The effect of acoustic environments on singers’ vocal behaviors and mental effort

Abstract

Singers perform in various acoustic environments; however, how the environments affect their mental effort is poorly understood. This study virtually simulated acoustic environments to examine the effect of reverberation time on singers’ vocal behaviors and mental effort. Participants were five vocally healthy singers who completed a minimum of undergraduate-level training. For the virtual environments, the voice signal was digitally processed by adding reverberation using a real-time effect processor of the digital mixer. The processed sound was played back to the participant using open headphones. The average T30 was 1.13 s in Low T30 condition, 1.39 s in Medium T30 condition, and 1.90 s in High T30 condition. Participants sang the American national anthem and rated their perceived level of overall effort, mental effort, physical effort, frustration, and performance using a modified NASA-TLX scale for each acoustic condition. Pupillometry was also used to measure the mental effort during each task. Their voice recordings were acoustically analyzed for intensity, singing-power ratio, alpha ratio, pitch accuracy, and vibrato rate and extent. The presentation will discuss: (1) individual differences in the participants’ response to the reverberation time and (2) the degree of agreement between the subjective rating and physical measurement of mental effort.