title: Formant frequencies in Estonian folk singing.
abstract: Formant frequencies in an old Estonian folk song performed by two female voices were estimated for two back vowels /a/ and /u/, and for two front vowels /e/ and /i/. Comparison of these estimates with formant frequencies in spoken Estonian vowels indicates a trend of the vowels to be clustered into two sets of front and back ones in the F1/F2 plane. Similar clustering has previously been shown to occur in opera and choir singing, especially with increasing fundamental frequency. The clustering in the present song, however, may also be due to a tendency for a mid vowel to be realized as a higher-beginning diphthong, which is characteristic of the North-Estonian coastal dialect area where the singers come from. No evidence of a "singer's formant" was found.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Perception Research (IPO), Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Ross
mesh_terms: D004957:Estonia; D006801:Humans; D008838:Microcomputers; D009146:Music; D010700:Phonetics; D010898:Pitch Perception; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D013018:Sound Spectrography / Q000295:instrumentation*; D013067:Speech Perception