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| Poster for Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser |
The Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner, which employs “strong magnetic fields, radio waves, and field gradients to form images”[1] of the human body was the instrument of choice (pardon the vocal pun) for Heidelberg's University of Klinikum professor and doctor of medicine Matthias Echternach, who recently approached the 56 year-old singer to fill the role of test subject for an ongoing research project that seeks to further explain the mysteries of the vocal tract as it is subjected to the heavy load and astronomically high registers commonly employed by operatic performers.
The recently released footage of Volle singing is not the first video of this kind to have been released by Professor Echternach or the Freiburg Institute, who uploaded to the video sharing hub youtube a roughly 40-second long clip of mezzo soprano Joanne Calmel singing popular French nursery rhyme Frère Jacques at a frame rate of 24 frames per second in 2014. Both videos are featured below, with Echternach getting delightfully creative with the latter video (the Frère Jacques).
View the fascinating captured footage below:
Michael Volle sings Wolfram's Song to the Evening Star from Wagner's 1845 epic Tannhäuser:
Mezzo-Soprano Joanne Calmel sings the French Nursery Rhyme Frère Jacques (Deutsch: Bruder Jakob):
Footnotes:
[1]Source quote: Wikipedia: Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Discover more (External links):
- Real-time MRI captures video of Opera Singer Performing Wagner (The Telegraph)
- Michael Volle Profile (at the Royal Opera House)
-Rose.
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