🎙️VoQS — Voice Quality Symbols

VoQS (Voice Quality Symbols) is the standard notation for voice quality in transcription — the long-domain settings that colour whole stretches of speech rather than single segments: whisper, creak, falsetto, breathiness, harshness, laryngeal and supralaryngeal settings (labialized or nasalized speech settings), and special airstreams such as œsophageal and electrolarynx speech.¹ Where the IPA describes segments and extIPA describes atypical segments, VoQS answers the third question a clinician or phonetician must ask: what is the voice doing over this whole stretch?

The braces convention

The notation's core design: voice-quality labels are written in braces around the stretch of speech they scope over, with numerals for degree — e.g. {V! … V!} marking harsh voice across a phrase, with 1–3 grading the strength of the setting. The braces are not decoration: they define the scope of the setting, and omitting them destroys the notation's meaning. VoQS layers over IPA/extIPA segmental transcription rather than replacing it.¹²

Authority and versions

• Foundational statement: Ball, Esling & Dickson, "The VoQS system for the transcription of voice quality," JIPA 25 (1995): 61–70.¹
• Current revision: Ball, Esling & Dickson, "Revisions to the VoQS system for the transcription of voice quality," JIPA (online 13 April 2017, doi:10.1017/S0025100317000159) — the sibling of the extIPA 2018 revision, following the same 2016-approval/2017-publication cycle. Among its additions: an aryepiglottic-phonation modifier letter.²
• Theoretical base: John Laver's The Phonetic Description of Voice Quality (1980) supplies the settings framework that VoQS notates. Using VoQS labels without Laver-style settings definitions reduces them to impressionistic judgments.³

Unicode and fonts

VoQS characters were covered together with extIPA in Unicode proposal L2/20-116 (Miller & Ball, 2020). Details worth knowing: U+A7F8 (modifier letter capital H with stroke) is actually small-cap in VoQS usage, with case not distinctive; VoQS also recruits U+0418 (Cyrillic И) and U+1D78; the new aryepiglottic modifier is an x-height small capital. Reference font: SIL Gentium — and as with extIPA, older fonts may lack the newer characters.⁴

Errors to avoid

• Dropping the braces, or leaving their scope ambiguous — scope is the system.¹
• Confusing VoQS settings (long-domain) with extIPA diacritics (segment-level).²
• Applying setting labels without the Laver definitions behind them.³

Learn more

• Ball, Esling & Dickson (1995), "The VoQS system," JIPA 25: 61–70 — The foundational statement.
• Ball, Esling & Dickson (2017), "Revisions to the VoQS system," JIPA — The current revision.
• Laver, The Phonetic Description of Voice Quality (Cambridge, 1980) — The settings theory VoQS notates.
• Unicode proposal L2/20-116 — Encoding details for VoQS + extIPA characters.