CARA JADE CATALANO
Independent Researcher

Cara Jade Catalano

Vocal Physiology · Acoustic Signal Analysis · Assistive Communication

I conduct observational research on the human voice — how it changes under autonomic intervention, how it carries signatures of trauma and recovery, and how motor-rhythm analysis can open communicative channels for individuals without functional speech. My work emphasizes long-duration naturalistic recording and rigorous statistical treatment of single-subject corpora.

Research Focus

Vocal Physiology

Post-Autonomic-Intervention Voice

Acoustic changes following bilateral stellate ganglion blockade, measured across a longitudinal single-subject corpus of ~19 hours of recorded speech, song, and vocalization.

Neurovocal

Trauma-Linked Phonation

Relationships between complex post-traumatic stress, autonomic dysregulation, and measurable features of the voice: dynamic range, jitter, shimmer, and timbral consistency.

Motor-Rhythm

Non-Verbal Communicative Signals

Sustained-contact touch patterns as candidate communicative signals in severe hypoxic-anoxic brain injury, with implications for the design of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) interfaces.

BCI / Synthesis

Assistive Speech Synthesis

Application of voice-cloning and neural TTS pipelines (XTTS) to brain-computer interfaces that can give a synthetic voice to individuals who have never been able to speak.

Publications

Preprints Forthcoming

White papers in preparation for preprint release

A series of white papers on naturalistic vocal acoustics, single-subject observational methods, and motor-rhythm analysis is being prepared for public release via established preprint servers. This page will list each paper — with direct links to the preprint, the manuscript PDF, and approved supplemental data — as releases occur.

Contact

For correspondence regarding ongoing or forthcoming work: