversary. The Institute for Musicians' Medicine (FIM), a joint institution of the University's Faculty of Medicine and the Freiburg University of Music, is also celebrating an anniversary: it has been conducting voice research for ten years.
In studies funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the FIM has now analyzed almost 50 singers, including many who perform regularly at opera houses such as La Scala in Milan, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Bayreuth Festival and the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin.
The studies were primarily carried out using dynamic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). For the implementation and optimization of imaging, there is close cooperation with the Department of Medical Physics at the Department of Radiology at the University Medical Center Freiburg and the Department of Neuroradiology at the University Medical Center Freiburg.
The FIM is headed by Claudia Spahn and Bernhard Richter. Matthias Echternach, senior physician at the Institute of Musicians' Medicine, has set himself the goal, together with Richter, of scientifically clarifying the question of how the voice develops in high-performance singers.
