Silvia Capobianco

Silvia Capobianco’s work mingles her interest in voice physiology and artistic voice care with the activity as a professional singer specialized in the Early Music repertoire. After graduating with highest honors from University of Pavia (Italy), she is currently practicing as a Medical Resident in Audiology and Phoniatrics at Pisa University Hospital (Italy). In 2017 she won the Armenise-Harvard Summer Fellowship to research on ambulatory voice monitoring at the Massachusetts General Hospital Voice Center (Harvard Medical School) under the guidance of Robert E. Hillman.

Her current interests cover acoustic analysis of formants applied to artistic and pathological voices, laryngopharyngeal reflux disease, machine learning applied to spectrographic and acoustic analysis of voice, and etiology of childhood deafness.

In 2023 she won the European Phoniatrics Young Scientist Award (PHYSA) of the Union of European Phoniatricians (UEP). She is a member of CoMet (Collegium Medicorum Theatri), a scientific society dedicated to the care of professional voice users. From November 2023 to April 2024 she will attend the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm as a visiting researcher under the guidance of Sten Ternstöm.

In parallel with her scientific activity, she takes part each year as an alto singer in several musical productions in Italy and Europe. As a choir member of the ensemble Coro e Orchestra Ghislieri she took the stage of some of the most important halls and festivals, such as the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Berliner Philharmonie in Berlin and the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. One of the CDs she recorded, Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle, won in 2022 the International Classical Music Award (ICMA) in the category “Choral Music”.

Her PhD project aims to describe clinical applications of voice mapping, with a special interest in patients reporting voice changes after uncomplicated thyroidectomy.