Making myself understood: perceived factors affecting the intelligibility of sung text

The intensities of vowels and plosive bursts and their impact on text intelligibility in singinga)

In classical singing, there are often problems with the intelligibility of sung text. The present study aims to test the hypotheses that (1) in loud operatic singing, compared with speaking, the intensity of voiceless plosives increases less than the intensity of vowels, leading to poorer recognition of plosives; and (2) pronouncing the plosive bursts with greater intensity improves their recognition. The acoustic analysis of nine opera arias in Italian from the Classical and Romantic periods performed by ten classically trained singers showed that the average difference in the intensity of vowels when sung and spoken was 14.6 dB [standard deviation (SD) = 7.2 dB], while the difference in the intensity of voiceless plosive bursts was only 6.6 dB (SD = 6 dB). In a perception test with 73 participants, increasing the intensity of the plosive bursts generally improved the recognition of plosives in the sung /a-plosive-a/ sequences, but mainly when reverberation and/or pink noise imitating instrumental accompaniments were added to the stimuli. At the same time, recognition of plosives was often better than chance even when the plosive burst was missing and replaced by silence.

Using Contextual and Visual Cues to Improve Sung Word Recognition in Hearing Aid Users

Older adults commonly experience hearing loss that negatively affects the quality of life and creates barriers to effective therapeutic interactions as well as music listening. Music therapists have the potential to address some needs of older adults, but the effectiveness of music interventions is dependent on the perception of spoken and musical stimuli. Nonauditory information, such as contextual (e.g., keywords, picture related to song) and visual cues (e.g., clear view of singer's face), can improve speech perception. The purpose of this study was to examine the benefit of contextual and visual cues on sung word recognition in the presence of guitar accompaniment. The researcher tested 24 community-dwelling older adult hearing aid (HA) users recruited through a university HA clinic and laboratory under 3 study conditions: (a) auditory stimuli only, (b) auditory stimuli with contextual cues, and (c) auditory stimuli with visual cues. Both visual and contextual nonauditory cues benefited participants on sung word recognition. Participants' music background and training were predictive of success without nonauditory cues, and visual cues provided greater benefit than contextual cues. Based on the results of this study, it is recommended that music therapists increase the accessibility of music interventions reliant upon lyric recognition through the incorporation of clear visual and contextual cues.

Preliminary study on lyrics intelligibility at different pitches in Chinese vocal music

Background: There is still no clear experimental data on the relationship between the intelligibility of Chinese vocal lyrics and different pitch.Aims/Objective: This study aims at investigating the intelligibility of Chinese sung words at different pitch.Material and methods: A word list is created and sung by eight singers at five different pitches (C5, F4, bB4, bE5, and bA5). The intelligibility of the words is tested by listeners with and without music background.Results: The average intelligibility score in the music-listeners is 84.9% (SD = 9.5%). The score at five pitches (from low to high) is 93%, 91.7%, 89.7%, 83.1%, and 67.1%, respectively. The average score is 77.4% (SD = 10.7%) in the non-music listeners. The average score is 87%, 86%, 79.8%, 76.8%, and 57.5% at five pitches, respectively. The ratio of unidentified sung words is 19.3% (SD, 4.3%) in female singers and 11.9% (SD = 1.5%) in male singers.Conclusions: The intelligibility of Chinese sung words declines gradually with increase in pitch, and the extent of decreases gradually elevating. Generally, the identified ratio of words sung by male singers is higher than that of female singers. The listeners who had no musical background have a lower intelligibility score than those with experience.

Word Intelligibility in Multi-voice Singing: The Influence of Chorus Size

OBJECTIVE

This study investigated how the intelligibility of sung words is influenced by the number of singers in a choral music style.

METHODS

The study used repeated measures factorial. One hundred forty-nine participants listened to recordings of spoken and sung English words and attempted to identify the words. Each stimuli word was sung or spoken in sync by either one, four, eight, sixteen, or twenty-seven members of a high-quality Soprano Alto Tenor Bass (SATB) choir.

RESULTS

In general, single-voice word recognition was higher than multi-voice word recognition in the sung condition. However, the difference between four concurrent singers and the full choir was negligible; that is, reduced intelligibility with multiple singers shows little sensitivity to the number of singers. The principal effect of voice density on intelligibility is found to occur with coda consonants-a result consistent with the importance many choral conductors attribute to coordinating word offsets. In particular, the plosives /b/, /d/, /g/, and /p/ are easily confused. Coda liquids (/l/,/r/) were also found to be a source of confusion. Finally, an increasing density of voices appears to have a facilitating effect for the coda nasal /m/.

CONCLUSIONS

Groups of four or more choral singers do appear to be less intelligible than single singers, although the observed effect is modest. However, increasing the number of singers in a choral texture beyond four singers does not appear to further degrade intelligibility.