Novel imaging tools for supporting the teaching of singing and spoken performance

Abstract

Recently, singers and singing instructors have begun to use real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rtMRI) videos of speech and singing movements as a pedagogical tool. Singers use videos of vocal tract movements to learn about the movements of speech, and are then able to contrast those movements with their ideal singing productions. These validated images can now replace the previous “practice-of-speculation” regarding the articulatory postures desirable during singing. While rtMR videos are most often used by professional instructors and aspiring-professional singers, these videos may soon commonly be used to assist amateur choruses as well, which often struggle to produce unified vowel qualities. Beatboxing is a related and unexplored pedagogical domain, yet beatboxing was one of the earliest spoken performance styles acquired at USC with real-time MRI. These videos, together with USC’s publicly available inventory of rtMR videos demonstrating the sounds of the world’s languages, provide a rich resource for the extreme and varied percussive sounds used by beatboxers. In sum, students of singing and spoken language performance have a brand new asset available to them in the form of dynamic real-time MR videos of the moving vocal tract. [NIH R01DC007124.]