Playing With Voices

n the Speech Production Lab at Indiana University, I am using a special 3D/4D ultrasound set up to look at the articulatory phonetics of adult voice actors who produce child voices for TV and film. A lot of people either don’t know or don’t think about how when we listen to child characters, particularly in animated TV, those voices are often being produced by an adult. The big question I am asking with my dissertation is–What are adults doing with their vocal tract anatomy in order to sound like a child?