Charles Mason, Birmingham-Southern College

My project is to develop a technology - based lab for courses in voice instruction utilizing SpeechStation2 software.

There are three aspects of vocal training that technology can aid in: tone quality, correct pronunciation, and correct pitch and rhythm production. Software written to aid music students in correct pitch and rhythm is in use at many schools, especially in ear-training courses. While, there is no software available that is dedicated solely to teaching voice students timbre and pronunciation, there have been a good number of software tools developed in speech therapy. In examining this software, I have found that many of the approaches taken in speech analysis could be useful in vocal performance training if used with vocal students. Until recently, the cost of utilizing speech therapy software has prevented its usefulness in music classroom situations. However, Sensametrix has developed an affordable vocal analysis software program (SpeechStation2) that is written for the PC platform. My goal is to configure the studio and the software front-end in such a way that any voice student can easily use it during their practice time. This will require a great deal of time testing and formatting the software.

The software does a formant analysis and a visual display of any sound that is entered into the computer. For voice students to be able to get the most out of the software, they must have an idea of what the visual representation of the desired tone or timbre should look like. Thus, adapting this technology to the voice classroom will require a great deal of codification and analysis, where I will work with four different voice teachers to realize the "ideal" for various voice types. Adapting the software for pronunciation analysis will require a similar approach to that of adapting it for timbre analysis. Once the software and the studio are formatted to a point where they are easy to use by any music student, I will need to run a multitude of tests to determine what the degree of visual detail is necessary to get the best results. If there is too much detail, students will not be able to use the lab easily. If there is too little detail, students will not be able to know if they are getting the results their teachers want. I will also have to do many tests to make sure that the software is getting the results each of the five voice teachers want and to see if different configurations need to be set up for different teachers.

The end result will be a situation where a voice student can sing into a microphone which is connected to the computer The computer will provide immediate visual feedback of the sound while the student adjusts his or her voice to try to make the visual representation match the one that the teacher has shown her to be the desired model.

This, in a sense, is what already occurs in a voice studio. A teacher continues to have the student adjust her tone until the desired result is realized. The difference between typical voice instruction and voice instruction utilizing technology is that with technology, the student can practice realizing the correct tone without having to rely on the presence of the teacher. It is my hope that this will encourage the students to practice better (and not waste time practicing mistakes), and will allow more of the lesson time with the professor to be used for instruction in expressive and diction aspects of performance.