Vibrato, the natural oscillation of musical pitch that is commonly associated with music performed by skilled singers and instrumentalists in certain musical styles, is an important aspect of realistic music synthesis. For synthesized singing particular care must be taken to ensure that the synthesized vibrato behaves naturally, especially in the vicinity of portamento pitch transitions. The ap...

This study explored two tenets of the Italian Bel Canto operatic singing technique “Come si parla” and “aggiustamento.” Articulatory changes in the lower formant vowel space of 11 spoken and sung vowels were systematically examined in six male singers. Results showed that singers influence the placement of the lowest formant frequencies in the sung vowel space using both a lowered larynx and mo...

In singing, FO sometimes is much higher than the typicalfiequency value of FI. According to previous investigations, sopranos raise FI to a fiequency near FO by widening the jaw opening in such cases. In the present study, the jaw opening was measured in 10 professional singers of dzflerent categorisations whose task was to sing an ascending two-octave scale at dzflerent vowels. Their normal Fl...

There has been a recent surge of research on the topic of poor-pitch singing. However, this research has not addressed an important distinction in measurement: that between accuracy and precision. With respect to singing, accuracy refers to the average difference between sung and target pitches. Precision, by contrast, refers to the consistency of repeated attempts to produce a pitch. A group o...

HAPPY YEAR OF THE YANG (羊)! On Friday February 20, 2015 The Chinese Program ushered in the Year of the Sheep with a celebration chock full of Chinese New Year activities including paper crafts, Jianzi game (aka hacky sack), opera mask painting, Beijing opera performance. Students had their faces painted as opera clowns. Students and faculty members from both Pacific Lutheran University and the ...

30 second-snippets from 37 songs have been automatically extracted. All phonemes from this pieces have been manually labeled. The considered genre was popular music. 21 songs have been performed by male singers. 16 songs have been performed by female singers. Altogether 2244 phonemes have been manually labeled and can be used by the system. Only 15 voiced phonemes have been distinguished, becau...

This study explores the higher formant structure of the male operatic voice. Through a comparative study of spoken and sung vowels from six specialist male operatically trained singers, the notion that operatic singers maintain an even vocal timbre throughout their vocal range is explored. Results validate previous investigations into the upper formant region, but also identify common patterns ...

The opera Death and the Powers by Tod Machover tells the story of a man, Simon Powers, who evades death by transferring his essence into his environment as his corporeal body dies. To realize the effect of the theatrical environment coming alive as the main character, the Opera of the Future research group at the MIT Media Lab developed new technologies and control systems for interactive robot...

In this paper, we investigate the problem of automatically detecting and tracking a specified person’s singing potions within a music recording with multiple simultaneous or nonsimultaneous singers. This problem reflects an important issue in multimedia applications which require transcription and indexing of music data in response to the increasing demand nowadays for content-based information...