Acoustic effect of vocal warm-ups on singers' voices
Date
1999
Authors
Schellenberg, Murray
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Abstract
Singers, like athletes, use a warm-up to prepare their muscles for subsequent exertion. These warm-ups increase core and muscle temperatures causing more efficient muscular functioning. Vocal warm-ups have received relatively little attention from speech scientists. This preliminary study attempts to provide some basic information about the effect of vocal warm-ups on the acoustic output of singers.
Eight subjects (1 F, 7 M), all choral singers, were recorded performing a series of vocal tasks before and after completing their usual warm-up. The tasks involved were a repeated arpeggio, a sustained tone on a comfortable pitch, an ascending scale in their upper tessitura, a descending scale in their lower tessitura, and a sustained tone on three levels of loudness (very soft, moderately loud and very loud). The results were analysed for amplitude and bandwidth of the singer's formant, range of the fundamental frequency, amplitude of the voice source fundamental, closed quotient of the voice source fundamental and amplitude range. The significant findings were an increase in the prominence of the singer's formant, an increase in the fundamental frequency range, and an increase in the closed quotient of the vocal waveform. This means that, as a result of the vocal warm-up, the singers were more audible, they had a larger pitch range and they were using a more efficient mode of voice production.