Introduction: This study considers the singing differences between Iranian Traditional singing and Classical Western singing. It compares acoustic features which may lead to a greater understanding of the two techniques and the pedagogy in their training.
Study design: A cross-sectional descriptive-analytic study was used for this research.
Methods: Participants of this study were five male professional tenor singers who had completed vocal training courses and were able to sing in both styles, Classical Western singing and Iranian traditional singing, and had more than 5 years of singing experience in both styles. The acoustic evaluation was performed on the "may zade" song using Pratt software. The evaluated parameters included jitter, shimmer, HNR, fo, formant structures, VOT, and cepstral prominence.
Results: The results showed that the two styles of Classical Western singing and Iranian Traditional singing differed significantly in the measures: HNR, F3, CPPs, VOT /t/, and VOT /k/.
Conclusion: The two styles differed in some acoustic factors, but the differences may not have practical significance except for the longer VOT values in the Western Classical style. Further research should include a wider range of phonatory phenomena (registration, etc.). The results suggest that, for Iranian-trained male singers, the two styles have strong performance similarities.