Padrões de respiração em estilos de canto e de fala

Abstract

The singing and spoken vocal styles derive from aerodynamic, phonatory and articulatory mechanisms, involving the participation of the organs of the vocal tract that functions as a wind instrument, transforming the egressive airstream from the lungs into sonorities. Having as background the singing and spoken voice styles, the objective of this work is to analyze breathing patterns, acoustic parameters and impressionistic perceptions. The breathing patterns were analyzed by a plethysmography technique using the RespTrack device developed at the University of Stockholm for measuring the duration of the breathing cycle, the duration of the inhalation interval; the amplitude of inhalation interval. The acoustic analysis uses the ExpressionEvaluator script (Barbosa, 2009), that extracts twelve acoustic measures, comprising the fundamental frequency, intensity, and spectral tilt. The perceptual analysis was performed by a semantic differential test, including three descriptors (Voice Pleasantness, Quality of the Interpretation and Emotional Impact). The research corpus is the lyrics of the song “Melodia Sentimental” by Heitor Villa-Lobos, with a poem by Dora Alencar Vasconcellos, who was a Brazilian poetess and diplomat. The research subjects, aged to 25 to 58, were three male professional lyric singers (one baritone and two basses) and three female professional lyric singers (two soprano and one mezzo-soprano).The results of the three types of analyses were submitted to multidimensional statistical analysis to investigate the correspondences between the quantitative variables (respiratory, acoustic and perceptual measures) and qualitative variables (voice style). The singing voice style showed a more extensive inhalation range, longer inhalation intervals and breathing cycles than the spoken voice. Acoustically, in the singing voice style, the more influential factors were f0 variabiity, f0 median and f0 maximum value and in the spoken voice the long term average spectrum and the rate of f0 variation. The results of the perceptual test on vocal performance expressivity showed that in the singing voice style the descriptors “Quality of Interpretation” and “Voice Pleasantness” got the highest scores and in the spoken voice style the descriptors “Emotional Impact” and “Quality of Interpretation” were the ones that got the highest scores. The experimental analysis of the breathing patterns by the plethysmography technique demonstrated the relevance of the contribution of the abdominal breathing mechanism for singing. This result reinforces the importance of the abdominal breathing technique in singing training