Dark tone quality and vocal tract shaping in soprano song production: Insights from real-time MRI

Elisabeth Lynn; Shrikanth S Narayanan; Adam C Lammert

doi:10.1121/10.0005109

Dark tone quality and vocal tract shaping in soprano song production: Insights from real-time MRI

JASA Express Lett. 2021 Jul;1(7):075202. doi: 10.1121/10.0005109. Epub 2021 Jul 9.

Authors

Elisabeth Lynn¹, Shrikanth S Narayanan², Adam C Lammert¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Biomedical Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts 01690, USA.
² Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 95616, USA erlynn@wpi.edu, shri@ee.usc.edu, alammert@wpi.edu.

Abstract

Tone quality termed "dark" is an aesthetically important property of Western classical voice performance and has been associated with lowered formant frequencies, lowered larynx, and widened pharynx. The present study uses real-time magnetic resonance imaging with synchronous audio recordings to investigate dark tone quality in four professionally trained sopranos with enhanced ecological validity and a relatively complete view of the vocal tract. Findings differ from traditional accounts, indicating that labial narrowing may be the primary driver of dark tone quality across performers, while many other aspects of vocal tract shaping are shown to differ significantly in a performer-specific way.