Volume 77, Issue 2

Background/Aims: Both music and language impose constraints on fundamental frequency (F0) in sung music. Composers are known to set words of tone languages to music in a way that reflects tone height but fails to include tone contour. This study tests whether choral singers add linguistic tone contour information to an unfamiliar song by examining whether Cantonese singers make use of microtonal variation. Methods: 12 native Cantonese-speaking non-professional choral singers learned and sang a novel song in Cantonese which included a minimal set of the Cantonese tones to probe whether everyday singers add in missing contour information. Results: Cantonese singers add in a rising F0 contour of less than a semitone when singing syllables with lexical rising tones. This microtonal variation is not observed when singing in a lower register. Conclusion: Cantonese singers use microtonal contours to reflect rising contours of Cantonese linguistic tones.

Background/Aims: In Chilean Spanish, syllable- and word-final /s/ are frequently weakened to an [h]-like segment or completely deleted. In word-final position, /s/ serves as the plural morpheme, so its deletion renders a site for potential neutralization with singular items. Chilean scholars have previously described differences in the vowel preceding weakened or deleted /s/ distinguishing it from non-/s/-final words, but this putative incomplete neutralization has not yet been acoustically verified, nor have its conditioning factors been explored. The primary purpose of this study was to assess via phonetic analysis of spontaneous speech whether neutralization of final vowels in singular words and plural words in Chilean Spanish is indeed incomplete, as hypothesized by scholars during the 20th century. Additionally, these vowels were also compared to the vowels of monomorphemic /s/-final words in order to ensure that the attested singular-versus-plural differences were not simply indicative of closed syllable laxing processes. Methods: Vowels were extracted from the spontaneous speech of 20 Chilean Spanish speakers and acoustically analyzed via VoiceSauce. Results: The results revealed that final /a/ vowels of plural words were found to be breathier than singular vowels but less breathy than the final vowels of monomorphemic words, and that plural /o/ was significantly fronted. They also demonstrated increased breathiness on /e/ vowels closed by /s/, regardless of morphological status. Conclusion: These results provide the first account of incomplete neutralization of plural vowel correlates in spontaneous speech in Chilean Spanish, and they offer evidence for closed syllable processes in this particular dialect, in alignment with an exemplar-theoretic approach.

Phonation types, or contrastive voice qualities, are minimally produced using complex movements of the vocal folds, but may additionally involve constriction in the supraglottal and pharyngeal cavities. These complex articulations in turn produce a multidimensional acoustic output that can be modeled in various ways. In this study, I investigate whether the psychoacoustic model of voice by Kreiman et al. (2014) succeeds at distinguishing six phonation types of !Xóõ. Linear discriminant analysis is performed using parameters from the model averaged over the entire vowel as well as for the first and final halves of the vowel. The results indicate very high classification accuracy for all phonation types. Measures averaged over the vowel’s entire duration are closely correlated with the discriminant functions, suggesting that they are sufficient for distinguishing even dynamic phonation types. Measures from all classes of parameters are correlated with the linear discriminant functions; in particular, the “strident” vowels, which are harsh in quality, are characterized by their noise, changes in spectral tilt, decrease in voicing amplitude and frequency, and raising of the first formant. Despite the large number of contrasts and the time-varying characteristics of many of the phonation types, the phonation contrasts in !Xóõ remain well differentiated acoustically.