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How menstruation might influence the female singing voice.

After reading a question about menstruation and voice I realized that, as a female singer I had not thought about this topic and noticed that I too seem to have to put more effort into getting some good sounds out of my voice when it’s shark week. But as said I never really wondered about it until now. So I looked into the web to find answers. And I found some nice infos that I now want to share with you.

Short answer

Yes there is a high chance that menstruation may cause changes in the female voice.

Long and maybe more interesting answer

So apparently to have voice problems during/slightly before menstruation IS a thing. It even has a fancy medical term, menstrual dysphonia, and some also call it pre-menstrual vocal syndrome or PMVS (Yay, it’s like PMS! But for your voice!).

There are also experiments where they have shown that there might be a correlation between your voice quality and menstruation (#1). And another paper suggests that the reason behind this are the hormonal changes that are happening in our (female) bodies.

Especially in the first days of menstruation there is a probability of a „vocal edema“ where the vocal cords are basically swollen (like the rest of our bodies… haha) and there is research on all different hormonal stages and what effects they could have on voices. (#2)

For people wondering: Oral contraception could be a solution for this problem but “their use has found varying results in women, and more data still must be collected on the subject„ (#2)

Picture by Caroline (Flickr.com CC license)

Fun Fact:

The opera even has an old tradition involving the topic. Female opera singer have so called „grace days“ or „Gnadenfrist“ where they can take a leave for a few days because their Aunty Flo is visiting.

Even more Fun Facts:

There is even more research on this topic.

My favorite one is probably a scientific paper called:

„Is Menstrual Dysphonia Associated With Greater Disability and Lower Quality of Life?“ (#3)

(<- love this title!!!)

Aaaaand they did find, according to the paper, that women with a higher degree of dysphonia ALSO had the promised „greater disability“ and „lower quality of life“ during pre-/menstrual phases. Which gives me a really nice outlook to the rest of my menstruating lifetime…

(Ok, all jokes aside: the scientists admit in their paper that these results may be because female professional singer „might“ feel kind of horrible during their menstruation because they can’t sing proper and thus have the feeling of „greater disability“ and „lower quality of life“. Which is a very obvious thing and also makes me wonder why they even wrote a paper about it…)