The Professional Singer's Voice Evaluation between Western Singing and Pansori Based on Vocal Fold Profiles and Acoustic Representation

Hong, Ki-Hwan; Kim, Hyun-Gi; Kim, Sun-Sook

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2006;11(3): 153-164.

Ki-Hwan Hong^` , Hyun-Gi Kim^` , and Sun-Sook Kim^`

홍기환(Ki-Hwan Hong)| 김현기(Hyun-Gi Kim)| 김선숙(Sun-Sook Kim)

ABSTRACT

The essential characteristics of a well trained singing voice and laryngeal mechanism has interested scientist since the early 19th century. The purpose of this study was to find the acoustic and physiological characteristics of the voice of Korean traditional song ‘Pansori’ singers determine. Sixteen Pansori singers and twenty-five western singers participated in this study. Speech samples were composed in glissando standard high pitch tone and standard low pitch tone for stroboscopic study of the simple vowels /a, i, u, e, o/. The vocal folds of Pansori singers were asymmetrical in comparison to the symmetrical vocal folds of western singers. Pansori singers’ music formant has higher peaks of intensity for low and high frequency. A Spectrographic characteristic of vibrato showed contrasts between Western singers and Pansori singers: dull and small for Pansori singers and clear and big for western singers. The vibrato rates between Western singers and Pansori singers were 5.5～6/sec and 4～5.5/sec, respectively. The vibrato rate of pitch range was 3.8Hz～11.0Hz for western singers compared to 7.2Hz～46.0Hz for Pansori singers. The vibrato rate of intensity range was 0.3dB～3.3dB for western singers and 0.2dB～11.0dB for Pansori singers.