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Updated: Jul 25, 2026

Hemi-laryngeal Setup for Studying Vocal Fold Vibration in Three Dimensions
Published on: November 25, 2017
[Characteristic of the vocal vowels with different pitch frequency]
1St. Petersburg State University, 199034, 7/9 University Emb., St. Petersburg, Russia.
Abstract:
It is well known that for adult speakers positions of the formants are different for various vowels and they can often be predicted for each phoneme, so first two formant frequencies provide the classic acoustic description of adults vowels' quality. But spectral characteristics of the vowels produced by human voice vary over wide range. In particular this is the case of vocalizations with high fundamental frequencies such as infants' vowel-like sounds and sung vowels. So while the specific structure of a vowel determine its acoustic quality in adults' speaking it does not apply to singing. To test the question of fundamental frequencies dependence of vowels' spectral characteristics, the investigation of vowels [a], [u], [i] sung by two professional singers--tenor and countertenor, was performed. It was shown that with increasing F0 vowel-specific F1/F2 feature tends to disappear. At the same time vowel-specific amplitude relationship between two first spectral maxima tends to occur. So in consistence with our previous data on infants we suggest that the vowel' phonetic identity in high fundamental frequencies might be achieved by information of spectral maxima frequencies (including the first maximum, e. g. fundamental frequency in infants and singers) and their amplitude relations.
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