“Vocal Advantage: The Singer’s Formant” by Dina Else

VOCAL ADVANTAGE: THE SINGER’S FORMANT, by Dina Else (no. 24 in a series)

 

Now that we have a clearer grasp of resonance we should probably also tackle something known as “The Singer’s Formant”. 

 

Here is an excerpt from The National Center for Voice and Speech tutorial on Singer’s Formant:

One seemingly mysterious property of the singing voice is its ability to be heard even over a very loud orchestra.  At first glance, this is counter-intuitive, since the orchestra is perceived by us to be so much louder than a single singer.  The answer to this mystery lies in the way the sound energy of the operatic voice is distributed across various frequencies.  The well trained operatic voice produces quite a bit of energy around 3000 Hz.

 

In A Spectrum of Voices, Shirlee Emmons says it this way; “The position of the tongue, the degree of the jaw opening, the use of protruding lips or not—these are all tools for achieving 2750 which is ‘ring’ and for all practical purposes, ring is focus and resonance.  She goes on to say, “The best resonance—or focused tone—occurs when a frequency of the laryngeal tone matches a resonance formant of the vocal tract.  In bel canto singing, a well-resonated tone has four or five overtones focused into marrow bands of energy, with a strong overtone (called the singer’s formant) in the area of 2800-3200 Hz.

 

For those of you that are particularly techno-savy, there are apps you can buy that will allow you to visualize your voice.  I use The Voice Analyzer on my iPad, although I don’t feel particularly techno-savy, I enjoy having this tool to use in my studio.  YouTube provides a three-minute YouTube video demonstration of the app. [The image accompanying this column is a still from that applicattion.] In the perfect world, life would slow way down so I could delve into how to use this app even more effectively in the studio setting, but for now I have to settle for a basic understanding and enjoying the visual aid!