Dr. Jenni Cook, Associate Professor in the UNH Music Department, visited my Speech Processing class to discuss speech production as it relates to the singing voice. Here’s a picture of Jenni I took during the lecture:
I invited Jenni because I was intrigued by a figure in the Quatieri textbook that I use in this course, and I thought she’d be the perfect person to bring this figure to life for us. The figure (a reproduction from a paper by Johan Sundberg) pictorially explains how singers can generate loud sounds, or using music terminology, how they can project well. In essence, the vocal tract has resonances, called formants. For so-called voiced sounds, the vocal tract is excited by periodic air puffs from the glottis. The frequency of the air puffs is the fundamental frequency of the voice. When the formants line up with the fundamental frequency, and/or its harmonics (its multiples in frequency), the singer projects well. Here’s the figure:
Jenni discussed this issue, as well as others, in her lecture. For me, the most exciting parts of the lecture were the demonstrations: Jenni sang short sequences to demonstrate various effects (including the one in the figure above), and she also had us participate in some of the demonstrations by vocalizing and by exploring the anatomy of our voice production mechanism.
Jenni has kindly agreed to help me in assigning a project topic for my Speech Processing course (each student will complete a project as part of the course). Jenni and I will work together on guiding a project on generating feedback to a voice student about how he or she is projecting while singing, as well as about other relevant features of his or her voice (we’ll determine which ones as the project gets going). The feedback will be based on digital speech signal processing algorithms and it will be presented in a user-friendly form to the singer. Should be fun!
Andrew Kun