My major activity, apart from academics, is vocal music. Videos of some of my very recent performances can be found on my youtube channel.

Here’s my lucky picture with Telugu playback singer Usha (and her lil’ kid) when she was here at CMU!

I learnt vocal classical music for five years during high school with Sri Rangacharyulu Garu and Smt Vasumati Garu, during which I gave several group performances and won a few local awards. Singing used to be my hobby in those days!

Then, I was unfortunate to be a victim of Puberphonia (due to something similar to “non fusion of thyroid laminae”). The worst part of it was that I was clueless of what happened to my voice until after 4 years! I was lucky to come across Dr. Phanindra Kumar of Melody Voice Center, where I learnt that Puberphonia is, after all, a fairly common nuisance among males, just that, people hardly care about their voices (so sad!). It is so common that I myself have encountered a bunch of people who suffer with that. The common symptom is an unusually high pitched voice, which is characteristic of children and adult females. A child usually has a high pitched voice. During adolescence, it becomes low pitched (the boldness in the voices) for males while it remains high pitched (the softness in the voices) for females. Now, a male with Puberphonia has persisted the high pitched voice he had as a child! There are several possible medical reasons for that. It is not that hard to find at least one person around you suffering with this problem!

I am so lucky to have gotten an awesome therapy from Mrs. Ravali, a therapist at that center, and I started singing again. Thank you so much Ravali garu!

To get a sense of how my voice used to be, before the therapy, here is a sample of my old voice (reading a scientific news article in Telugu) : OldVoice

Mrs. Ravali was very amazing to sense that the voice I should have naturally had is in the way I coughed. The initial experiments with my voice involved coughing voluntarily and prolonging it to an extended vowel. Then, I had to press down my Adam’s apple with my fingers and say prolonged vowels, words and sentences. This helped lower the pitch of my base voice.

For example, here is a sample for vowels : Vowel

And another one for speaking words slowly and clearly (reading a news article on psychology in Telugu) : Words

I had to do this for a few months - it was a very frustrating experience! But, it was all worth doing to get back the voice I deserved!

And here’s how the beginning of my new voice sounded like (reading a news article on China, in Telugu) : TheBeginning

That was just the beginning. My voice wasn’t very stable. I had to continue the vocal exercises for another year or so, to internalize the voice and to speak smoothly and fluently. I am extremely happy that I achieved it in the end! I thank all the people who were very supportive throughout - Mrs. Ravali for sure and especially, my parents who were very patient and understanding, even during my frustrating times.