University researchers, always mindful of the next tenure review, are studying children’s voices:Choir boys, and more recently choir girls, have been enchanting congregations for centuries with their distinctive voices.
Professor David Howard, from the University of York, thinks there is more to the choristers’ sound than meets the ear.
Working with music trainer Jenevora Williams, from Guildford, he has been trying to pin down exactly what it is in the singers’ voices that make them sound so special.
This report, as well as the research, lumped boys’ and girls’ voices together, even though there are many musicians who believe that they sound quite different and often have a strong preference for one over the other. Anyway, their results:
And he has found that when choir boys and girls sing, particularly soloists, whose voices can soar above the rest of the choir, certain frequencies peak again and again.
He says: “In our experiments it looks as if that particular ‘ring’ is happening above the normal speech area, in the region up around 8,000 Hz, where there is something appearing when you get this really shimmery sound.
This sounds suspiciously like the “singers’ formant” we learned about in vocal pedagogy class back in the Pleistocene, although that was more in the 2500Hz range. In the rat race of academia, though, I guess you need small victories. And now the frequencies are analyzed using “special software” rather than with an oscilloscope like in the olden days, so it’s all new and exciting.
There was something of a selection bias, too: they chose singers to study who had a “shimmery sound” or “sparkle factor”, which sounds like a layman’s way of describing an 8000-Hz overtone. Their description of that sound as “communicating with the soul” and “going from the brain of a singer to the brain of a listener” is so much cultural bias and personal preference dressed up as science. How depressing.
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