This was a study of the relationship of situational anxiety to vocal solo performances of college freshmen voice students.

This thesis examines the historical significance of the vocal methods employed from the middle of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century in what became known as the bel canto era. It provides further exploration into the pedagogical procedures of the bel canto technique through a study of the premier instructors and singers from this period. The resurgence of interest in this tradition is addressed along with its impact on current vocal pedagogy. The vital role that vocal agility played as one of its most distinguishing traits is the primary factor under investigation. A discussion of the bel canto teaching styles in relation to their approach to agility is a major point of inquiry. By maintaining a link between present artists and pedagogues and the old Italian school, it helps the singer understand the historical implications of vocal agility as an integral part of healthy vocal development.

There is a need for a systematic collection of ideas concerning blend in choral sound. Many authorities discuss blend, but their concepts of the term are very divergent. These divergent concepts lead to emphasis of various factors which are important to the development or achievement of blend in choral sound. This emphasis in turn leads to various methods of achieving blend. Authorities ascribe several definitions to the term blend, as it relates to choral tone. These definitions should be studied collectively in order that a clearer concept of the term blend in choral sound may be developed. In studying blend in choral sound, several factors are generally deemed important. No study has been made which leads to a consensus concerning the relative importance of these factors. Scientific studies have been made of these factors, but the results have not been compiled and presented in one source. Authorities employ various methods in working with the factors which affect blend in choral sound. No study has been made which includes these methods. It is hoped that this study will contribute to the collecting and organizing of ideas regarding blend, including its various definitions and its important factors. It is also hoped that this study will contribute to the understanding of these factors as they relate to the achievement of blend in choral sound. It is intended that this study will present this information in such a manner as to be of assistance to the musician in the field of choral music.

The study introduces the Cornelius Reid Archive and provides biographical and functional context for Reid’s teaching method, which he referred to as functional voice training. Biography, summary of Reid’s ideas on environmental control and vocal registration, together with descriptions taken from Reid’s own writings of the function and purpose of various exercises transcribed from the Archive, constitute the primary chapters. Appendices include complete transcription of ca. 170 exercises and several illustrations of Dr. Douglas Stanley’s overt teaching methods.

This dissertation explores the relationship of the act of singing to being a human in the lyric poetry of the troubadours, traveling poet-musicians who frequented the courts of contemporary southern France in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. In my dissertation, I demonstrate that the troubadours surpass traditionally-held perceptions of their corpus as one entirely engaged with themes of courtly romance and society, and argue that their lyric poetry instead both displays the influence of philosophical conceptions of sound, and critiques notions of personhood and sexuality privileged by grammarians, philosophers, and theologians. I examine a poetic device within troubadour songs that I term ‘personified song’—an occurrence in the lyric tradition where a performer turns toward the song he/she is about to finish singing and directly addresses it. This act lends the song the human capabilities of speech, motion, and agency. It is through the lens of the ‘personified song’ that I analyze this understudied facet of troubadour song. Chapter One argues that the location of personification in the poetic text interacts with the song’s melodic structure to affect the type of personification the song undergoes, while exploring the ways in which singing facilitates the creation of a body for the song. Chapters Two and Three examine specific types of body formation located in the tornadas of the personified songs. In Chapter Two, I argue that the troubadours exploit pedagogies of singing and philosophical conceptions of sound to undercut the privileging of heterosexual relationships as the only, “natural” form of sexual relationship. In Chapter Three, I argue that troubadour lyric poetry engages with Latin grammatical treatises to undermine the primacy of a binary gender system, and open up space within the lyric for a third gender. I examine songs whose tornadas include both of the differently gendered (masculine and feminine) versions of the Old Occitan noun for “song,” exploring the complicated (and often contradictory) way in which multiple subject positions were expected to inhabit a single person, and suggesting a fluidity of gendered constructs that permeates the lyric corpus as a whole. In my final chapter, I argue that the troubadours continue to act as social critics even after their poetic tradition comes to an end, as the songs form different types of bodies through their contact with the parchment page of the manuscripts in which they are preserved. I analyze the songs’s lives as objects of literary transmission, exploring how the concept of the personified song changes when its audience no longer encounters it in performance. I argue that, although the personified songs do not make explicit reference to the parchment on which they come to be written, they are similarly embodied with parchment-skins that simultaneously serve as body and body-covering.

Enhancing the separated singing voices from harmonic (pitched) and percussive musical instruments in songs recorded with a single microphone is the scope of this thesis. Separating singing voice has applications in music information retrieval systems. Various methods have been used to separate singing voice from harmonic and percussive instruments. Most of them use two stages of separation, one for separating harmonic instruments, and the other for separating percussive instruments. One of these Algorithms uses non-negative matrix factorization in each stage to separate harmonic and percussive instruments. Traditionally, in each stage, components' bases or gains are clustered based on discontinuity measures. The first contribution of this thesis was the use of local discontinuity of significant parts of these bases and gains, followed by splitting (rather than classifying) each component's basis or gain. This significantly refined the separated voice and music sources. Median filtering has also been used in two stages to separate singing voice. Typically, horizontal and vertical filters are used in each stage. The second contribution of this thesis was to enhance the separation quality using a combination of six additional diagonal median filters to accommodate singing voice frequency modulations. In addition, filters parameters that are suitable for all songs regardless of their sampling frequencies are sought. The third contribution of this research was the novel use of Hough Transform to detect traces of pitched instruments in the magnitude spectrogram of the separated voice. These traces are then removed completely using median filtering after successfully calculating their frequency bands. The new Hough Transform based approach was applied to a number of separation algorithms as a post processing step and it significantly improved the quality of the separated voice and music in all of them.

Over the past several decades, cognitive and behavioral scientists have been researching the most effective practices for training muscles to produce specific movements consistently and accurately. That research has led to relatively wide acceptance of several best practices for the training of motor skills. One such practice is the reduction in the frequency with which augmented (external) feedback is provided by the instructor/trainer during skill-acquisition. This theory of low-frequency feedback has been examined by research in a wide variety of fields ranging from exercise and sport to voice therapy and rehabilitation. Prior to the study reported here, however, this theory had not been applied the acquisition of vocal skills associated with classical singing techniques. The current research consisted of an alternating treatment single-subject study, which was conducted on a college campus over the course of a 15-week semester. 8 college voice students (3 male and 5 female) ranging in age from 18 to 25 participated in voice lessons provided by the researcher and aimed at improving the overall quality of the voices of the participants. Over the course of the15 weeks, the instructor alternated between providing a high-frequency feedback (HFF) instruction condition and a low-frequency feedback (LFF) instruction condition. At the beginning of each session, a vocal sample was recorded to test the retention of the skills trained in the previous lesson. Those recordings were evaluated by a panel of five college voice instructors who provided a numerical score (out of a possible 100 pts.) for each sample on the basis of tone quality, breath management, and intonation. The results of this study indicated that three of the eight subjects retained more vocal skill ability during the HFF phases of the study, while the remaining five subjects retained less vocal skill ability during the HFF phases of the study. It was also seen that the three subjects who responded favorably to the HFF instruction condition were also those whose scores were higher throughout the duration of the study. These findings would appear to indicate that an HFF instruction condition may be more beneficial to more experienced or more skilled singers, while an LFF instruction condition may be more beneficial to more novice singers. In the final chapter of this report, several modifications to this study are suggested along with suggestions for future research regarding the application of other principles from motor-learning theory to the acquisition of new vocal skills.

A review of the literature on the inaccurate singer provided strong evidence that improvement in pitch matching skill was possible. Visual feedback was found to be an effective aid in earlier studies, but none of the previous studies provided both a comparison group which had identical practice without the visual cues and a control group which received no form of practice. Such a design was used in the present study.

<p>This is a case study about a singing student who was certain she could not learn to sing. The student had built up great mental obstacles around her singing ability, and the study brings up these obstacles and the processes involved while trying to overcome them.</p><p>The purpose of this study is to look into the train of thoughts around the teaching and the exercises used. The study also illuminates the processes the student and the teacher went through together, and discusses their meaning and consequence.</p><p>The study is based on notes made by the teacher during 30 lessons, spread out over a period of about two years, and reflections made by the teacher and the student afterwards.</p><p>The result shows some of the processes formed during the work, and that the student could manage more than she thought was possible by developing the right attitude and by gaining access to suitable tools.</p>

This is a case study about a singing student who was certain she could not learn to sing. The student had built up great mental obstacles around her singing ability, and the study brings up these obstacles and the processes involved while trying to overcome them. The purpose of this study is to look into the train of thoughts around the teaching and the exercises used. The study also illuminates the processes the student and the teacher went through together, and discusses their meaning and consequence. The study is based on notes made by the teacher during 30 lessons, spread out over a period of about two years, and reflections made by the teacher and the student afterwards. The result shows some of the processes formed during the work, and that the student could manage more than she thought was possible by developing the right attitude and by gaining access to suitable tools.