title: Pitch effects on vowel roughness and spectral noise for subjects in four musical voice classifications.
abstract: This study was designed to investigate the effects of vocal fo on vowel spectral noise level (SNL) and perceived vowel roughness for subjects in high- and low-pitch voice categories. The subjects were 40 adult singers (10 each sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses). Each produced the vowel /a/ in isolation at a comfortable speaking pitch, and at each of seven assigned pitches spaced at whole-tone intervals over a musical octave within his or her singing pitch range. The eight /a/ productions were repeated by each subject on a second test day. The SNL differences between repeated test samples (different days) were not statistically significant for any subject group. For the vowel samples produced at a comfortable pitch, a relatively large SNL was associated with samples phonated by the subjects of each sex who manifested the relatively low singing pitch range. Regarding the vowel samples produced at the assigned-pitch levels, it was found that both vowel SNL and perceived vowel roughness decreased as test-pitch level was raised over a range of one octave. The relationship between vocal pitch and either vowel roughness or SNL approached linearity for each of the four subject groups.
authors.affiliation: Department of Communication, University of South Dakota, Vermillion 57069.
authors.forename: R A
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Newman
authors.forename: F W
authors.initials: FW
authors.lastname: Emanuel
mesh_terms: D000162:Acoustics; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D016018:Least-Squares Analysis; D008297:Male; D009146:Music; D010700:Phonetics; D013018:Sound Spectrography