The influence of tonal movement and vowel quality on intelligibility in singing

Abstract

This paper investigates the perceptual consequences on vowel intelligibility caused by high-pitched tones. Previous research in speech perception, especially with sung speech, has shown that perceptual difficulties generally increase significantly with rising pitch. The stimuli for the perception experiments under consideration include three tensed German vowels /a, e, i/, produced by a soprano in three different pitches as well as rising contours and falling contours. The participants made use of a response box with three keys labeled /a/, /e/, /i/. On hearing an item, the correct key had to be pressed as fast as possible. The present paper shows that processing time, vowel quality and pitch contour are factors that have to be taken into account.