Perceptual Differentiation of the Modal and Falsetto Registers
Raymond H. Colton · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1970
Experienced and naïve observers heard phonations produced at an identical frequency but in the modal and falsetto registers. These phonations, produced by singers and nonsingers, were arranged into an AX diad and the observers identified the voice qualities of the paired phonation as same or different. In another task, the observers placed an equal number of phonations into each of two undefined voice quality groups. No training in voice quality identification was given in both procedures. There was no difference between the performance of the two observer groups in either task. The observers were able to correctly discriminate between the phonations produced in the modal and falsetto registers 95% of the time. In the categorization procedure, the observers separated the modal and falsetto register phonations into the two voice-quality groups significantly above chance level. However, their general level of performance in this task was considerably below their performance in the discrimination task. The results of both procedures suggest that each register exhibits an identifiable voice quality and observers can utilize this quality characteristic of a phonation to place it into its proper voice-quality group.