title: A virtual castrato?
abstract: In this investigation the voice source from trained boy singers was processed with a transfer function that contained the singer's formant cluster of a bass, a baritone, or a tenor. The modified voices were evaluated by a panel of highly specialized experts. The experts were asked 1) to assess how similar the examples sounded to the voice of the last castrato Alessandro Moreschi, and 2) to rate how similar they thought the examples were to their imagination of an 18th-century castrato voice. For both questions, the voices with tenor formants produced significantly higher ratings than the other voice types. However, the mean ratings for the second question were generally lower than those for the first.
authors.affiliation: Hochschule für Musik und Theater Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany. mecke@irrelevanz.de
authors.forename: Ann-Christine
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Mecke
authors.forename: Johan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Sundberg
authors.forename: Bernhard
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Richter
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007830:Larynx / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D009146:Music; D009919:Orchiectomy; D010898:Pitch Perception; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012984:Software; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D014833:Voice Quality / Q000502:physiology*