THE EFFECT OF PITCH-RELATED CHANGES ON THE PERCEPTION OF SUNG VOWELS

Vowel discrimination and perception were studied for a soprano singing on a fundamental frequency between 262 and 1047 Hz. The vowels were identified by 28 listeners as 1 of 12 American English vowels. As expected, both the singer's apparent first formant and the difficulty in vowel recognition increased as the fundamental frequency increased. Although some formant frequency shift can be tolerated without changing vowel perception, the greater shifts that occurred here contributed to the difficulty in understanding in a roughly predictable way. PACS numbers: 43.75.Rs, 43.71.Es. © 1990, Acoustical Society of America. All rights reserved.