the.com/voicebox
a slab of cartilage staging every whisper, scream, and terrible karaoke decision you've ever made
means the larynx — the cartilage-and-muscle structure in your throat that houses the vocal cords and turns moving air into sound.
from A plain English compound, exactly what it says on the tin: 'voice' (from Latin vox, 'voice,' via Old French) plus 'box.' The 'box' is apt — the larynx really is a little chamber of cartilage. It's the homespun cousin of the clinical 'larynx,' which comes from the Greek larunx, the upper windpipe.
- real name
- the larynx, sitting atop your windpipe
- deepens at puberty
- testosterone enlarges it, dropping male voices an octave
- the gatekeeper
- it seals shut to stop food entering your lungs
- folds not cords
- vocal folds vibrate up to 1000 times per second
- adam's apple
- that bump is just thyroid cartilage shielding it
for instance
google voicebox — google's generative ai model (2023) that synthesizes speech with emotion and style control
meta voicebox — meta's multilingual speech generation model (2023) trained on 40,000+ hours of audio