Crawford, Tim

Proutskova, Polina

Rhodes, Christophe

Wiggins, Geraint

English

Arrow@TUDublin

Technological University Dublin ARROW@TU Dublin Papers 6th International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis, 15-17 June, 2016 2016-6 Formalising Cross-Cultural Vocal Production Polina Proutskova Goldsmiths College, University of London, proutskova@googlemail.com Christophe Rhodes Goldsmiths College, University of London, c.rhodes@gold.ac.uk Tim Crawford Goldsmiths College, University of London, t.crawford@gold.ac.uk Geraint Wiggins Queen Mary University of London, geraint.wiggins@gmul.ac.uk Follow this and additional works at: https://arrow.tudublin.ie/fema  Part of the Musicology Commons Recommended Citation Proutskova, P., Rhodes, C., Crawford, T., Wiggins, G. (2016). Formalising cross-cultural vocal production. 6th International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis, Dublin, 15-17 June, 2016. This Conference Paper is brought to you for free and open access by the 6th International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis, 15-17 June, 2016 at ARROW@TU Dublin. It has been accepted for inclusion in Papers by an authorized administrator of ARROW@TU Dublin. For more information, please contact yvonne.desmond@tudublin.ie, arrow.admin@tudublin.ie, brian.widdis@tudublin.ie. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License  FORMALISING CROSS-CULTURAL VOCAL PRODUCTIONPolina Proutskova Christophe Rhodes Tim Crawford Geraint WigginsGoldsmiths, Universityof Londonproutskova@googlemail.comGoldsmiths, Univer-sity of Londonc.rhodes@gold.ac.ukGoldsmiths, Univer-sity of Londont.crawford@gold.ac.ukQueen Mary Univer-sity of Londongeraint.wiggins@qmul.ac.uk1.  INTRODUCTIONHow do we speak about the timbre of a singer? How dowe compare singers singing the same song? It wouldn'tbe particularly hard to distinguish a Chinese opera singerfrom a Western opera singer, but it would be much harderto verbalize how we distinguish them. And when a classi-cal singer performs a rock song, we all hear it is stylisti-cally wrong, but how do we explain to the singer what heneeds to change? All these questions are about vocal productionand how it can be captured in words. As it currentlystands there is no widely accepted vocabulary to talkabout it, not even within a single culture or genre (Gar-nier, 2007; Mitchell, 2003). Publications in English ana-lysing vocal production in other cultures are rare (Föder-mayr, 1971; Bartmann 1994). Singing teachers very oftenuse idyosincratic language based on their subjective per-ception or learnt from their own teachers, it is hard forteachers from different schools to agree about the terms(McGlashan, 2013). Medical professionals are mainly in-terested in vocal dysfunction (Little, 2009). Ethnomusi-cologists focus on the context of music making and rarelymention the sound itself; while for musicologists or mu-sic critics it is considered a virtue to use unique termsspecific to the particular writer and objectivity of lan-guage is not a priority.We became interested in the subject in the con-text of MIR, hoping to train a computational model toclassify vocal production. Applications would include:differentiating recordings of singing from different cul-tures; singer recognition; distinguishing originals fromcovers and covers by different singers; genre classifica-tion, etc. All these tasks have been addressed by bruteforce computational algorithms and by more sophisticat-ed approaches (Tsai 2006, Serra 2010, Holzapfel 2008).Yet there seems to be a glass ceiling of classification ac-curacy that can be achieved (Karydis 2010, Downie2008). In MIR it is referred to as “semantic gap” (Wig-gins, 2009). If a middle layer could be introduced of moreobjective categories where further hunan knowledge is in-corporated in the model, that could help improve classifi-cation accuracy further. 2. MODELS OF VOCAL PRODUCTIONThere is no theoretical model of vocal production whichcould provide the basis for predictions. There are no an-notated datasets either. As we have seen above, there isn'teven a vocabulary to talk about vocal production. Wehave found only three approaches to parametrising vocalproduction that have had a wider reach: one originating inethnomusicology, another coming from vocal educationand one formulated in singing voice science.Ethnomusicological parametrization was intro-duced by Alan Lomax in his Cantometrics experiment inwhich over 5000 recordings from more than 500 cultureswere analysed, performance practice was expressed via36 parameters (Lomax 1976). 13 of these parameterswere related to vocal production, including volume, rasp,vocal tension, glottal shake, nasality, vocal pitch, etc. Lo-max took an auditory-perceptual approach: human listen-ers were trained to rate the value of each parameter afterlistening to an audio recording. Lomax tried to diversifythe ratings by getting at least three people to rate eachrecording. But his raters were mainly US university stu-dents with similar life experiences and musical back-grounds. A proper diversification would include peopleof all ages and professions, from different cultures andwith varying musical experience. It is a much bigger un-dertaking and would have been unworkable in Lomax'scircumstances. Only if it were conducted this way thoughwould we be able to say with certainty whether Canto-metrics musical parameters are perceived similarly inde-pentently of cultural and musical background. Johan Sundberg, the father of singing voice sci-ence, introduced phonation modes describing the voicesource aspect of vocal production (Sundberg 1979). Theyare based on the relationship between subglottal pressureand transglottal airflow. Three of his phonation modes -breathy, neutral and pressed - are widely used by speechand language therapists and in other fields. Sundberg for-malised the terms relating them to the aerodynamic pro-cesses from which each of the modes originates. He sug-gests ways to infer phonation mode from an audio record-ing of singing via inverse filtering. This model works ona miliseconds scale but becomes unmanagable on a sec-onds scale, which is necessary for humans to recognisemusic and to feel something about it or deduct its charac-teristics – the time scale on which the Cantometrics ex-periment was conducted. Sundberg's phonation modeldoes not include the resonance body aspect, which is cru-cial for resulting timbre. Jo Estill was an american singer, teacher andvoice researcher, who suggested a physiology-based sys-tem for understanding and teaching vocal production. Heridea was to isolate physiological structures, learn to man-age them indepentently and use these building blocks ofvocal physiology to construct various kinds of vocal pro-duction, ultimately leading to the ability to build anysinging style (Estill, 1979; Colton, 1981). While her sci-entific evidence was partial at best, her work has had ahuge influence on contemporary singing education(Sadolin, 2000; Soto-Morettini, 2006; Kayes, 2004). FMA 2016 Workshop36Since we could not verify the inter-personal andinter-cultural consistency of Cantometrics approach weconcentrated on the physiology including phonation. Wedevised aн ontology of vocal production based on Sund-berg's and Estill's terminology with some minor additions(Table 1).Table 1. Our  ontology of vocal production. 3. THE STUDYThe aim of our study is to assess the viability of the phys-iological approach to modelling vocal production as wellas to verify applicability and usefulness of our prelimi-nary ontology of vocal production (Table 1). The study isbased on interviews with vocal physiology experts andcombines a qualitative and a quantitative approach (Bry-man, 2006). We chose eleven tracks from the Cantometricsdataset (see Chapter on vocal width in Lomax, 1977), allfrom different musical cultures. Nineteen physiologicallystable fragments were extracted from the tracks, whichwere then used as entities of analysis in the interviews.We recruited 13 participants: otolaryngologists, speechlanguage therapists, singing teachers. Participants' profes-sional involvement with vocal physiology ranged from 10to over 40 years. Three of them had a non-Western cul-tural background. Interviews were structured and lasted from 90minutes to several hours. Participants were asked to ratephysiological dimensions from the preliminary ontologywith which they were familiar; they were encouraged toexplain their ratings, to point out complexities, to suggestbetter terms and approaches.  4. RESULTS Participants showed confidence in the majority of termsintroduced in the preliminary ontology: only 20% ofphysiological dimensions were rated by less than 80% ofparticipants.  While experts generally supported the on-tology, the inter-participant agreement on the ratings waslow. Only for two descriptors – position of the larynx andAES – was there a tendency to agreement. In this talk we shall present the results of thequalitative analysis of the interviews, the analysis of in-ter-participant (dis)agreement including problem casesand searching for possible causes. We shall demonstrateusing the words of our participants how some commonthemes have emerged from the interviews and how thesefindings could explain the disagreement. The advantagesand disadvantages of physiological vs perceptual ap-proaches to vocal production as well as their possiblecombinations will be discussed. We shall outline futureresearch directions for this largely understudied area andexplain the significance of our findings for academic andapplied fields outside  MIR.5. REFERENCESBartmann, M. (1994). Rauhigkeiten in der Volksmusik in derKanarischen Insel El Hierro. In Bockner, M., editor,Berichte aus dem ITCM- Nationalkomitee Deutschland,volume 3, Bamberg. Bryman, A. (2006). Integrating quantitative and qualitativeresearch: how is it done? Qualitative research, 6(1):97–113.Colton, R. H. and Estill, J. A. (1981). Elements of VoiceQuality: Perceptual, Acoustic, and Physiologic Aspects. InSpeech and language: advances in basic research andpractice, Lass, Norman J. (ed.), volume 5, pages 311–403.Academic Press, New York. Downie, J. S. (2008). The music information retrievalevaluation exchange (2005-2007): A window into musicinformation retrieval research. Acoustical Science andTechnology, 4(29):247–255.Estill, J. and Colton, R. (1979). The identification of some voicequalities. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,65(S1). Födermayr, F. (1971). Zu gesanglichen Stimmgenbung in deraußereuropaischen Musik. Ein Beitrag zur Methodik dervergleichenden Musikwissenschaft. Stieglmayr, Wien. Garnier, M., Henrich, N., Castellengo, M., Sotiropoulos, D., andDubois, D. (2007). Characterisation of voice quality inwestern lyrical singing: from teachers’ judgements toacoustic descriptions. journal of interdisciplinary musicstudies, 1(2):62–91. Holzapfel, A. and Stylianou, Y. (2008). Musical genreclassification using nonnegative matrix factorization-basedfeatures. Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, IEEETrans- actions on, 16(2):424–434.Karydis, I., Radovanovic, M., Nanopoulos, A., and Ivanovic, M.(2010). Looking through the “glass ceiling”: A conceptualframework for the problems of spectral similarity. In 11thInternational Society for Music Information RetrievalConference (ISMIR 2010).Kayes, G. (2004). Singing and the Actor. Routledge. range scale metricssubglottal pressure low to high 5-point intervaltransglottal airflow low to high 5-point intervalphonation breathy present/absent 2-point nominalphonation pressed present/absent 2-point nominalphonation neutral present/absent 2-point nominalphonation flow present/absent 2-point nominalmodal/falsetto 2-point nominal9-point intervallarynx height low to high 9-point intervalthyroid cartilage tilt 5-point intervalcricoid cartilage tilt 5-point intervalvelum low to high 5-point intervalwide to narrow 5-point intervaltongue height low to high 5-point intervaltongue compression present/absent 2-point nominallow to high 5-point intervallow to high 5-point intervalphysiological di-mensionsvocal folds modal vs.falsettovocal folds vibrationmode thick to thinthick/mixedthicker/mixed/mixed thinner/thinvertical/slighttilt/tiltedvertical/slighttilt/tiltedariepiglottic sphinc-ter (size of vocaltract)position within chestregisterposition within headregisterFMA 2016 Workshop37Little, M., et. al. (2009). Objective dysphonia quantification invocal fold paralysis: comparing nonlinear with classicalmeasures. Journal of Voice. Lomax, A. (1968). Folk Song Style and Culture. TransactionBooks, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Lomax, A. (1977). Cantometrics: A Method of Musical Anthro-pology (audio-cassettes and handbook). Berkeley:University of California Media Extension Center. McGlashan, J. (2013). What descriptors do singing teachers useto describe sound examples? Presented at PEVOC 10 (Pan-European Voice Conference) Prague, Czech Republic. Mitchell, H. F., T. Kenny, D., Ryan, M., and Davis, P. J. (2003).Defining ‘open throat’ through content analysis of experts’pedagogical practices. Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology,28(4):167–180. Sadolin, C. (2000). Complete vocal technique. Shout PublishingCopenhagen, Denmark. Serra, J., Gomez, E., and Herrera, P. (2010). Audio cover songidentification and sim- ilarity: background, approaches,evaluation, and beyond. In Advances in Music InformationRetrieval, pages 307–332. Springer.Soto-Morettini, D. (2006). Popular Singing: A Practical GuideTo: Pop, Jazz, Blues, Rock, Country and Gospel. A&CBlack. Sundberg, J. (1987). The science of the singing voice. IllinoisUniversity Press. Tsai, W.-H. and Wang, H.-M. (2006). Automatic singerrecognition of popular music recordings via estimation andmodeling of solo vocal signals. Audio, Speech, andLanguage Processing, IEEE Transactions on, 14(1):330–341.Wiggins, G. (2009). Semantic gap?? schemantic schmap!!methodological considerations in the scientific study ofmusic. Proceedings of IEEE AdMIRe. FMA 2016 Workshop38

Formalising Cross-Cultural Vocal Production

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Formalising Cross-Cultural Vocal Production

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