Performing Lieder: Expert Perspectives and Comparison of Vibrato and Singer's Formant With Opera Singers

This article reports three studies about performance of lieder, and in particular in comparison with opera performance. In study 1, 21 participants with experience in music performance and teaching completed a survey concerning various characteristics of lieder performance. The results showed that there was consensus between the literature and the assessment of an expert panel-that a "natural" and "unoperatic" vibrato was favored, and that diction, text, and variation of tone are all important aspects of lieder performance. Two acoustic analyses were conducted to investigate genre-specific differences of the singer's formant and vibrato parameters. The first analysis (study 2) used 18 single quasi-unaccompanied notes from commercial recordings of two lieder, and, for comparison, 20 single unaccompanied notes from an opera. Vibrato rate was statistically identical between the two genres at ~6.4 Hz; however, lieder featured a longer delay in vibrato onset. Vibrato extent was smaller for lieder (~112 cents) compared with opera (~138 cents). The singer's formant, which is generally associated with opera, was at times observed in the lieder recordings; however, this was at an overall significantly weaker intensity than in the opera recordings. The results were replicated in study 3, where recordings using only singers who performed in both lied and opera were analyzed. This direct comparison used 45 lieder notes and 55 opera notes and also investigated three different methods of analyzing the singer's formant. A number of consistencies and inconsistencies were identified between acoustic parameters reported in studies 2 and 3, and the beliefs of singing teachers and scholars in the literature and study 1.

The effects of emotional expression on vibrato

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of emotional expression on several acoustic measures of vibrato, including its rate, extent, and steadiness. We hypothesized that singing a passage with emotional content would influence these variables.

STUDY DESIGN

This study used a within-subjects, repeated-measures design. Singer performance under different conditions was analyzed.

METHODS

Ten graduate student singers (eight women, two men) completed a series of tasks including sustained sung vowels at several pitch and loudness levels, an assigned song that was judged to have relatively neutral emotion, and a personal selection that included passages of intense emotion. Vowel tokens were extracted from the recordings and averaged for each task. Dependent measures included the mean fundamental frequency (F0), mean intensity, frequency modulation (FM) rate, FM extent, and measures of FM rate and extent variability.

RESULTS

The FM rate and extent were higher and the modulation variability was lower for the more emotional song than for the sustained vowels. Mean F0 and intensity were higher for the emotional song than for the neutral song.

CONCLUSIONS

Singing an emotional passage influences acoustic features of vibrato when compared with isolated, sustained vowels. The wider dynamic and pitch ranges for emotional passages only partly explain vibrato differences between emotional and neutral singing.