Vocal Timbre Research Articles

The Role of the Tenor in Giacomo Puccini’s Musical Theatre (Interpretive Models of the Rudolf Image in the Opera La Boheme)

The purpose of the article is to identify the defining aspects of the artistic and figurative performance interpretation of the part of Rudolf in the opera La Boheme by G. Puccini – a lyrical hero embodied in the tenor timbre. The research methodology is based on the following methods: analytical (study of art and musicological literature on the subject); method of performance analysis (analysis of Rudolf’s part in the context of identifying genre and style features, characteristic musical and expressive means, and place in the drama of the performance); comparative method (comparison of interpretations of the role of Rudolf performed by prominent singers to determine the common and distinctive features of the image “reading”), empirical method (covering the author’s own experience of rehearsal and stage performance interpretation); method of generalisation (to substantiate the conclusions of the study). The scientific novelty of the publication lies in the proposed research angle: attention is focused on the image embodied in a certain vocal timbre, and an analysis of the panorama of performing interpretations of the tenor part, a landmark in the creative heritage of G. Puccini, is presented. Conclusions. G. Puccini managed to create a theatrical reality where the “individual” prevails over the “typical” and “characteristic”. The composer carefully considered the principles of revealing the inner world of the hero, his interaction with other characters and the surrounding reality. A special place in Puccini’s “musical theatre” is occupied by the role of the tenor, who realises the “lyrical principle” in the male character, which is important for the composer (young men in love, creative natures – people prone to emotional, spontaneous actions). An analysis of the interpretations of the composer’s iconic role of Rudolf performed by outstanding singers reveals the value of a performer’s interpretation based on a deep understanding of the author’s style and proves the importance of the emergence of a syncretic singer-actor who deeply understands the drama of the performance and the place of his or her role in the overall concept of the opera.

The Impact of Non-Lyrical Elements on Undergraduate Students’ Lyric Interpretation

Abstract Much of the extant research regarding lyric analysis centers on lyrics as the primary therapeutic musical element, to the detriment of all other non-lyrical elements. Non-lyrical musical elements, such as musical style, may drastically affect how listeners interpret lyric text within lyric analysis tasks. The purpose of this qualitative heuristic inquiry was to investigate the effects of musical style (instrumentation, vocal timbre, and texture) on lyric interpretation among undergraduate students aged 18–36 via focus groups and individual interviews. Participants listened to and discussed the lyrics and non-lyrical elements of 3 stylistically distinct recordings of one song (“Everybody Hurts”). Focus groups and interviews were transcribed, then coded and analyzed via initial coding and focused coding protocols (Saldaña, 2021). One primary theme emerged from the data: lyric text carried the basic message of the song, though non-lyrical elements influenced the perceived intention and connotation of that message. Three code categories emerged under the primary theme: (1) musical elements around the text gave context and nuance; (2) cohesion of musical elements determined the emotional impact of a given recording; (3) descriptions of musical style occurred in conjunction with multisensory comparisons. These findings provide evidence of a symbiotic relationship between lyrics and non-lyrical musical elements within song recordings, which both support clinical decision-making when choosing repertoire for lyric analysis and provide a foundation for further research into the role of non-lyrical musical elements in lyric analysis.

“A gold mine in bobby sox”

Twelve-year-old Annette Swinson burst onto New York’s Black music scene in 1953. A darling of the local Black press, Swinson worked as a solo singer throughout her adolescence before replacing Arlene Smith as lead singer of the Chantels. During her career, Swinson’s girlhood evoked connotations of malleability and naïveté that were attractive to music industry men searching for salable sounds. Swinson exploited these assumptions using her extraordinary ability to transform her vocal timbre, but this strategy also complicated the record of her career. This article examines journalistic coverage of Swinson’s career alongside her recorded performances to consider the possibilities afforded by her vocal shapeshifting. Beginning with Swinson’s early period as a child singer, this article argues that Swinson’s legibility as a child highlights the impact of legal minority as a status that denies Black girls’ capacity for rational consent, prevents them from representing their own work, and leaves them vulnerable to abuse. This article also analyzes Swinson’s recorded voice to demonstrate that girls like Swinson used unstable vocal identity as a choreographic technique to work around their legal disempowerment and gain access to professional opportunities. Ultimately, this article suggests that listening to vocal timbre in this way presents a method by which scholars might recognize Black girls’ agency within archival silences and obfuscations.

Speech comprehension in the context of speaker changes: The importance of voice-feature continuity at the cocktail party

In this talk, I will show how different groups of listeners use voice acoustics to enhance speech comprehension under adverse listening conditions, specifically when the auditory scene comprises a multitude of sounds heard at once. These “cocktail-party”-like situations pose a difficult conceptual problem: To comprehend target speech, listeners need to attend to the target voice while at the same time ignoring other irrelevant sounds. The cocktail-party problem is made considerably easier when all target sounds are spoken by the same talker. Previous work suggests that such benefits from voice continuity can be—in large part—attributed to two prominent voice features: Glottal-pulse rate (GPR) and vocal-tract length (VTL). GPR determines the fundamental frequency of a speech sound and is perceived as vocal pitch; VTL determines the spectral envelope of a speech sound and is perceived as an aspect of vocal timbre. Apart from being important voice identity cues, GPR and VTL have been shown to play a crucial role in cocktail-party listening. Here, I will present data from a series of experiments highlighting the importance of voice-feature continuity for speech comprehension at the cocktail party.

Identifying Peking Opera Roles Through Vocal Timbre: An Acoustical and Conceptual Comparison Between Dan and Laosheng

Chinese jingju (Peking opera) typically distinguishes several stock character types differentiated by narrative function, appearance, and vocal timbre. Though aspects of jingju music and dramaturgy have been thoroughly mapped by scholars, the contribution of timbre to the differentiation and characterization of dramatic roles has not been theorized. Here we sampled 20,000 excerpts of a cappella recordings of dan (woman) and laosheng (old man) singers from a large corpus. We analyzed the acoustic characteristics of the two roles both qualitatively and computationally, extracting and comparing relevant acoustic descriptors including spectral centroid, roughness, inharmonicity, and spectral fluctuation. We found statistically significant differences between the roles in spectral centroid (controlling for differences in fundamental frequency), roughness, and spectral flux (16­00­–3200 Hz). Lower normalized spectral centroid and reduced roughness in dan timbre is semiotically congruent with this virtuous and gentle female role; higher normalized spectral centroid, roughness, and spectral flux in laosheng timbre are congruent with an elderly, powerful, and educated man, indicating the contribution of vocal timbre in communicating identification and narrative information to audiences. These timbral attributes also reflect traditional Confucian ideals for music, gender, and age. These patriarchal and filial hierarchies are reiterated through Peking opera vocal timbre, displaying the effectiveness of music, and timbre specifically, in reflecting and reinforcing cultural and societal scripts.

“Das Floß der Medusa”: About Problem of Henze’s Political Engagement

The article is devoted to one of the most famous works of H. W. Henze “Das Floß der Medusa” (“The Raft of Medusa”), often seen as an example of Henze’s political engagement. The author of the article concludes that the oratorio was recognized as a political composition in large part due to the accompanying circumstances of its creation and premiere, but not based on the original idea and its realisation. The author demonstrate “Das Floß der Medusa” like a example of the protest music as a direction that exposes not only fascism, but also any form of social inequality, violence against the person. The study of the features of choral style of “Das Floß der Medusa” reveals parallels in the textural structure between Henze’s oratorio and Nono’s works of the 1950s (“La victoire de Guernica”, “Il canto sospeso”, “Intolleranza 1960”). The use of political text resources, the operation of individual syllables and phonemes of a literary text, work with multilingual verbal rows, the active use of diagonal texture — all this brings together the choral works of two contemporaries. At the same time, Henze’s composition also reflected the searches in the field of vocal timbre, characteristic of other composers of Darmstadt Summer Course — the use of various modifications of speech singing (Sprechgesang), the latest techniques of vocal articulation (vocal tremolo, prolongation of the anterolingual vibrant). All this together allows us to talk about Henz’s oratorio as one of the most peculiar choral compositions of the late 1960s.

National tradition as an innovation factor in Guo Wenjing’s chamber opera “Wolf Cub Village”

Statement of the problem. The modern stage of development of Chinese musical theater is associated with a significant role in creative experiment, the search for new artistic means. These processes have gone down in history as an artistic direction under the name “new wave”. It emerged in 1976 as a confrontation with the aftermath of the cultural revolution. It combines trends in the revival of national Chinese traditions and the introduction of modern compositional writing methods. In the works of representatives of this direction, a deep understanding of the uniqueness of the aesthetics of ancient Chinese music, the originality of its rhythm and timbre richness is restored. These features are vividly embodied in the Opera “Wolf Cub Village” by Guo Wenjing (郭文景, born in 1956). The theme of the transformation of traditional Chinese musical art in modern times under the conditions of Western influences and the formation of new Chinese music raises by Chinese researchers in one way or another. But the issue of national tradition as a factor of innovation is considered tangentially. Thus, the subject of the article, which reveals the features of the implementation of the traditional chamber opera “Wolf Cub Village” by Guo Wenjing, is looking up-to-date. Recent research and publications. An Luxin in the dissertation “Research of Guo Wenjing’s musical creativity” (2012) traces the stylistic features of Guo Wenjing’s work and analyzes many of his works, but the reason of significant amount of material studied, the composer’s opera heritage is highlighted in generalized way. Guo Wenjing’s own article (2016) as well as materials published in his book “Noise” (2009), are a valuable source of information about the composer’s idea of the opera. Objectives, methods, and novelty of the research. The purpose of the article is to identify the mechanisms of innovations in the implementation of the national Chinese tradition in Guo Wenjing’s chamber opera “Wolf Cub Village”. The study used methods developed in modern musicology, in particular, theoretical, historical and cultural analysis, as well as the method of theoretical generalization. For the first time, the embodiment of the national tradition in the opera work by the contemporary Chinese composer is considered as a factor of artistic innovations. Research results and conclusion. Guo Wenjing’s appeal to the national traditions of Chinese music is associated with the two way orientation of the “new wave” flow that emerged in Chinese professional composing music. We are talking about transforming deep Chinese national traditions along with the use of modern compositional techniques. It is proved that in European opera this approach becomes an artistically effective means of updating the modern musical language. As a result of the study, Guo Wenjing’s opera “Wolf Cub Village” revealed a number of innovations, the source of which was the Chinese verbal language and traditional music. These include: a) the invention of new methods of vocal and declamatory articulation of the Chinese language, the expansion of the range of vocal and performing techniques, the creation of a special style of singing that combines European bel canto and intense high declamatory singing of the Chinese traditional opera; b) the use of features of the sound and semantics of instrumental accompaniment of traditional Chinese opera and the formation of a new poly-national composition of the orchestra; c) the introduction of characters into the opera that saturate the plot with figurative intonations of Chinese folklore; d) the use of metro-tempo models (banshi) of Chinese traditional opera. By introducing the elements of Chinese traditional music into the opera, the composer expanded the instrumental and vocal timbre palettes, enriched the work with a bright national flavor and significantly diversified the techniques of musical expressiveness of Western-style opera.

Music as Magic

Music as Magic

Felicia Donceanu – The cycle of lieds Three songs for Til on lyrics by George Călinescu

Born on Moldavian soil, on January 28, 1931, in Bacău, the composer Felicia Donceanu completed her musical studies at the “Ciprian Porumbescu” Conservatory in Bucharest, under the high supervision of some already established personalities of Romanian music. She composed for various genres, from instrumental theater, children's music, to chamber music, stage music, vocal-symphonic, choral, thus exhibiting, with exquisite skill, her mastery of laying down the notes on the musical scale. With a special love for Romanian poetry and literature and beyond, Felicia Donceanu dipped her writing pen in ink to give voice to her music and through the power of her own words. Authentically feeling this vein of poetic art, she also stood out with texts dedicated to various choral works of Romanian composers. She wrote scripts for various musical-choreographic performances, or radio dedicated, and with her painting talent she gave life to illustrations in children's books. As for the admiration that Felicia Donceanu gives to the distinguished man of culture, George Călinescu, it is drawn in two directions, holding a profound respect for the originality of the personality and the works of this illustrious representative of Romanian culture and literature, who ravished souls and became a source of inspiration, both for the young students of the Faculty of Letters and for people of culture in general. It is not surprising that Felicia Donceanu found in the creation of the poet George Călinescu a never-ending source of inspiration. In 1964, the cycle Three songs for Til was born, including the lieds: The Steps, The Leaf and The Living Water. It is based on the love poem structured and rendered in three different forms from a poetic and compositional point of view. Felicia Donceanu thought of the three lieds, in a “suite in pre-classical style: gavotte (The Steps), saraband (The Leaf) and courant (The Living Water)... each of them being doubled by meanings close to popular creation... in the first one, the game..., in the second one, the romance (with depressive, chromatic accents) and in the third one, the enchantment” (Constantinescu, 1966, p. 24). The musical interpretation of the poems is not a simple metaphorical game, the musical character of the poems, in general - far from being just an ornament - being part of the act of creation necessary for a fair reception, because it is created in a certain mood and a special tension of tone, and the reader or listener will have to perceive it in the same tension and texture. The quality of the sound, the form and the point of crystallization of the feeling make up an act of creation and not a borrowing, made by the poet or performer, from life. Poetry is the intimate form of creation, the acquired vocal timbre that identifies itself entirely with the musicality of the content.

Seeger Lecture, Society for Ethnomusicology Virtual Meeting 2021

Seeger Lecture, Society for Ethnomusicology Virtual Meeting 2021

Feminist Performance as Challenging Voice-Body Regimentation

This article proposes a close listening to women’s voices in Chile today. Subverting the assumption that the study of voices leads preferably to the description of individual subjectivities, this article aims to interrogate the collective dimension of vocal sound through the study of the performance A Rapist in Your Path. Its impact on the feminist movement is examined by paying attention to two versions in which vocal sounds articulate specific notions of identity, both of which challenge the conventional ordering of gender. It is the vocal timbre that disrupts this order, allowing us to hear the voices of Mapuche women shouting in their language and extreme metal singers sonically embodying violence. Thus, diverting the attention from the lyrics and movement to the sound itself, the articulation between this denunciation of rape culture and forms of inequality experienced by women in Chile becomes evident.

Experienced Listeners’ Perception of Timbre Dissimilarity Within and Between Voice Categories

The terms "soprano" and "mezzo-soprano" are frequently used by vocal pedagogues to describe a main category of singing timbre categorization, while the terms "lyric" and "dramatic" are often used to describe sub-categories of "soprano" and "mezzo-soprano". A handful of studies have reported on the perceptual dissimilarity of main voice categories, but few, if any, have focused on within voice category perceptual distinctions such as dramatic and lyric vocal timbre. Using stimuli collected from cisgender female singers of varying voice categories and voice weights across the pitches C4, G4, and F5, this study sought (1) to visualize an experienced listener's perception of vocal timbre dissimilarity within and between voice categories using the statistical technique of multidimensional scaling (MDS), (2) to identify salient acoustic predictors of voice category and voice weight, and (3) to determine any dependencies on pitch for the perception of vocal timbre. For the pitches C4, G4, and F5, experienced listeners (N=18) rated the dissimilarity of pairs of sung vowels produced by classically trained singers classified as follows: six mezzo-sopranos (three lighter and three heavier) and six sopranos (three lighter and three heavier). The resulting dissimilarity data were analyzed using MDS. Backward linear regression was used to see if one or more of the following variables predicted MDS dimensions: spectral centroid from 0 to 5 kHz, spectral centroid from 0 to 2 kHz, spectral centroid from 2 to 5 kHz, frequency vibrato rate, and frequency vibrato extent. Listeners also completed a categorization task where they rated each individual stimulus on two dimensions: voice category and voice weight. Visual analysis of the MDS solutions appears to show that both voice category and voice weight emerged as dimensions at pitches C4 and G4. Discriminant analysis, on the other hand, statistically confirmed both these dimensions at G4, but only voice weight at C4. At pitch F5, only voice weight emerged as a dimension, both visually and statistically. Acoustic predictors of MDS dimensions were highly variable across pitches. At the pitch C4, no MDS dimension was predicted by the acoustic variables. At pitch G4, the dimension associated with voice weight was predicted by spectral centroid from 0 to 2 kHz. At pitch F5, the dimension associated with voice weight was predicted by spectral centroid from 2 to 5 kHz and frequency vibrato rate. In the categorization task, voice category and voice weight were highly correlated at the pitches C4, G4, and when all pitches were presented together, but weakly correlated at the pitch F5. While voice category and sub-category distinctions are commonly used by singing voice professionals to describe the overall timbre of voices, these distinctions may not be able to consistently predict the perceptual difference between any given pair of vocal stimuli, particularly across pitch. Nonetheless, these dimensions do emerge in some fashion when listeners are presented with paired vocal stimuli. On the other hand, when asked to rate stimuli according to the specific labels of mezzo-soprano/soprano and dramatic/lyric, experienced listeners have a very difficult time disentangling voice category from voice weight when presented with a single-note stimulus or even a 3-note stimulus consisting of the pitches C3, G4, and F5.

The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries, by Anna Maria Busse Berger

<i>The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries</i>, by Anna Maria Busse Berger

The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language, and Diné Belonging

The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language, and Diné Belonging

The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music

The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music

Vocal Depersonalization in Scat Singing

"The purpose of this paper is to question the amount of personal investment in exploring the voice as an impersonal sound, in scat singing. Jazz singers and jazz voice teachers follow vocal practices that aim to control and distort the vocal timbre, to master microtonal intervals, to push and eventually overcome the voice’s limits. In scat singing, the boundaries of gender are subdued to the impulse of improvisation, thus, even though the timbre is a biological and a physical memory, influenced by the singer’s culture and experiences, the gender encoding can be reshaped inside the licks and patterns of the improvisation section. The current paper aims to prove that scat singing is the neutral ground where aspects of the voice can blend and disappear into one another: voice gender, vocal timber, technique, individual materiality, experimentation. Keywords: scat, improvisation, jazz, vocalists "

Construction of Vocal Timbre Evaluation System Based on Classification Algorithm

With the continuous development of communication technology, computer technology, and network technology, a large amount of information such as images, videos, and audios has grown exponentially, and people have started to be exposed to massive multimedia contents, which can easily and quickly access the increasingly rich music resources, so new technologies are urgently needed for their effective management, and automatic classification of audio signals has become the focus of engineering and academic attention. Currently, music retrieval can be achieved by selecting song titles and singer names, but as people’s living standards continue to improve, the spiritual realm is also enriched. People want to be able to select music with different types of emotional expressions with their emotions. It mainly includes the basic principles of audio classification, the analysis and extraction of music emotion features, and the selection of the best classifier. Two classification algorithms, hybrid Gaussian model and AdaBoost, are used to classify music emotions, and the two classifiers are combined. In this paper, we propose the Discrete Harmonic Transform (DHT), a sparse transform based on harmonic frequencies. This paper derives and proves the formula of Discrete Harmonic Transform and further analyzes the harmonic structure of musical tone signal and the accuracy of harmonic structure. Since the timbre of musical instruments depends on the harmonic structure, and similar instruments have similar harmonic structures, the discrete harmonic transform coefficients can be defined as objective indicators corresponding to the timbre of musical instruments, and thus the concept of timbre expression spectrum is proposed, and a specific construction algorithm is given in this paper. In the application of musical instrument recognition, the 53-dimensional combined features of LPCC, MFCC, and timbre expression spectrum are selected, and a nonlinear support vector machine is used as the classifier. The classification recognition rate is improved by reducing the number of feature dimensions.

Audio analysis reveals mutual associations between clients’ and therapists’ vocal timbres in Guided Imagery and Music sessions

Existing literature broadly demonstrates that a therapist’s tone of voice affects interpersonal and therapy outcomes, and qualities of human voice tone (pitch, volume, rhythm, speed and intensity) influence human interaction and attachment. However, little empirical and systematic evidence surrounds the use of voice in Guided Imagery and Music (GIM) and other psychotherapeutic practices. This exploratory study investigates the use of acoustic analysis to report on ways in which therapists’ and clients’ voices attune with each other and the music in GIM practice. Seven volunteer university student participants each attended a single GIM session with a qualified GIM therapist. Audio recordings of the session were made using a multi-channel recording device and 61 excerpts of the recordings were then analysed using the MIRToolbox for Matlab. It was found that acoustic features of the client’s voice predicted acoustic features of the therapist’s voice more commonly than the other way round (therapist predicting client). Furthermore, both such predictions occurred more commonly than they did for acoustic features of the music predicting acoustic features of either the therapist or client. These results suggest the client’s voice influences the therapist’s voice more than the therapist’s voice influences the client’s, and the music is the least influential. This study developed a reliable methodology for data collection and analysis to examine interactions between the client and therapist voices and music in GIM practice and provides further insights for clinical practice and training, enhancing sensitivity to vocal interactions and attunement.

Analyzing Vocables in Rap

This article examines the structural and semiotic functions of vocables in rap music. Analytical studies of the rapping voice have predominantly focused on lyrics, rhyme, accent, rhythm, and the emergent property of flow. Although timbral aspects of the voice play an important role in rappers’ flow, identity construction, and reception, investigations of timbre and non-lexical expression (e.g., vocables) remain comparatively rare. As a case study, I focus on the signature ad-lib vocable of Houston rapper Megan Thee Stallion—a creaky-voiced [æ] vowel, like the “a” in cat. Analyzing a corpus of all recorded instances of this vocable in her commercially available recordings (699 instances in 101 songs), along with timbral and phonetic close-reading, I claim that vocables can serve both percussive and formal functions in rap music. Synthesizing perspectives from sociolinguistics, gender and sexuality studies, and brand theory, I argue that Megan Thee Stallion uses her vocable as a timbre trademark: a unique, memorable, and immediately recognizable sonic icon of her brand persona. This brand is closely associated with the gendered and racialized social history of vocal fry in representations of female sexual pleasure. I close by suggesting that vocal timbre plays a leading though often invisible role in hip-hop expression and politics.

Objective Evaluation Method of Broadcasting Vocal Timbre Based on Feature Selection

Broadcasting voice is used to convey ideas and emotions. In the selection process of broadcasting and hosting professionals, the vocal timbre is an important index. The subjective evaluation method is widely used, but the selection results have certain subjectivity and uncertainty. In this paper, an objective evaluation method of broadcasting vocal timbre is proposed. Firstly, the broadcasting vocal timbre database is constructed on Chinese phonetic characteristics. Then, the timbre feature selection strategy is presented based on human vocal mechanism, and the broadcast timbre characteristics are divided into three categories, which include source parameters, vocal tract parameters, and human hearing parameters. Finally, the three models of hidden Markov model (HMM), Gaussian Mixture Model-General Background Model (GMM-UBM), and long short-term memory (LSTM) are exploited to evaluate the timbre of the broadcast by extracting timbre features and four timbre feature combinations. The experiments show that the selection of timbre features is scientific and effective. Moreover, the accuracy of the LSTM network using the deep learning algorithm in the objective evaluation of the broadcast timbre is better than the traditional HMM and GMM-UBM, and the proposed method can achieve about 95% accuracy rate in our database.