A Longitudinal Ageing Analysis of Vocal Parameters of Singing Voice of Female Playback Singer

Abstract

Age-related changes to the vocal structure affect the singing ability of the singer. We present a longitudinal study of vocal ageing of a female professional playback singer having more than six decades of singing span (covering singer age from 19 to 80 years). The ageing analysis is performed on six vocal parameters like – fundamental frequency (F0), vibrato, formants and spectral features like spectral roll-off and centroid. Statistical variations in these vocal parameters over the entire singing span of the singer are discussed in the paper. Significant effects noted with the ageing voice were - decrease in F0, decreased vocal range, reduction in vibrato rate, increase in vibrato extent, decrease in F2 & F4 formants and rapid change in the spectral features. This investigation also studied the effect of ageing on singing voice quality through the measurement of singing power ratio (SPR). Increase in SPR measures was observed with ageing voice. The study of impact of vocal ageing with longitudinal data on singer identification (SID) is scare. The SID experimentation performed with 350 cappella songs covering entire singing span of the singer, showed a clear impact that change in acoustical parameters with ageing affected the performance of singer identification systems.