WinSingad: A real-time display for the singing studio

Abstract

This paper describes the nature and implementation of a specially-designed integrated real-time display that is undergoing evaluation as part of a recently funded innovative pilot project to investigate the relative usefulness of computer displays in the singing studio. Following previous work that suggests that simple displays of a small number of analysis parameters are generally likely to be the most effective, the system makes available a range of complementary analyses that are plotted against time. These relate to: fundamental frequency, spectrum, spectral ratio, and vocal tract area. These can be viewed singly, multiply or in combination using a panel based design within the PC Windows environment, known as WinSingad. The algorithms used are described and the displays themselves are illustrated with results gained from the pilot phase of the research to indicate their potential usefulness.

Human Hearing Modelling Real-Time Spectrography for Visual Feedback in Singing Training

“…Narrow-band spectrograms have been used in the context of providing real-time visual feedback in singing lessons as part of a recent York-and London-based project to assess the usefulness or otherwise of applying technology in the singing studio [20,21] . Spectrograms are also used extensively in the SingandSee software [16,17] and VoceVista [18,19] .…”

“…Real-time visual feedback has been previously used successfully with primary school children [15] and adult singers [11,[16][17][18][19][20][21] . Our experience suggests that technological applications are of greatest potential benefi t if they are easy to use by non-specialists and provide information that is readily understood, meaningful, valid and useful.…”

“…In the context of singing training, the spectrogram has found application as a real-time display for singing training, and there is evidence to suggest that spectrograms do provide useful information that can be used successfully in support of the work of the singing teacher [16,18,20] . However, spectrograms need to be interpreted with some care with reference not only to relating the details of the display to the appropriate acoustic variation, but also in terms of the analysis parameter settings employed [22] , otherwise there exists the potential for misinterpretation.…”

Evolution of adult male oral tract shapes for close and open vowels

“…Rossiter et al [16] implemented a real-time oral tract area display based on LPC analysis as part of their ALBERT system [17] for real-time visual feedback for training professional singers. More recently, this display has been incorporated into the WinSingad PC Windowsbased real-time singing training system [18,19]. The oral tract results derived using the LPC technique assume an all-pole vocal tract acoustic frequency response, which is not always true.…”

Fundamental frequency alignment vs. note-based melodic similarity for singing voice assessment

“…Some aspects such as intonation accuracy, vibrato or rhythm seem to be quite reliably judged by musicians, unlike more subjective aspects such as diction. Prior work has lead to various solutions for automatic singing rating [4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. In general, all these systems focus on intonation assessment with visually attractive real-time feedback.…”