Vocalist.org archive


From:  Tako Oda <toda@m...>
Date:  Tue Sep 5, 2000  7:36 pm
Subject:  RE: Tako's vocal clip, and Source of frequencies was:Falsetto Recognition


On Tue, 5 Sep 2000, Martyn Clark wrote:
> 1) A signal which is not good enough for analysis (signal to noise ratio
> high, recorded in an echoey environment or with reverb added, and some
> clpping taking place at some stage in the process). To get quality
> answers, you need quality equipment. The noise in the background looks
> like a combination of general equipment noise, and left-overs from the
> echo. Nothing more.

I hang my head in shame ;-) It's true - the room was very wet, my
equipment is bargain-basement, and I wasn't paying attention to the gain.

> It could also be a compression effect if you are
> compressing the audio at all (like recording on consumer MiniDisc).

Not compressed. At least I didn't do that :)

> I don't think that from this recording anything can be said about the
> vocal tract non-linear noise generation ideas...

True, but the purpose of the clip was not to illustrate noise levels, but
to demonstrate registration events in my voice... I think it is somewhat
successful at this level. A trained ear can hear the changes, despite the
sonic garbage, I think.

> 2) A normal countertenor arpeggio, shifting from chest into a rich
> head-type resonance. The shift in resonance is accompanied by an
> increase in the level of sound, which alters the visibility of the
> higher harmonics (particularly in the 4 middle notes in the arpeggio).

Glad you call it "head-type resonance" instead of falsetto! I know it's
just semantics, but it's nice to hear...

> 3) A relatively low level of "singer's formant" energy (measured as the
> ratio of energy above 2500 to the energy below). From the recording, the
> ratio is about 29% - about 10 percent below what we expect for
> classically trained singers. This is going to be the case with a ligter
> countertenor production, and explains why there is not much energy there
> in the spectrogram.

Yikes, I didn't know that. Is the low ratio comparable to that of a lyric
coloratura, who also uses a very light (though mechanically different)
production? Just curious...

> Don't have time for any more comment! Sorry.

Please don't be sorry - thank you so much for writing - I learned a lot,
and you've challenged me to be less sloppy. I'm just starting the MFA
program in Electronic Music and Recording Technology at Mills, and I need
to do better!

Tako


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