Surgery makes your vocal cords young again

The surgery involves plumping up the vocal cords to turn old shaky voices into strong clear ones. The technique has previously only been used on people who have lost their voices through injury or disease.

But doctors say it is becoming popular with patients who have already had plastic surgery and want to sound as well as look younger than they are.

"There are people who pay $15,000 for a face lift and as soon as they open their mouth, they sound like they're 75," said Dr Robert Thayer Sataloff of the Graduate Hospital in Philadelphia.

"The wobbles, the tremors, they're what we recognise as things that make a voice sound old," report BBC.

According to timesonline.co.uk you can have the face-lift, the tummy tuck, liposuction and Botox jabs, but still your voice can betray your age. Now doctors in America are offering cosmetic surgery for people who want to sound as young as they look - the "voice-lift".

"If someone can take the tremor out of your voice, that would be of more value for you," according to Dr Robert Thayer Sataloff, of the ear, nose and throat department of Philadelphia’s Graduate Hospital Like the rest of the body, the vocal chords grow flaccid with age. Talking, shouting and singing take their toll, leaving voices weak and quavering. Women’s voices continue to drop throughout their lives, so that they end up speaking in a deep pitch. Men’s voices fall until their fifth decade, then become increasingly squeaky.

All the voices of the world - from the high soprano of an opera diva to the deep voice of a TV announcer to the excited babble of kids on a playground - start in the larynx or voice box. The larynx is simply the top part of the trachea, the pipe leading from throat to lungs.

The lungs are the engines of voice. Like opening and closing bellows, the lungs push streams of air up the windpipe. Stretched like the letter "V" between the front and back of the larynx are the vocal cords. The air from below sets these ligaments vibrating, like strings of a violin.

The number of vibrations per second is the voice's frequency. The average adult human voice has a frequency of 100 to 200 cycles each second. Kids' speech clocks in at about 250 to 400 cycles a second. The frequency of a baby's wailing cry can be 500 cycles a second. And when a soprano hits a high note, her vocal cords may open and shut 1,000 times a second.

Generally, the smaller your larynx and the shorter your vocal cords, the higher the frequency and sound of your voice. Whatever your basic voice, muscles tense and shorten vocal cords to make higher sounds, and relax and lengthen them to make lower ones.

Children's vocal cords, usually less than a half-inch long, make kids' voices higher than most adults'. As kids grow, their larynxes enlarge, and their vocal cords become thicker. Which is why high school students usually have lower voices than elementary school students, inform newsday.com