Linguistics and Beheading

So I'm studying for finals by reviewing a textbook, and I come across this line which somehow went unnoticed previously:

"If you were to cut somebody's head off while they were producing a vowel, and if they were able to go on phonating, the sound that they produced would have the waveform shown in this figure" (Ladefoged, Elements of Acoustic Phonetics, p.102.)

Unfortunately I don't have the illustration to share with you. This was somewhat of a shocking and bizarre sentence to come across in my textbook. I guess that's what I get for studying linguistics...