As a classically trained singer, reading Gussenhoven and Kenstowicz made me curious about the phonetic differences between speaking and (classical) singing. Of course, the linguists' respective detailing of anatomical mechanisms in speech production and pronunciation interpretation apply to normal speech. However, from the abundance of "misheard lyrics" videos and articles (typically in regard to pop music, whose pronounced words tend to be phonetically similar to normal speech) on the Internet, it seems clear that while we can generally perfectly understand what people are saying in conversations, rather different rules apply to the realm of music. The "collective phonetic illusions" of sounds we perceive but do not actually hear (as Kenstowicz calls them) no longer seem to exist: either the illusion becomes reality through clear articulation of a word, or it is shattered, giving rise to confusion.
To the average choir director, "normal" phonetics (as described by Gussenhoven and Kenstowicz) are the bane of intelligibility. For example, let us consider the phrase "unique New York" (commonly used as a tongue twister/articulation warmup exercise before singing). When we speak the phrase in a conversational setting, the [k] sound in "unique" and "York" isn't voiced (something I didn't realize until trying it out just now). However, when warming up in choir practice, singers are expressly instructed to enunciate a hard [k]. Likewise, taking Kenstowicz's example of the different [t] sounds in "hit" (which has a glottalized [t]) and "hitter" (which has the flap [D]), a classical singer would pronounce the [t] the same way in both cases when performing – namely, with a plain [t]. In effect, classical singing appears to utilize a more literal pronunciation of consonants for the sake of clarity. I wonder – how much of the required changes in pronunciation from speaking to classical singing comes from a need to account for unique physiological mechanisms involved in creating music (perhaps something that Gussenhoven could explore), and how much of it comes from the lyric nature of song (which might make context a bit more difficult to grasp – something Kenstowicz might be interested in studying given his focus on interpretation)? Why does an overly articulated word sound strange in regular speech but perfectly natural and more easily understandable when singing?
Your comparisons between classical singing and pop songs are super interesting! I wonder why pop music in particular doesn't follow the same patterns of articulation as classical music. Maybe it is just a sacrifice for a certain aesthetic. I personally think it would clear up a lot of misheard lyrics if all artists clearly articulated their words, as classical singers tend to do.
ReplyDeleteYour very last question that you pose is also very thought-provoking. We tend to think people are being pretentious or formal if they overly articulate their words in day-to-day conversations. Perhaps singing requires more articulation because vowels constitute a larger percentage of phonation time compared to speaking, since singing forces you to draw out vowels for a longer time rather than terse talking.
I think singing is quite different from speaking in terms of producing sounds. Take singing Chinese songs for example. It is well-known that Chinese has four tones: the first tone is high and flat; the second tone is rising; the third tone is low; the fourth tone is falling. However, a famous Chinese musician and linguistics named Yuan Ren Chao discovered that Chinese singers cannot produce the fourth tone in their singing because the melody of music cancels out the fourth tone.
ReplyDeleteI also read an interesting article related to your topic. The writer finds that British singers lose their accent when they sing. He cites the study of linguist David Crystal from Northern Ireland to explain this phenomenon. According to David Crystal, a song's melody cancels out the intonations of speech, followed by the beat of the music canceling out the rhythm of speech. Once this takes place, singers are forced to stress syllables as they are accented in the music, which forces singers to elongate their vowels.
The following is the link of the article for your reference. http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/08/why-british-singers-lose-their-accent-when-singing/