THE AGING VOICE IN CHORAL AND SOLO SETTINGSmillion cycles of vocal fold vibration. VIDEO CLIPS....
Transcript of THE AGING VOICE IN CHORAL AND SOLO SETTINGSmillion cycles of vocal fold vibration. VIDEO CLIPS....
THE AGING VOICE IN CHORAL AND SOLO
SETTINGS
Ingo R. TitzeDirector, National Center for Voice and Speech,
University of Utah
Distinguished ProfessorCommunication Sciences and Disorders and the School of
MusicUniversity of Iowa
OUTLINE• Anatomical changes• Voice classification and tessitura• Registers and singing mezza voce• Warm-up and voice conservation• What’s an ideal choir size?
Aging Effects
Males and females:
• Are not an octave apart in their fundamental frequencies (125:190 Hz ratio in speech)
• Are not equally distributed across their voice classifications
What is a register?
• A plateau of vocal timbre (voice quality) as pitch, loudness, or vowel is changed
What is a register shift (break)?
• A sudden (quantal) change in timbre as pitch, loudness, or vowel is changed gradually
What labels are sufficient to describe register phenomena?
• Fry (pulse timbre)• Male Modal (rich timbre)• Female Modal (mixed timbre)• Falsetto (poor timbre)• Whistle (near pure tone)
• In addition: A percent mix between male modal and falsetto
Warm-up:• Is primarily an individual activity, prior to
choir rehearsal
• Is highly dependent on your fatigue and recovery cycle and is most effective in short intervals
• Platoon warm-up is only moderately useful
In a teacher’s day, there are:
• About 1600 occurrences of voicing per hour at work
• More than 10,000 occurrences of voicing per day, about the same as the repetitive finger movements in a busy stenographers day of typing
In a teacher’s day:
• The accumulated phonation time is about 2-3 hours
• The greatest accumulation of voicing comes from 0.3-1.0 s durations of voicing (vowels and voiced consonants)
• At 150 Hz average F0, this amounts to 1.3 million cycles of vocal fold vibration
The Basic Concepts in SOVT Exercises
• Stretch the vocal folds• Un-press the vocal folds• Use the vocal tract to help the
vocal folds vibrate