VOICEPrints. Comparative Voice Pedagogy A Comprehensive Review ON-DEMAND ONLY MAY-- JUNE 2017

Transcription

1 VOICEPrints JOURNAL OF THE NEW YORK SINGING TEACHERS ASSOCIATION MAY-- JUNE IN THISIssue: On-Demand Learning: Comparative Voice Pedagogy...Page 1 New PDP On-Site Course: Vocal Tract Tuning for Contemporary Singing: How Vocal Tract Shape and Vibratory Mode Affect the Spectrum with Brian Gill...Page 1 Message from President Judith Nicosia...Page 2 Message from VOICEPrints Editor Anna Hersey...Page 3 FEATURE ARTICLE: Hi-ho, the Glamorous Life! Insights from an American Vocal Coach in Germany, by Ellen Rissinger...Pages 3-4 FEATURE ARTICLE: Necessary Roughness in the Voice Pedagogy Classroom: The Special Psychoacoustics of the Singing Voice by Ian Howell...Pages 4-7 International Congress of Voice Teachers 2017: The Future of Singing, in Stockholm, Sweden...Page 8 OREN LATHROP BROWN PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM FEATURED COURSE: Comparative Voice Pedagogy A Comprehensive Review ON-DEMAND ONLY Review the past informative seasons of NYSTA s favorite On-Demand PDP course. Janet Pranschke Moderator During each yearly course, master teachers present teaching demonstrations after case histories of students are discussed. Concrete links are made between various teaching strategies and the scientific and medical information covered in other courses of the PDP program. This course is available On-Demand 24 / 7 from the comfort of your home or office! Start any time and receive up to four full months of access. Graduate credit is also available in conjunction with Westminster Choir College at Rider University. For more information, contact NYSTA s Professional Development Program Director Felicity Graham at pdpdirector@nyst.org. PAST PRESENTERS 2014: Richard Leech, Elizabeth Kling, Amy L. Cooper, John West, David McCall, and Lisa Rochelle. 2013: Jeanne Goffi-Fynn, Matthew Hoch, Lori McCann, Jan Prokop, Melissa Cross, and Margaret Lattimore. 2012: Stephen Oosting, Taina Kataja, Jeffrey Gall, Justin Stoney, Margaret Cusack, and Mary Saunders-Barton. 2011: Margaret Baroody, Gwendolyn Bradley, Scott McCoy, Sally Morgan, Michael Paul, Michael Rider, and Patrick Wickham. 2010: Herbert Burtis, Judith Coen, Jeanette LoVetri, Lori McCann, Scott McCoy, Patricia Raine, and David Sabella-Mills (with Marvin Keenze, moderator) OREN LATHROP BROWN PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM NEW COURSE: Vocal Tract Tuning for Contemporary Singing: How Vocal Tract Shape and Vibratory Mode Affect the Spectrum with Brian Gill LIVE ON-SITE Saturday, May 27, 1:00 EDT 79 Madison Ave, NYC $50 Members, $65 Non-Members This class will cover the basics regarding the acoustics of the singing voice with an emphasis on formant/harmonic interaction and Brian Gill the resultant spectra. Vocal fold contact time, using data from EGG/ELG will be included, as the thickness of the folds as well as their contact duration affects the acoustics generated at the vocal fold level. While some comparisons will be shown with regard to the differences in vocal tract tunings of classical and non-classical singing, the emphasis of the course will be on resonance strategies found in non-classical singing, including musical theater legit and belt gospel, folk, and pop music. Both recorded and live examples of these tunings will be explored. Not in New York? Not a problem. Although the course is being offered live, on-site in NYC, purchasing the course also gives you FOUR MONTHS of access to the video archive of the course. Tenor Brian Gill, DMA, Certificate in Vocology, and 2011 Van L. Lawrence Fellowship winner, is associate professor of voice at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. He was previouslyn associate professor /director of vocal pedagogy at New York University s Steinhardt School and Voice Center (Langone Medical Center). He has also taught at Eastern Kentucky University, Pace University, University of Kentucky at Lexington, and University of Colorado at Boulder.

2 2 MESSAGE FROM THE President The Total Lesson When teachers gather to talk, there is a fairly constant lament these days concerning the lack of preparation singers have for collegiate or professional study. Coming out of high school, many have not studied a single non-english language, have no background in another instrument (including piano, which they desperately need), do not know what a key signature is nor what it means, do not know how to count rhythms, have virtually no knowledge of who the major vocal figures are (no matter what genre), and on and on. What do they know? Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and every other social media app they can load on their smart phones none of which will help them learn a new piece of music on their own. I have always felt that it is the responsibility of the private teacher, no matter what the age and musical level of the student, to incorporate musical knowledge of all kinds into the lesson. Although a lesson is anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes long, there is still time to check briefly on any number of things and to reward the student when the right information is provided. What is the key signature (or what does a flat/sharp/natural sign mean), what is the meter and what musical unit gets one count or one beat, how many sections to the piece (ABA, AB, etc., which engenders a short discussion of strophic or through-composed, etc.), what do the markings in the piano part mean (because sometimes the pianist doesn t know either), what do the dynamic markings mean, how fast should this piece go (and how to determine that from the app on your phone!), what constitutes a vocal/musical phrase, what clues tell you where to breathe, who is / was the poet or lyricist, when was the piece composed and for what purpose the list is endless, as you know. Instilling in singers the discipline of the musical profession, again no matter the genre, is a life-long task for all teachers. Singers need a way to approach music and singing systematically, a method, if you will, that gets them from A to Z with knowledge, confidence, and consistent results, especially when they are in a hurry to learn something. There is no greater joy for me than to ask a student some of these questions quickly, receive the correct answers (or at least some of them) and know the singer has done his or her homework and is ready to really delve into the mysteries of artistry. When I ask for that preparation, I am trying to build a thorough approach to learning that will serve the student, and potential future colleague, the rest of his or her life. That approach includes getting a singer to vocalize every day (when practice time is available) in an organized manner, using exercises that show how to wake up the breathing muscles, stretch the range at both ends, utilize semioccluded vocal tract exercises (such as lip trills, tongue trills, raspberries, humming, and flow straws) to conserve breath, practice excellent vowels and balanced resonance (and thereby correct intonation), encourage flexible muscle memory, tackle any number of upcoming vocal challenges by making an exercise out of a difficult phrase or musical gesture (which includes chromatic scales at some point), and vary the dynamics on each exercise (once mf, twice p). Such a vocalizing session should not take more than minutes, maximum. The order of the exercises should build good habits that naturally lead to the goal of effortless sound, and the student must be made aware that the order (not necessarily set in concrete!) is an important part of that goal. At the end of vocalization, I suggest every singer perform her touchstone piece: a song or aria that sets the voice up in a great place just by virtue of its inherent qualities. A singer may not have one at first but eventually such a work comes to mind. My touchstone was, and still is, Mozart s Dans un bois solitaire. When that piece felt good, I was ready to go. When it didn t, back to the drawing board. In the lesson, we can extend the singer s musical confidence (when the singer is ready) by not playing every note of the exercise with him or her. I begin by doubling every note, especially with those who are uncertain singers or beginners, but soon I start leaving out notes until the singer can go it alone with just a V7 chord for the next starting pitch (and no sustaining pedal!!). It s enlightening to ask the singer to go up or down by half steps to the next key of the exercise without hearing the piano chord underneath. Usually, with a bit of practice, singers will surprise themselves and be fairly confident of the next key without piano support. Another trick I use is stopping to chat a bit (or tell an extended anecdote), then asking the singer if he or she still can remember the last pitch sung. If no other pitch has occurred in the intervening time, many singers can do this, much to their surprise. Lastly, it s a nice challenge to ask if the singer can begin a familiar piece without hearing the accompaniment. Again, many can do this (in the correct key) and they don t even know it. All these ideas are used in the spirit of making the singer independent of the accompaniment and a stronger musician. Most are quite delighted when they realize how much they have grown in this regard. Though I insist on organized vocalization for my singers, I find too many times (and I hear it from the practice rooms as well) that students are haphazardly running through any number of exercises without rhyme or reason, not looking for anything in particular except the sound of their own instruments. Nothing is being built in the warm-up and therefore little is retained in performance. When asked what the purpose of a particular exercise is, many have either no idea whatsoever, or an incorrect picture of what they are supposed to gain/remember from that particular set of notes. When this happens with one of my singers, I blame myself: I have not been clear enough on the necessity of healthy, systematic warm-ups and what each exercise, in order, is designed to achieve. Once more, back to the drawing board! Part of our mission as teachers must obviously go beyond the standard vocal technique we espouse. Our mission must include as much of the broader values of being a musician as we can comfortably manage in each lesson. We need to give specific assignments that require a singer to seek out additional information, that ask him or her to build new skills each week. That may mean we wind up teaching a bit of theory or history or keyboard in our lessons. Our students will be the richer for it. If we don t ask for a spirit of discovery in every piece, if we do not encourage exploration by students for their own sake, if we do not teach total lessons and a systematic development of vocal and musical skills, there is the very real possibility that our students will never have that knowledge, will never be the confident performers they could be, and will never realize their musical potential. Thinking of assignments reminds me to share with you a very useful app for learning and pronouncing the International Phonetic Alphabet in all languages. It s called IPA Phonetics (works on smart phones and tablets), and it includes video of a man pronouncing every vowel and consonant on the extensive chart. The camera is very close to the person s mouth, so you can see tongue position, soft palate, lips, teeth just about all the articulatory structures you need. Additionally, there are settings on the app so it can be custom-tailored to the user s needs. The reviews are from linguistics majors who used the application to become familiar with the sounds of various languages. It is incredibly useful if you have singers who struggle with language pronunciation (yes, it can help non-english speakers also). As this is my last message as President, I want to welcome my successor, Matthew Hoch, who will be firmly in command of NYSTA by mid-summer. I wish him all the best as he comes to grips with NYSTA s future. Please extend him all the support you can volunteers gratefully welcomed! May your pharynx always be moist. Judith Nicosia, President president@nyst.org

3 3 MESSAGE FROM THE Editor Dear Colleagues, In our previous issue, we featured an expert panel discussing the academic job market in music, and our first feature article in this issue continues in a related vein. On the performance track, a plethora of advice is available about the young artist audition circuit here in the United States. Pursuing a career abroad can be even more daunting, and few resources on this topic are available. Ellen Rissinger, creator and curator of The Diction Police website and podcast, offers a unique perspective on building a successful performance career in Europe. She recounts her own experience, obstacles and successes alike. Our second feature article, by psychoacoustics trailblazer and VOICEPrints Associate Editor Ian Howell, suggests a new paradigm within which we can identify sung vowels. Professor Howell has challenged existing frameworks, and I, likewise, challenge you to listen with fresh ears to these possibilities. This brings my first year as Editor-in-Chief of VOICEPrints to a close, and it has been a pleasure to serve this fine organization. I am grateful to outgoing President Judith Nicosia for her leadership and excellent letters. I m looking forward to welcoming our new President, Matthew Hoch, who previously served as Editor-in-Chief of this publication. We are already busy planning exciting content and new developments for next year. Please send questions, comments, or article submissions to me directly at voiceprints@nyst.org. As always, archives of past issues are available on the NYSTA website. Anna Hersey Editor-in-Chief, VOICEPrints HI-HO, THE GLAMOROUS LIFE! Insights from an American Vocal Coach in Germany by Ellen Rissinger TEACHER: Have you ever seen the Dom in Köln (the cathedral of Cologne)? ME: No, I ve never been to Europe. TEACHER: You cannot play the sixth song of Dichterliebe properly unless you have seen the Dom in Köln. I never had any intention nor any desire to come to Europe. The idea of flying over an ocean terrified me, my mother never wanted her children to be that far away, and the arrogance of youth told me that I didn t need to come to Europe. So when this conversation with my teacher in grad school took place, I inwardly scoffed, telling myself that he was exaggerating. Just because he studied in Germany, he thinks everyone needs to go there, I thought. Seven years later, after a few young artist programs, and several years doing contract work for opera companies, I showed my résumé to people at some of the major opera houses in the US, and they all said that they were looking for coaches/pianists with experience in repertoire houses. Go to Europe! they said, and for the first time I took it seriously. My plan was to spend three to five years in Germany and then, of course, to move back home. It s been fourteen years now, and what I ve learned in that amount of time about the job, about the world, about myself is incalculable. When you tell people you live and work in Germany, their expression is generally one of admiration: they think how glamorous your life must be. They don t realize the difficulties of being so far away. I spent the first three months ing my father every day, wondering what I had done! Dealing with all of the paperwork when you first get here is practically a full-time job. Just when you think you re done, someone else reminds you of another paper that needs to be filled out and taken to another office. Only my father, a nephew, and my best friend have ever made it over, and if I want to see my friends and my family, I have to fly back home. My mother passed away while I was living here. Being away from family during that time was beyond difficult. It can be incredibly lonely to be far from everyone for such a long period of time. On the other hand, one does find an unexpected inner strength. I now know that I can go anywhere even to a place where I know no one and don t speak the language and live a successful life, make wonderful friends, and be happy. Believing that there are no challenges too difficult to overcome brings me a sense of peace. Knowing that there is nothing that I dream of doing that isn t attainable gives me immeasurable confidence. I m on my own over here there s no safety net and somehow that is very liberating. In some ways, being a performer in Europe is considered a job like any other job. We have a daily schedule and (sort of) set work hours. In Germany, the opera houses are government-sponsored, so we are, in effect, government employees. We have full benefits: health and dental insurance, a steady paycheck, a thirteenth paycheck (extra money at Christmas and summer), and vacation bonuses. We even have a retirement plan specifically for people with stage careers. In France and Belgium, performers receive a stipend when they are unemployed, which allows them to keep working at their craft until they find another performance opportunity. If one has a full-time contract at an opera house and falls ill during the house s vacation time, the house must return that time back during the season. Can you imagine that in the States? But having a Fest contract in Germany also means that you are part of a huge machine that has to keep running. You may be rehearsing for two or three different productions at any given time, even on the day of a performance, because certain people (or rooms!) are only available then to rehearse. You may have weeks with nothing to do or weeks with a performance every night, because all the shows you re cast in happen to be programmed that way. The Show Must Go On this takes on a whole new meaning when your Rodolfo, Turandot, or Brünnhilde calls in sick at 9 AM for a 7 PM performance. The office (the KBB ) will then call agents and other houses to locate someone who can sing the role, and a Einspringer (replacement) jumps in, usually after only a brief Verständigungsprobe (brush-up). One moral of this tale: don t put something on your résumé that you can t sing on any given day if your agent knows you sing it, he ll offer to send you to jump in! In the United States, opera contracts are for several weeks and you focus on one piece at a time it s called the stagione system. In Germany, repertoire houses will rotate productions over many seasons; in a single week I played staging rehearsals for Les contes d Hoffmann, worked a performance of Die Zauberflöte, and gave coachings for Harbison s The Great Gatsby and Weinberger s Schwanda the Bagpiper (in Czech!). Opera houses have up to eight new productions a season; each gets roughly six weeks of rehearsal time, a huge shock to me! During my first production in Germany, at the three-week point, I was feeling like everything was moving at a glacial pace. The tenor in the production said, This rehearsal period is really flying by! That production was Dialogues des Carmelites. I d arrived on December 31 st and two weeks later started coaching Germans all day long on French repertoire. They spoke neither French nor English, and I spoke no German. I was exhausted. The most frustrating thing was that we had no common ground to help them figure out the sounds of the French language; European conservatories don t usually teach the phonetic alphabet in fact, diction classes often consist of students working with a native speaker who happens to teach at the Hochschule. They learn to pronounce a song or two, without really learning any rules. I also realized over the course of several years that while I was well-versed in the rules of diction, the actual sounds were slightly different than I had believed. Many of my diction teachers had been Americans being here now brought me into contact with people from all over Europe, singing in their own languages. It opened my eyes to the fact that when we learn diction from books, our preconceived notions and the habits of our native tongue affect how that book translates from reading to speaking. It was really this that prompted me to create The Diction Police. Friends had been encouraging me to write a diction book for years. I already owned what seemed like all the diction books and there are a TON of them. I didn t really want to have to describe in words what a vowel sounds like. Instead, I wanted people to hear them the way I was hearing them! Thus, The Diction Police Podcast was born, to give the listener the chance to hear foreign languages as native

4 4 speakers people who work in the opera world and know the traditions, the rules, and when to break them actually speak them. It has expanded into a full website, with phonetic transcriptions, text readings by native-speaking performers, translations of song into several languages, as well as webinars on lyric diction, Diction Lessons, Diction Tips, a series of fun Tongue Twisters for Singers, a video with tongue exercises from a speech therapist, and of course the podcast continues. Our mission is, and always has been, to give singers the best tools possible to improve and perfect their diction. For anyone interested in moving to Germany, the best resource I can recommend is still the book What the Fach?! by Philip Shepard, which details almost everything one needs to know about setting up an audition tour and moving. There used to be an unwritten rule that if you wanted to The Definitive Guide for Opera Singers Auditioning and Working in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland by Philip Shepard audition in Europe, come in November, spend a month, travel around to audition, and then go back home indeed, that is essentially what I did when I auditioned in Germany. This has changed over the years; more and more opera houses hold auditions throughout the year and sometimes have sudden, unforeseen vacancies. Now it s better to plan to come here for several months; if you aren t in the country when auditions come up, people won t make a new time to hear you. For those interested in breaking into the early music scene, this is even more important. Early music, even in the United States, is mostly about making connections, and in Europe it s the same. So if this is your specialty, you should plan to move here and get some kind of alternative work while you try to establish those connections. Most opera houses shut down in July and August and some only start back up at the end of September, so the best time to be in Europe would probably be from November to June. Oh, and on my audition trip back in 2002, I did travel to Cologne to find that cathedral. My teacher was right you really can t play the sixth song of Dichterliebe properly until you ve seen the Dom in Köln! PHOTO: Mathias Creutziger Ellen Rissinger is an American vocal coach/accompanist on the music staff of the Sächsische Staatsoper (Semperoper) in Dresden, Germany. She came to European attention in December 2008, when she accompanied a performance of Shostakovich s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk for the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf on one hour s notice. She has worked in both the United States with Opera Company of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh Opera, Kentucky Opera, Glimmerglass Opera, and Baltimore Opera and in many houses in Germany: Semperoper, Bregenz Opera Festival, Oper Frankfurt, and Deutsche Oper am Rhein, among others. She has given master classes with several summer music programs in Europe, including the International Performing Arts Institute (IPAI) in Kiefersfelden, Germany; the International Music Festival of the Adriatic in Duino, Italy; University of Miami s summer program in Salzburg, Austria; American Institute of Music Studies (AIMS) in Graz, Austria; as well as at several universities in the United States, including The Hartt School, Boston Conservatory, Oklahoma City University, Murray State University, and the Boston NATS Chapter, among others. As the producer and host of The Diction Police Podcast since April 2010, she has led the way for classical singers and coaches from all over the world to hone their foreign language skills. Ms. Rissinger is fluent in German and English, is conversant in Italian, French, Spanish, and Modern Greek, and continues to work on her conversational ability in Russian. NECESSARY ROUGHNESS IN THE VOICE PEDAGOGY CLASSROOM: The Special Psychoacoustics of the Singing Voice by Ian Howell Introduction Science-based voice pedagogy curricula routinely focus on the anatomy and physiology, vocal fold dynamics, kinesiology, vocal tract acoustics, and motor learning properties of the singing body. The role of the hearing mechanism in defining the sound of a singer is frequently under-explored. However, the human senses are physical systems with limitations that shape one s mental image of reality. This mental image is called a percept. The eye cannot produce a detailed image of a very far or very near object, and sensitivity to touch is not uniform across the entire body. Such limitations change the percept of, rather than the objective nature of, an object. As the sound wave produced by a voice is a physical phenomenon, one can explore the underlying rules of hearing to ask how one might possibly perceive the human voice. This is another way of asking what sounds the human voice is capable of making. This may seem like an academic, tree-falling-in-the-woods distinction: that all the richly colored and varied sounds we hear exist as a silent, colorless soup of vibrating air until they are perceived. However, sound waves can be understood as instructions for timbre, not the timbre itself. The way in which the human hearing mechanism reacts to those instructions limits, colors, and in some cases creates aspects of the voice. Psychoacoustics is the field of study concerned with these phenomena. This article will explore and synthesize three such psychoacoustic limitations relevant to singing: auditory roughness, the resolvability of harmonics into the pitch, and absolute spectral tone color. My hope is that the resulting framework may inform the way that registration, vowels, and formants 1 are taught in the voice pedagogy classroom. Roughness Auditory roughness is a buzzing, sometimes pulsing or beating quality introduced by the inner ear because the cochlea is unable to differentiate simple tones that are very close in frequency. This is true whether these simple tones are sine tones or narrowly notch filtered noise from different sources, or adjacent harmonics of a single, pitched sound. Generally, any two simple tones a minor third or closer will give rise to such roughness; the closer, the rougher. This interval, called a critical band, is wider at lower frequencies. 2 However, for much of the singable range, the minor third is a useful, if simplified rule. 3 Given a single voice with clear harmonics and low noise, auditory roughness of adjacent harmonics is generally related to position within the harmonic series, rather than pitch. From the fifth harmonic (H5) and up, all harmonics of a voice fall within a minor third (within the critical band) of a neighbor (see Figure 1). As Johan Sundberg notes, the higher the amplitude of such harmonics, the stronger the roughness they contribute to a singer s timbre. 4 Roughness is related to voice type and vowel only insomuch as they affect the range of pitches sung and the amplitude of harmonics higher than H4. Figure 1. A generic harmonic series (in which H1 is greater than 100Hz) with the associated quality of auditory roughness. Musical intervals indicated for the lowest six harmonics.

5 5 Pitch Spectrographs split complex sound waves into their frequency components and display this information visually. For sounds with pitch, these images tend to show clearly visible harmonics arranged in the harmonic series. While one might assume that the lowest harmonic (H1) displayed is the pitch, and higher harmonics are either audible overtones or aspects of color, the ear folds these higher harmonics into the pitch. H1 is just a sine tone with a frequency equivalent to the pitch. Although one may perceive a high amplitude harmonic as a separate sine tone, the pitch is a complex percept constructed from the harmonic series itself. Remove H1 from just about any periodic sound, and the pitch remains. However, this phenomenon, called the missing fundamental, has limits. Generally, the lowest eight harmonics resolve neatly into the pitch, while the ninth harmonic and higher (called unresolved harmonics) contribute progressively less to the pitch. 5 This means that the higher a harmonic is in the series than H9, the more it exists as part of a separate percept, hanging above, rather than coloring the pitch. The intersection of roughness and resolvability may then be shown on a generic harmonic series (see Figure 2). H1-H5 will create a predominantly pure percept; H5 and higher will create a percept with progressively stronger auditory roughness. H1-H8 will neatly resolve into the pitch, which H9 and higher will progressively escape from. This creates three main perceptual divisions: pure and resolved (H1-H5), rough and resolved (H5-H8), and progressively rougher and unresolved (H9 and higher). With some exceptions for very low fundamentals (<100Hz), the hearing mechanism obligatorily imparts these qualities so long as harmonics of sufficient amplitude are present. Neither roughness nor resolvability exists in the sound wave; the ear creates them. Figure 2. A generic harmonic series (in which H1 is >100Hz) with the associated qualities of auditory roughness and resolvability of harmonics into the pitch, and the three main perceptual regions based on the interaction of roughness and resolvability. Tone Color Within limits, a human speaking voice can change pitch without changing timbre (or at least vowel), and timbre without changing pitch. Imagine an inflected aaaaaaahhhhh followed by a monotone recitation. These properties of sound are demonstrably separable. Despite this independence, Reinier Plomp explains that,...pitch and timbre are not entirely unrelated. He points out that,...for the extreme case of a sinusoidal tone without harmonics, the tone s frequency as its single variable determines pitch as well as timbre. 6 Essentially, sine tones have timbre. Psychoacoustics calls this phenomenon brightness. 7 Lowfrequency tones are dark and dull, and high-frequency tones bright and brilliant. As with roughness and resolvability, brightness is imparted by the ear. 8 Sine tones appear to elicit not just relative timbral differences (a high tone is brighter compared to a low tone), but also absolute similarities. Two sine tones of the same frequency are identically bright. 9 This is independent of other elements of timbre: attack, decay, release, or general spectro-temporal flux. This holds true even if the sine tones are harmonics extracted from different sources playing different pitches. For example, given the pitches C4 and C5, H2 of C4 and H1 of C5 (both approximately 523Hz) are identically bright. I call this phenomenon absolute spectral tone color (ASTC) and consider it a very specific sub-attribute of timbre. 10 The ASTC of a harmonic remains constant so long as its frequency remains constant. This makes intuitive sense in visible color. The same color red can exist on a variety of objects, because the red percept is the result of sensory processing. So long as the same receptors in the eye are stimulated in the same way, it doesn t matter the source. As the frequency of visible light increases or decreases, the perceived color changes. As a singer changes pitch, and every harmonic increases or decreases in frequency, each harmonic similarly changes ASTC in a predictable way. Conversely, as one changes vowels without changing pitch, any given harmonic only changes amplitude, not its individual ASTC. If one searches for a connection between the colors one sees and the colors one hears, ASTC is the appropriate analogy. A vowel is not a single color. A vowel is more like a painting made up of many individual colors. Specific frequency ranges of brightness bear meaningful, if subtle, similarities to the defining qualities of several vowels. 11 These associations may be used to provide anthropomorphic labels along the scale of ASTC. The vowels of the human singing voice can be thought of as combinations of these absolute spectral tone colors. Harmonics of sufficient amplitude contribute their ASTCs regardless of whether that tone color defines the vowel, which helps to explain how different vowels share similar formant frequencies/spectral peaks. That is to say that every spectral peak of a vowel generally gives rise to a single, perceptually separable tone color based on the frequencies of the harmonics that form it. 12 A vowel is the combination of these multiple tone colors. For most vowels, one spectral peak will define the vowel while the rest add depth and brightness. This may seem counterintuitive, but it allows for an elegant shift in approach when discussing the interaction of formants and harmonics. Formants do not imbue harmonics with timbre. A formant simply amplifies harmonics that fall under its influence. A harmonic automatically elicits an ASTC based on its frequency. This helps to explain why an [a] shaped vocal tract (just as an example) will not always create the same [a] sound as pitch rises and high amplitude harmonics no longer directly occupy the ASTC range that defines that vowel. I believe this explains the perceptual aspects of the phenomenon Kenneth Bozeman labels passive vowel modification. 13 To label ASTC, I use the ~ followed by a letter. This indicates that a sine tone at that frequency elicits a quality of the dominant tone color of the sound indicated by the letter when used in the International Phonetics Alphabet. For example, ~a means: like the dominant tone color of [a] (see Figure 3). I intentionally avoid labeling this ~[a], although I recognize that this choice will raise a few eyebrows among linguists. As Figure 4 suggests, [a] is characterized by several spectral peaks with different tone colors, here at minimum ~, ~a, and ~i. However, only the second spectral peak contributes the ~a tone color. Figure 3: The scale of brightness with associated absolute spectral tone color (ASTC) labels. The ~ followed by a letter indicates that a sine tone at that frequency elicits a quality of the dominant tone color of the sound indicated by the letter when used in the International Phonetics Alphabet. For example, ~a means: like the dominant tone color of [a]. The boundaries are indicated with areas of some ambiguous overlap. Figure 4: A perceptual annotation of a schematic of [a] produced by a male voice at E3. From left to right, the spectral peaks occupy the ASTC ranges of ~, ~a, and ~i respectively. Note that both the F1 (around G5) and F2 (around D6) peaks are rough and resolved, and the singer s formant peak (around F- sharp7) is rough and unresolved. The interaction of a harmonic s ASTC and its role in eliciting roughness and resolvability produces a variety of potential percepts, as ASTC is tied to frequency and roughness and resolvability are tied to position in the harmonic series. If the harmonics forming a spectral peak are low enough in the series, that spectral peak s tone color becomes an aspect of the pitch with a pure quality. If high enough, that tone color elicits roughness and eventually escapes the pitch. At low enough pitches, it is quite possible to have vowel defining (F1/F2/F3) spectral peaks exhibit roughness, and the singer s formant frequently escapes the pitch (see again Figure 4). 14 Above approximately the pitch F5, one would have to look in frequency ranges higher than the classically understood male singer s formant (centered around approximately 3kHz according to Sundberg) 15 to find roughness, and such harmonics may well resolve into the pitch (see Figure 5). c c

6 6 overall percept changes. Follow the link in each figure caption to watch a video demonstrating this. These registration solutions do not sound similar. However, by applying a single set of perceptual rules to both, this psychoacoustic framework accounts for, explains, and helps predict the sound of both voices equally well. Figure 5: A perceptual annotation of a schematic of [a] produced by a female voice at G5. Note that all harmonic energy within the range of the piano keyboard is both pure and resolved. Any roughness or unresolvability would have to exist in harmonics higher than the range shown here. Examples These schematics suggest that voice teachers can benefit from understanding voice registration in terms of changes in roughness, resolvability, and tone color as pitch and/or vowel changes. As an introductory example, consider that this C5 sung by Franco Corelli (see Figure 6) exhibits an energized, pure and resolved peak centered around G6; a rough and resolved peak in the singer s formant range centered around G7; and progressively less resolved and rougher harmonics above the singer s formant. Each of these peaks elicits a different tone color: ~æ, ~i, and bright ~i, respectively. While one might assume that any ring heard at this pitch in a tenor voice relates to the singer s formant, all three of these peaks contribute a perceptually different type of brightness. Figure 6: A perceptual annotation of an averaged power spectrum of Franco Corelli s C5 from A te, o cara from Bellini s I Puritani. The written vowel is /e/ in rammento. Source: Vincenzo Bellini, Bellini Hits, Philharmonia Orchestra, Franco Ferraris and Franco Corelli, Warner Classics, Go to kfgwv5 to watch a video demonstrating the perceptual qualities illustrated in this figure. A soprano elicits different perceptual qualities when negotiating her registration challenges. In Figure 7, notice the way that Gundula Janowitz balances the tone colors of an A-flat5. Her first peak (H1 and H2), which covers the entire frequency range of the rough F1 and F2 peaks in Figure 4, elicits a pure and resolved ~ quality. The H3-H5 peak, which covers the frequency range of the male singer s formant, elicits a pure and resolved ~i quality. H6-H12 (with a notable peak around D9) elicits a rough and progressively unresolved bright ~i quality. For both Corelli and Janowitz, remove any one perceptual quality, and the c Figure 7: A perceptual annotation of an averaged power spectrum of Gundula Janowitz s A-flat5 from Beim Schlafengehen from Strauss Vier Letze Lieder. Written vowel is /y/ in Flügen. Source: Gundula Janowitz, Vier Letze Lieder, Berliner Philharmoniker, conducted by Herbert von Karajan, Deutsche Grammophon, Go to kfgwv5 to watch a video demonstrating the perceptual qualities illustrated in this figure. Registration may be approached from a variety of pedagogical perspectives, but the objective sound of the singer at a given pitch, vowel, and intensity is determined by these perceptual qualities. A soprano with a clear sound will generally never exhibit strong roughness in her lowest five harmonics. If there is a strong buzzy quality to her voice, which is quite common in heavier fachs singing above the staff, it must come from contiguous harmonics higher than H4. Above the treble staff, this means looking higher than the classically described singer s formant range. A tenor will never be able to sing a C5 with a strong and pure singer s formant. If one hears a pure ringing quality at that pitch, it exists within the first five harmonics (likely F2 tuned to either H3 or H4). 16 Perhaps most paradoxically, ASTC requires one recognize that such spectral features have obligatory tone colors based on the frequency of each harmonic. For example, Janowitz could not sing a true [u] on A-flat5 (her lowest harmonic is already in ~ ), and Corelli s singer s formant will always impart an ~i. There are no technical choices that could change these limitations, as they are imposed by the ear rather than the voice. This suggests that one may hear specific resonance tuning strategies not just by picking out a specific harmonic by its frequency, but by the more comprehensive perceptual qualities of the resulting spectral peaks. These peaks may be aurally located and separated based on tone color, roughness, and resolvability. c What Makes the Psychoacoustics of the Singing Voice Special? Everything written above can be ignored and comprehension of daily speech remains robust. This raises an important question: why delve into the complexity of psychoacoustics at all? Plomp offers a glimpse of the answer. He divides human sound perception into two broad categories: cognition and audition. 17 Cognition is the way one uses previous experience to extract meaning from sounds. For example, in the sentence, it is hot outside today, one need not hear the exact same central vowel in the word hot, to understand the word. If one speaker says [hæt] (Chicago accent), another [h t] (American radio English) and the third [h t] (British radio English), the context (both phonetic and syntactic) is sufficient for comprehension. This is because the position of the articulators for each phoneme subtly impacts the surrounding phonemes. This is called coarticulation. In speech, this creates a near constant spectro-temporal

7 7 flux; it is rare to find a continuous state, unchanging sound in speech. 18 Audition is the process of perceiving the objective timbral qualities of a sound without those additional layers of linguistic meaning. The process of audition tells us the central vowels in the word hot are objectively different. In speech, cognition obviates those differences. Singing differs from speech in at least two meaningful ways. First, one finds very few melismas or sustained pitches in speech, and many in singing. The longer a vowel is sustained, the more distant the coarticulation effect, and thus the more noticable its objective timbre. Second, humans frequently speak in a lower and more compact pitch range than they sing. Generally, this fills all ASTC ranges with one or more harmonics, which is why one doesn t worry about formant tuning in speech. 19 As pitch rises, and voice source harmonics become more sparsely distributed over the frequency ranges covered by the vocal tract resonances, proper alignment of resonances and harmonics becomes more consequential. In the hot example above, one or more of those central vowels will likely better align with a specific singer s resonance goals at a given pitch. Singers do rely on the cognition of the listener to create linguistic meaning; however, they frequently use variations in vocal tract shape to aid resonance and registration. These adjustments change the physical properties of the sound wave, which in turn affects the listener s percept. Though multiple solutions to this problem do exist (which is why the same pitch range may be sung healthily with radically different timbres), the number of solutions decreases as pitch rises. The perceptual limitations of the hearing mechanism come to characterize the sounds of these solutions. Singers and voice teachers may benefit from as clearly developed a sense of audition as possible, as they consider technique and tonal models with a specificity unnecessary for the casual listener. Because this psychoacoustic framework is a powerful descriptive and predictive tool, and because any one aspect of it generates productive discussions, I encourage all those who teach voice pedagogy classes to incorporate elements of the special psychoacoustics of the singing voice into their courses. This information can bring detail to the often confusing topics of registration, tonal models, and especially vowels and formants. Several computer programs (Overtone Analyzer for analysis, and Madde for synthesis) allow one to easily filter out portions of the spectral envelope, which lets students contemplate the aural contributions of the various harmonics and spectral peaks they see on a spectrogram. This pushes back against the idea that all vowel percepts are the result of the totality of the spectral envelope, rather than defined by crucial spectral peaks in specific tone color ranges. I further suggest that spectrographic analysis of the singing voice (especially the female voice above the staff) benefits from inclusion of sound up to at least 10kHz-12kHz. This helps to properly capture the very rough and unresolved aspects of the high voice that are frequently missing from spectrograms capped between 5kHz-8kHz. Speech research tends to ignore this high frequency range because it is not critical for comprehension (cognition). However, the energy in this range may contribute significant qualities to the objective sound of a singer (audition). 20 When critically listening to recordings of singers, I encourage an informed awareness that both older, pre-electric microphone recordings, and modern videos compressed for online viewing frequently fail to accurately reproduce these higher frequency ranges. Such recordings must be viewed in a spectrograph before one can draw meaningful conclusions from them. I also encourage listening to recordings at sound intensity levels similar to what the singer would produce live, as the ear is less sensitive to higher and lower frequencies as intensity diminishes. While not obligatory (again, ignore everything above and you will still hear singers), listening with this deliberate specificity may improve one s ability to target the elegant technical solutions needed to make good art. ENDNOTES 1 Throughout this article, I will use the terms formant and vocal tract resonance interchangeably. 2 Pantelis N. Vassilakis, Perceptual and Physical Properties of Amplitude Fluctuation and their Musical Significance (PhD. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2001), Sundberg explores this idea in some detail in Johan Sundberg, The Science of the Singing Voice (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1987), 108-9, and Johan Sundberg, Perceptual Aspects of Singing, Journal of Voice 8/2, (1994) Sundberg, The Science of the Singing Voice, Sam Norman-Haignere, Nancy Kanwisher, and Josh H. McDermott, Cortical Pitch Regions in Humans Respond Primarily to Resolved Harmonics and Are Located in Specific Tonotopic Regions of Anterior Auditory Cortex, The Journal of Neuroscience 33/50 (December 11, 2013): 19, Reinier Plomp, The Intelligent Ear: On the Nature of Sound Perception (London: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002), Reinier Plomp, Experiments on Tone Perception (Soesterberg: Institute for Perception RVO-TNO, 1966), Plomp, Experiments on Tone Perception, Ian Howell, Parsing the spectral envelope: Toward a general theory of vocal tone color (DMA diss., New England Conservatory of Music, 2016), Howell, Parsing, 29. See also Howell, Parsing, 20 for a thorough discussion of the author s distinction between timbre and tone color. 11 This line of thought is not particularly new. For further information see Plomp, Experiments on Tone Perception, 132 and Robert Cogan, Music Seen, Music Heard: a picture book of musical design (Cambridge: Publication Contact International, 1998), The way in which the ASTC of individual harmonics glue together into the more complex tone colors of individual spectral peaks, which I call local spectral coherence, is covered in more detail in Howell, Parsing, Kenneth Bozeman, Practical Vocal Acoustics: Pedagogical Applications for Teachers and Singers (Hillsdale, New York: Pendragon, 2013), Note, the term F1 indicates the lowest frequency vocal tract resonance. The pitch F is preceded by the word, pitch to avoid confusion. 15 Sundberg, The Science of the Singing Voice, Keep in mind that intensity of roughness exists on a continuum, and these rules only apply to a single voice with a pristine signal to noise ratio. E.g. if a soprano has a great deal of breath noise between H1 and H2, or orchestral instruments fill the frequency range between a tenor s H2 and H3, the ear will introduce proportional roughness. 17 Plomp, The Intelligent Ear, Peter B. Denes and Elliot N. Pinson, The Speech Chain: The Physics and Biology of Spoken Language (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1993), Ingo Titze, Principles of Voice Production, 2 nd Edition (Iowa City: National Center for Voice and Speech, 2000), Recent work into high frequency energy in the singing voice includes: Rebecca Worthington, One Ring to Rule Them All: The Complicated Case of Sopranos and the Singer s Formant (Term paper, New England Conservatory, 2016); Brian Monson, et al., The Perceptual Significance of High-Frequency Energy in the Human Voice, Frontiers in Psychology 16/5 (2014):1-10; S.O. Ternström, Hi-Fi Voice: Observations on the Distribution of Energy in the Singing Voice Spectrum Above 5 khz, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 123/5 (2008): ; Ingo Titze and Sung Min Jin, Is There Evidence of a Second Singer s Formant? Journal of Singing 59/4 (2003): ; and Rudolf Weiss, et al., Singer s Formant in Sopranos: Fact or Fiction? Journal of Voice 15/4 (2001): Praised by the New York Daily News for his rich voice, capable of great dramatic force, and San Francisco Classical Voice for the heart at the core of his soulful sound, Ian Howell sings with a warm and seamless tone rarely heard from countertenors. He has sung with Florentine Opera, New York City Opera, Opera London, and with most major North American baroque orchestras. In 2006, Howell won first prize at the American Bach Soloists International Solo Competition with an acclaimed performance of Bach s Cantata BWV 170, Vergnügte Ruh, and third prize at the Oratorio Society of New York s Vocal Competition. Ian Howell s debut solo CD, 1685 and the Art of Ian Howell with American Bach Soloists, was released in 2009 and features repertory by Domenico Scarlatti, J.S. Bach, and G.F. Handel. Dr. Howell has recorded for the American Bach Soloists, Warner Classics, Rhino, and Gothic labels. He can also be heard with the all-male chamber choir Chanticleer on multiple albums, including the Grammy Award-winning Lamentations and Praises. Dr. Howell has taught at Yale, Swarthmore, and Rutgers Camden, and was a 2013 NATS Teaching Intern. He has presented original research at the Pan American Vocology Association s Symposiums (2015, 2016), the NATS National Conference (2016), and Harvard s ArtsTechPsyche (2017), and is a guest faculty member at the 2017 Vocal Pedagogy Professional Workshop at The Boston Conservatory at Berklee, and Kenneth Bozeman s Acoustic Vocal Pedagogy Workshop. Currently, he teaches voice and voice pedagogy at the New England Conservatory of Music, where he directs research in the NEC Voice and Sound Analysis Laboratory. He was educated at Capital University, the Yale School of Music, and the New England Conservatory of Music.

8 VOICEPrints JOURNAL OF THE NEW YORK SINGING TEACHERS ASSOCIATION May-June 2017 NYSTA, c/o Dr. Anna Hersey Eastern New Mexico University Station S Ave K Portales, NM The Cathedral of Cologne, Germany ICVT 2017 The Future of Singing International Congress of Voice Teachers in Stockholm, Sweden 2-6 August 2017 Join us in Stockholm! VOICEPrints Volume 14, No. 5 Your hosts for the 2017 International Congress of Voice Teachers (ICVT2017), the 30th Jubilee of ICVT, are SSTPF: Voice Teachers of Sweden, one of the world s oldest associations of singing teachers, founded in For more information, please visit our website: icvt2017.com Dr. Anna Hersey Editor-in-Chief Dr. Loralee Songer Associate Editor Dr. Ian Howell Associate Editor John Ostendorf Designer