David Howard 1 , Jenevora Williams 2

1 University of York, Electronics, York

2 Institute of Education, Music, London

A ‘ringing' quality is a feature of exceptional children's voices in both solo and choral situations within the English Choral Tradition. It has long been accepted that adult professional singers make use of the singer's formant (Sundberg, 1987). This research uses recordings of both boy and girl trebles and an adult female professional soprano. The protocol includes speaking a text, singing a variety of exercises and a Handel aria in a performance venue. This paper will explore the acoustic signal of children's voices qualitatively and quantitatively. The quantitative assessment makes use of long term average spectra to identify spectral peaks with the potential to account for ‘ring'. Spectral modifications made to individual recorded sung vowels enable the specific formant contribution to the ‘ring' to be evaluated perceptually with trained listeners.

 

Sundberg, J. (1987). The Science of the Singing Voice. Decalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press.

 

Christopher Barlow 1

1 Southampton Solent University, School of Computing and COmmunications, Southampton

Available research on the singing voice of children and adolescents has largely been on ’Classically’ trained voices, (Howard et al. 2003). Musical Theatre (MT) singing has largely been ignored, despite the fact that young people are still the most likely demographic group to undertake training in singing (Barlow 2003), and particularly MT.

 

The author examined the voice production of young singers using laryngographic and acoustic analysis tools to analyse any differences on voice function and acoustic output of training young voices in ‘Musical Theatre’ or ‘Classical’ styles.    Over 100 subjects were taken from a variety of full time and part time stage schools and cathedral choirs in the UK, and also from the Brooklyn Youth Chorus Academy ©  (BYCA) in the USA. Subjects were recorded reading aloud a passage of spoken text, singing a 2 octave ascending and descending scale and singing a practiced song.    A Laryngograph ^(TM) was used to record and analyse vocal fold activity and derive vocal fold closed quotient (CQ) data, while a microphone was used to record the acoustic output for analysis using Long Term Average Spectra (LTAS).

 

Results indicated quantifiable differences in vocal production and acoustic output of young singers between the ‘classical’ and ‘musical theatre’ styles of singing.   Singers used a lower vocal fold closed quotient (CQ) at most pitches when singing in a classical style than in a MT style, although it is suggested that this increase is of such a small amount that it would make little functional difference to the voice, though it is possible that it may slightly reduce the spectral slope of the glottal waveform.   A one tailed student’s t-test showed a significant difference between the two groups over all pitches.  The spectral slope of the acoustic output was also found to be significantly shallower for MT singing than classical, particularly over the lower harmonics. ‘Classical’ voice had a consistently negative spectral slope, with harmonic amplitude weaker in almost all instances at all pitches than for the Musical Theatre style.   It is suggested that the primary factor in the difference between musical theatre styles of singing and classical for this age group is in the use of a different voice resonance strategy, which is used to enhance any slight changes in the acoustic waveform caused by a slightly increased Closed Quotient. 

 

The project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom.

 

Key words:  Singer, Musical Theatre, Classical, Adolescent, Closed Quotient, LTAS.

 

Ofer Amir 1 , Merav Engel 1 , Noam Amir 1

1 Tel-Aviv University, Communication Disorders, Tel Aviv

Question: Throughout life, changes occur in the human voice mechanism organs. These changes affect voice and provide information on speakers′ identity, their health, emotional status, physical characteristics, gender and age. The data on listeners′ ability to decipher these cues, based on the speaker′s voice, is limited. Hence, the goal of this study was to examine listeners` ability to identify age and gender of children and teenagers, based on their voice.

Methods: Thirty-eight naïve listeners evaluated age and gender of young speakers, based on recorded samples of their voice. Recordings were taken from 120 children, between the ages of 8 to 18 years. Each speaker was recorded during the production of a sentence, and during the production of the vowel /a/.

Results: Listeners were able to identify children`s gender and age well above chance level. Identification levels were higher for the sentence stimuli than for the isolated vowels. While girls were identified correctly at similar levels in all age groups, the correct identification of boys has improved after the age of 12 years.

Conclusions: Children and adolescents` voice provides cues for gender and age. This information can be identified correctly by listeners, based on short voice samples, before and after puberty. As expected, gender was recognized more accurately after puberty. However, this improvement in identification was observed mostly for male voices. In addition, some voices were perceived as representative of their gender or age, more than other voices, even before puberty.

David Howard 1 , Graham Welch 2

1 University of York, Electronics, York

2 Institute of Education, Arts and Humanities, London