Difficult Vowels in Singing

Objective: Many singers find that some vowels are particularly difficult to sing at certain pitch levels. These difficulties are more likely to originate from the voice source, i.e., the glottal airflow, than from the vocal tract. We will test the hypothesis that any pitch instability is due to source-filter interaction. Such interaction is likely to occur when one of the lower spectrum partials crosses over the first or the second formant.

Method: Novice singers are asked to produce pitch-glides, traversing the traditional passaggi, on five vowels /i, ɛ or æ, a, o, u/. Instabilities of fundamental frequency will be detected by the method used by Sundberg and associates (2023). At instabilities, the frequency distance between formants, determined by the Praat software, and the closest partial will be measured.

Results and Conclusions: We will discuss our results to show whether the instabilities noted were caused by proximity of partial frequency to F1 or F2, i.e., source-filter interaction. This distance should be consistently narrow if source-filter interaction caused the disturbances.