The influence of sung vowels on pitch perception

Abstract

Phonologists have demonstrated that in speech there is an intrinsic pitch of vowels, i.e., that different pitch heights are perceived for different spoken vowels with the same mean fundamental frequency. Only limited work has been done on the impact of sung vowels on perceived pitch and previous studies, using forced choice paradigms, have found conflicting results comparing Front/Close to Back/Open vowels: Ternstrom, Sundberg, and Collden (1988), using manipulated sung tones, found that Front/Close vowels were perceived as higher than other vowels while Fowler and Brown (1997), using synthesized tones, found that Front/Close was perceived lower than Back/Open. The current study uses a method-of-adjustment paradigm to examine pitch perception of all four extremal vowels: Front/Close (/i/), Front/Open (/ae/), Back/Close (/u/), and Back/Open (/ɑ/), using completely controlled, but realistic synthesis. It also assesses whether different models of pitch perception are necessary for the various vowel types. In the experiment, the subjects are asked to match a reference tone that has no formants against a stimulus tone with first and second formants corresponding to a particular vowel. Both the reference and stimulus tones are identical in their synthesis except for the formants and are 300 ms in length.