Abstract

Professional singers are trained to maximize vowel duration and minimize consonant interference, while still maintaining intelligibility. The mechanisms by which they do this, however, are unclear. A deeper understanding of the gestural mechanisms utilized during professional-quality singing could be useful to train singers more effectively. It has been well-established that nasal sounds in syllable coda position have longer and larger velum motion in formal speech as compared to casual speech. The hypothesis of this study was that coda velum gestures would be temporally extended proportional to the duration of the entire syllable. To test this, real-time magnetic resonance (rtMR) images of trained soprano singers were used to track the motion of the velum. The boundaries of the vocal tract were mapped to a semi-polar grid, and the velocity of the velum at every frame of its movement was calculated. An important …

Date

2014

Authors

Reed Blaylock, Adam Lammert, Louis Goldstein, Shrikanth Narayanan

Journal

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Volume

135

Issue

4_Supplement

Pages

2199-2199

Publisher

Acoustical Society of America