Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS, United Kingdom.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2019 Aug;146(2):1005. doi: 10.1121/1.5120483.
Unlike fixed-pitch instruments, the voice requires careful regulation during each note in order to maintain a steady pitch. Previous studies have investigated aspects of singing performance such as intonation accuracy and pitch drift, treating pitch as fixed within notes, while the pitch trajectory within notes has hardly been investigated. The aim of this paper is to study pitch variation within vocal notes and ascertain what factors influence the various parts of a note. The authors recorded five soprano, alto, tenor, bass quartets singing two pieces of music in three different listening conditions, according to whether the singers can hear the other participants or not. After analysing all of the individual notes and extracting pitch over time, the authors observed the following regularities: (1) There are transient parts of approximately 120 ms duration at both the beginning and end of a note, where the pitch varies rapidly; (2) the shapes of transient parts differ significantly according to the adjacent pitch, although all singers tend to have a descending transient at the end of a note; (3) the trajectory shapes of female singers differ from those of male singers at the beginnings of notes; (4) between vocal parts, there is a tendency to expand harmonic intervals (by about 8 cents between adjacent voices); (5) the listening condition had no significant effect on within-note pitch trajectories.
与定调乐器不同，人声在演奏每个音符时都需要仔细调整，以保持稳定的音高。先前的研究已经调查了歌唱表现的各个方面，如音准和音高漂移，将音高视为音符内的固定值，而音符内的音高轨迹几乎没有被研究过。本文旨在研究声乐音符内的音高变化，并确定哪些因素影响音符的各个部分。作者记录了五名女高音、女中音、男高音和男低音四重奏在三种不同的聆听条件下演唱两首乐曲，根据歌手是否能听到其他参与者的声音。在分析了所有的单个音符并提取了随时间变化的音高后，作者观察到以下规律：（1）在音符的开头和结尾处大约有 120 毫秒的瞬态部分，在该部分音高快速变化；（2）尽管所有歌手在结束音符时往往都有一个下降的瞬态，但瞬态部分的形状根据相邻音高有很大的不同；（3）在音符开始时，女歌手的轨迹形状与男歌手不同；（4）在声乐部分之间，存在扩展和声间隔的趋势（相邻声部之间约为 8 个半音）；（5）聆听条件对音高轨迹没有显著影响。
