If you saw Sydney Theatre Company’s memorable production of Sarah Ruhl’s play In The Next Room last year, you’ll know that the common or garden “ladies” vibrator has been the subject of offbeat medical experiments for well over a hundred years. Now, it appears, researchers at the University of Alberta have been experimenting with sex toys to help singers and actors achieve that little bit more.

Pressing a finely tuned vibrator against the throat, it turns out, can loosen up all sorts of tensions, enabling improved vocal range and projection. The claims come from Professor David Ley (pictured below), the university’s voice and dialect coach, who led the project.

“You can actually watch on a spectrograph how vocal energy grows,” he says. “Even when you take the vibrator off, the frequencies are greater than when first applied. I’ve done this with singers, schoolteachers and actors. It always works … people simply say, ‘wow!’”

The vibrator method looks like a handy alternative to speech pathology’s standard technique of massaging the larynx – often problematic for people who have problems with the feeling of fingers on their throat.