Acoustical properties in inhaling singing : a case-study

A highly experienced versatile female professional singer displaying no apparent vocal complaint, developed inhaling singing, an innovative approach to reverse phonation. Although there are some reports in literature that describe the characteristics of ingressive phonation and sounds, to the best of our knowledge, no reports on actual inhaling singing are available in literature. This paper reports a case study on the acoustical analysis of inhaling singing, comparing this innovative technique with traditional exhaling singing. As this is rather undiscovered territory, we have decided to address several questions: is it possible to match the same pitches using inhaling singing compared to exhaling singing? Is the harmonic structure and energy distribution similar? Is it possible to maintain the same phonation duration in both techniques? Are there differences in volume and tessitura (vocal range)? This paper, reporting on the experience of one individual, demonstrates that a tessitura can be mastered in inhaling singing. Spectral analysis reveals a similar frequency distribution in both conditions. However, in inhaling singing the energy of the harmonics is significantly lower for the first 3 overtones, while the maximum phonation time is larger, than in exhaling singing. The singer reports that less effort is required for inhaling singing in the high register. As such, inhaling singing offers new possibilities for vocal performance

The National Singing Programme for primary schools in England: an initial baseline study

The ‘Sing Up’ National Singing Programme for Primary schools in England was launched in November 2007 under the UK Government’s ‘Music Manifesto’. ‘Sing Up’ is a four-year programme whose overall aim is to raise the status of singing and increase opportunities for children throughout the country to enjoy singing as part of their everyday lives, in and out of school. As part of the Programme’s research evaluation, a key focus has been to build an initial picture of singing in Primary schools across England. This information could then be used as a ‘baseline’ by which the programme’s subsequent impact could be judged, including ‘before’ and ‘after’ measures of schools that receive particular ‘Sing Up’ input. This paper reports an overview of key outcomes of first five months of baseline profiling (October, 2007 to February 2008), embracing analyses of the singing behaviours of 3,472 children in 76 Primary schools. These findings are complimented by additional analyses of children’s views on singing in and out of school; and the self-efficacy of their class teachers’ (n=90), both as singers and as teachers of singing

Mandarin Singing Voice Synthesis Based on Harmonic Plus Noise Model and Singing Expression Analysis

The purpose of this study is to investigate how humans interpret musical scores expressively, and then design machines that sing like humans. We consider six factors that have a strong influence on the expression of human singing. The factors are related to the acoustic, phonetic, and musical features of a real singing signal. Given real singing voices recorded following the MIDI scores and lyrics, our analysis module can extract the expression parameters from the real singing signals semi-automatically. The expression parameters are used to control the singing voice synthesis (SVS) system for Mandarin Chinese, which is based on the harmonic plus noise model (HNM). The results of perceptual experiments show that integrating the expression factors into the SVS system yields a notable improvement in perceptual naturalness, clearness, and expressiveness. By one-to-one mapping of the real singing signal and expression controls to the synthesizer, our SVS system can simulate the interpretation of a real singer with the timbre of a speaker.Comment: 8 pages, technical repor

Singing voice correction using canonical time warping

Expressive singing voice correction is an appealing but challenging problem. A robust time-warping algorithm which synchronizes two singing recordings can provide a promising solution. We thereby propose to address the problem by canonical time warping (CTW) which aligns amateur singing recordings to professional ones. A new pitch contour is generated given the alignment information, and a pitch-corrected singing is synthesized back through the vocoder. The objective evaluation shows that CTW is robust against pitch-shifting and time-stretching effects, and the subjective test demonstrates that CTW prevails the other methods including DTW and the commercial auto-tuning software. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method in a practical, real-world scenario

Airport noise predicts song timing of European birds

Anthropogenic noise is of increasing concern to biologists and medical scientists. Its detrimental effects on human health have been well studied, with the high noise levels from air traffic being of particular concern. However, less is known about the effects of airport noise pollution on signal masking in wild animals. Here, we report a relationship between aircraft noise and two major features of the singing behavior of birds. We found that five of ten songbird species began singing significantly earlier in the morning in the vicinity of a major European airport than their conspecifics at a quieter control site. As birds at both sites started singing before the onset of air traffic in the morning, this suggests that the birds in the vicinity of the airport advanced their activity to gain more time for unimpaired singing before the massive plane noise set in. In addition, we found that during the day, chaffinches avoided singing during airplane takeoffs, but only when the noise exceeded a certain threshold, further suggesting that the massive noise caused by the airport can impair acoustic communication in birds. Overall, our study indicates that birds may be adjusting their mating signals and time budgets in response to aircraft noise

American Idol: Should it be a Singing Contest or a Popularity Contest?

In the very popular FOX TV reality show, American Idol, the judges, who are presumably experts in evaluating singing effort, have no voting power when the field is narrowed to the top twenty-four contestants. It is only the votes of viewers that count. In the 2007 season of the show, one of the judges, Simon Cowell, threatened to quit the show if a contestant, Sanjaya Malakar, who was clearly a low-ability contestant, won the competition. He was concerned that the show was becoming a popularity contest instead of a singing contest. Is this a problem? Not necessarily. I show that, under certain conditions, making success in the contest dependent on a contestant’s popularity and not solely on her singing ability or performance, could paradoxically increase aggregate singing effort. It may be optimal to give the entire voting power to the viewers whose evaluation of singing effort or ability is noisier.American Idol, contests, tournaments