Singing and speaking: Acoustic differences

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the acoustic differences between singing and speaking within the female soprano singer. The interaction between the supralaryngeal and phonatory components of voice production was examined with two measures. Voice-onset time (VOT), the relationship between formant frequency one, two and three (F₁–F₂, F ₂–F₃), and the ratio between F₂/F₁ , F₃/F₂ were the variables of interest. Five classically trained singers produced five spoken and five sung phrases incorporating the voiced plosive consonants /b/, /d/, /g/, the high-front vowel /i/, and the high-back vowel /u/. The phonetically controlled phrase was set to the music of an aria from the opera Tosca.; Measurements of VOT and formant frequencies were derived from spectrographic displays and Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) spectra. Initial consonant-vowel (CV) from the first word were examined for VOT measures, and initial CV from the first and third words of the spoken and sung phrases were examined for formant frequency relationships in order to investigate connected singing and speaking conditions.; The descriptive data and repeated Analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed statistically significant differences in voice-onset time between the spoken and sung productions. For the consonant and vowel data voice-onset time was not statistically significant in the two conditions.; The descriptive data for the formant frequency relationships suggested that both absolute format frequency values and formant frequency relationships are different in connected singing and speaking. The acoustic data for connected speaking suggested that F₂ is considerably higher in spoken production of the vowel /u/ than previously reported (Peterson & Barney, 1952). The acoustic data further suggested that formant ratios of F₂/F ₁ are substantially smaller in singing than speaking for the vowels examined in this study. The formant ratios of F₃/F₂, however, appear to be similar in singing to speaking for the high-front vowel /i/ and high-back vowel /u/.; Several possible underlying physiological contributions to the acoustic results are suggested. The clinical and pedagogical implications of these results are discussed with respect to possible differences between vocal efficiency in singing and speech production, and suggestions for future research are proposed.