UNCORRECTED PROOF The perception of ‘forward’ and ‘backward placement’ of the singing voice Allan Vurma 1 and Jaan Ross 2 From the 1 Estonian Academy of Music, Ra ¨ vala 16, 10143 Tallinn, Estonia and 2 University of Tartu, U ¨ likooli 18, 50090 Tartu, Estonia Received 26 March 2002. Accepted 29 January 2003. Log Phon Vocol 2003; 28: 1  /10 Singing teachers sometimes characterize voice quality in terms of ‘forward’ and ‘backward placement’. In view of traditional knowledge about voice production, it is hard to explain any possible acoustic or articulatorydifferences between the voices so ‘placed’. We have synthesized a numberof three-tone melodic excerpts performed by the singing voice. Vowel quality, formant frequencies, and the level of the singer’s formant werevaried across the stimuli. Results of a listening test show that the stimuli which were perceived as ‘placed forward’, correlated not only with higher frequencies of the first and second formants, but also with the higher frequency and level of the singer’s formant. Key words: formant, placement, singing, synthesize, voice quality. Allan Vurma, Department of Musicology, Estonian Academy of Music, Ra ¨ vala 16, 10143 Tallinn, Estonia. Tel.:  /372 6675700. Fax:  /372 6675800. E-mail: vurma@ema.edu.ee INTRODUCTION In the training of professional singers, instructors often use vocabulary which, to a large extent, is not well understood by the general public. The nature of this vocabulary is metaphoric and aimed at reaching a specific vocal quality, which the instructor has set as the goal. The following list presents examples of this type of vocabulary: ‘to support the voice’, ‘to direct the voice into the mask’, ‘to make the voice fly’. The aforementioned expressions seem to point to images which a singer is expected to create for her or himself during singing. One may think that such images, as well as the process of their creation, trigger certain unconscious mechanisms which help the singer in reaching the goals of the vocal technique (14). It is possible that the use of metaphoric expressions may be justified because during vocalization the singer per- ceives the sound in two ways  / via not only the auditory system but also the vibratory sensations in the head, neck and chest (26). Those metaphoric images evidently have little in common with the scientific understanding of human physiology and acoustical phonetics, despite the fact that some singers believe there to be correlation between the two realms of thought. Some of the metaphoric expressions have been used for a hundred years or more in the training of singers. Their longevity leads one to think that the expressions are fully functional, even when there is not much overlap between them and the scientifically correct description of singing production. Metaphoric descriptions may be employed in singer training instead of scientific ones because of the complexity of the scientific concepts involved. Singers generally lack a strong background in mathematics and science  / rather, they tend to be trained in the humanities, and, thus, a significant effort would be required in order for them to understand the me- chanics of the vocal mechanism (8). Even current research professionals do not understand all aspects of voice production, and scientific understanding of one’s vocal apparatus does not necessarily help a performer sing better due to the lack of appropriate feedback. For example, Hemsley (13) writes: ‘‘It seems to me that for basically healthy singers, the anatomy that really matters is not the anatomy studied by the medical profession, but the anatomy of ‘how it feels’: the ‘as if’ anatomy’’. It is evident that metaphoric directions cannot be very precise. A metaphor is not useful if the singer lacks associations connected with it, or if the singer’s associations differ from those of the instructor. It is important to keep in mind that there are different accepted ways of vocal production in singing (bel æ ORIGINAL ARTICLE æ # 2003 Taylor & Francis. ISSN 1401-5439 Log Phon Vocol 28 DOI: 10.1080/ C:/3B2WIN/temp files/SLOG9928_S100.3d[x] Thursday, 13th March 2003 11:41:36