Diverse resonance tuning strategies for women singers

John Smith (1) , Joe Wolfe (1) , Nathalie Henrich Bernardoni (2) , Maëva Garnier (3)

1 UNSW - School of Physics [UNSW Sydney]
2 GIPSA-SLD - GIPSA - Systèmes Linguistiques et Dialectologie
3 GIPSA-PCMD - GIPSA - Perception, Contrôle, Multimodalité et Dynamiques de la parole

Over the range 200 to 2000 Hz, the fundamental frequency f0 of women's singing voices covers the range of the first two resonances (R1 and R2) of the vocal tract. This allows diverse techniques of resonance tuning. Resonances were measured using broadband excitation at their lips. A commonly noted strategy, used by sopranos, and some altos, is to tune R1 close to the fundamental frequency f0 (R1:f0 tuning) once f0 approached the value of R1 of that vowel in speech. At extremely high pitch, sopranos could no longer increase R1 sufficiently and switched from R1:f0 to R2:f0 tuning. At lower pitch many singers of various singing styles found it advantageous to use R1:2f0 tuning Additionally, many sopranos employed R2:2f0 tuning over some of their range, often simultaneously with R1:f0 tuning.

Mots clés: resonance tuning; singing; voice

Mots clés: accord résonantiel; voix chantée

Domaines: Acoustique [physics.class-ph]; Acoustique [physics.class-ph]; Linguistique; Physiologie [q-bio.TO]

John Smith, Joe Wolfe, Nathalie Henrich Bernardoni, Maëva Garnier. Diverse resonance tuning strategies for women singers. SMAC 2013 - Stockholm Music Acoustics Conference, Jul 2013, Stockholm, Sweden. pp.306-310. ⟨hal-00923955⟩