Preliminary study on lyrics intelligibility at different pitches in Chinese vocal music

Background: There is still no clear experimental data on the relationship between the intelligibility of Chinese vocal lyrics and different pitch.Aims/Objective: This study aims at investigating the intelligibility of Chinese sung words at different pitch.Material and methods: A word list is created and sung by eight singers at five different pitches (C5, F4, bB4, bE5, and bA5). The intelligibility of the words is tested by listeners with and without music background.Results: The average intelligibility score in the music-listeners is 84.9% (SD = 9.5%). The score at five pitches (from low to high) is 93%, 91.7%, 89.7%, 83.1%, and 67.1%, respectively. The average score is 77.4% (SD = 10.7%) in the non-music listeners. The average score is 87%, 86%, 79.8%, 76.8%, and 57.5% at five pitches, respectively. The ratio of unidentified sung words is 19.3% (SD, 4.3%) in female singers and 11.9% (SD = 1.5%) in male singers.Conclusions: The intelligibility of Chinese sung words declines gradually with increase in pitch, and the extent of decreases gradually elevating. Generally, the identified ratio of words sung by male singers is higher than that of female singers. The listeners who had no musical background have a lower intelligibility score than those with experience.