General Science > Question of the Week

QotW - 08.03.30 - Apparent loss of vocal accent when singing

(1/3) > >>

techmind:
I'm no speech-scientist, but I think to answer this question we have to think about what constitutes an "accent". I would suggest that the way you modulate both the pitch and rhythm of your voice go a long way to defining an accent.
In singing, the pitch is constrained by the tune, ironing out much scope for individuality. Similarly the rhythm is largely determined by the music, forcing some conformance.
Of course, the way you pronounce certain vowel sounds probably goes beyond my simple explanation of accent... but since singing is mostly a group activity I would suggest that social pressure to conform with the other singers helps to curtail deviation from the majority of the group.

In the past I have played with writing computer-programs to analyse the acoustic content of speech, particularly in separating the fundamental pitch from the amplitude of the fundamental and its harmonics. I've been able to take a voice recording (e.g. of a newsreader on the radio) and replay it at constant pitch - this procedure turns "speech" into "plainsong". Similarly I've been able to reconstruct the speech in such a way that the replayed pitch follows the original pitch only "lazily" (i.e. apply a low-pass filter to the pitch function) which makes the speaker sound tired.

Make it Lady:
Being a bit of a lovey, I often sing on stage with a bunch of people from the south of England. I have a strong nothern accent and NEVER compromise in order to try and fit in, however one director told me that I had to sing in a southern accent (sing Darnce instead of dance) or get off the stage. I told him that I would stay on stage but I would not sing the words that offended him. He was very shocked, little Hitler.

I think anyone that puts on an accent in order to sing should be shot.

thedoc:
My question is about accents.  I’ve noticed that many people when they speak in a language that is not their native tongue have strong accents.  However, when they try to sing a song in the same language their accent seem to diminish.  There are exceptions for this but it seems to be generally true no matter what their native language is or what language they try to sing in.  Why is that?
Asked by Archana, North Carolina

                                          Read this Question from our Podcast

thedoc:
Here's the answer - from Professor David Howard, University of York

In answer to the question which relates to accents, what you hear when people sing as opposed to when they speak, I think the answer to this lies in the way people are trained to sing. We learn vowel sounds, particularly in singing, in a way that allows us to project them to a loud audience. That means that the front of the mouth needs to be more open than it is in speech so it’s a bit like a megaphone.  The vowels take on a different sound in terms of their timbre which is really what accent is. Therefore the vowels are being placed in a position for singing which is not the same as speech.

The other way of thinking about it is that the-certainly the Opera tradition of singing, certainly the Bel Canto tradition of singing come very much from the Italian school of vowels. Singers are encouraged to make their vowels very clean, very Italian-like: “Spagheeetti.” When you do that, no matter what language you start in, you will aim towards the vowels that have that clean, slightly Italian sound. Even if it’s not Italian they do merge to a sort of fund-vowel quality which rather removes the accent variation which in terms of mouth movement is really very small.

neilep:
What a great question !...here's some food for thought !

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=1500.0

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page