The laryngograph in singing. II. The “ring” in the professional voice
Oren Brown, Noël Fraterrigo, Linda Gates, Charles R. Potter, William Reed, Evelyn Reynolds, Dale T. Teaney · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1980
For a given vowel, sung or intoned at constant pitch and subjective loudness, the trained male or female voice user has control over an additional timberal feature, namely the “ring” in the voice. The ring is manifest as an additional 10 or 20 dB in the voice sound power spectrum |Ac| in the band near 3 kHz. Production of the ring is associated with maintaining a lowered larynx and open pharyngeal spaces. [J. Sundberg, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 55, 838 (1975)]. We report here that an additional correlate of the ring is the relative extension of the closure phase of the laryngeal cycle [Fry, private communication, (1978)]. We have measured the power spectra of both the laryngeal acoustic source |Lx′| and the voiced sound; the larynx and the vocal tract are both significantly involved in the effect. The cross spectrum, |Vt| = |Lx′* Ac|/|Lx|2, yields the magnitude of the vocal tract transfer function directly. Two-channel precision is not required to reinforce the kinesthetic cues of the ring: The lx waveform shows an easily discernable increase in the relative duration of the closure phase for increased ring along with other waveform features associated with the target laryngeal behavior. Waveforms, spectra, and cross spectra will be shown for several voices.