The evaluation of data gathered during the course of the study indicates that the development of consistent vocal timbre produced by the classical singing student may be enhanced through visual/kinesthetic response to melodic contour inversion mapping, as it balances the singer's perception of melodic intervals in standard musical notation.
Mothers interact with their babies in the Princeton Baby Lab, where researchers identified consistent shifts in vocal timbre between mothers speaking or reading to their children and speaking to other adults.
In research Piazza and other researchers published in October in Current Biology, a computer algorithm found that all mothers in the study made the same timbre shift, with results consistent across nine languages, including English, Mandarin, and Polish.
Nonetheless, because these difficulties generalized to a professional but unfamiliar opera singer as well as to a synthesized vocal timbre with little vibrato, this interpretation is still consistent with the proposal that human voices represent a special class of auditory stimuli.
When they looked at the data, the researchers found that this timbre shift between adult- and child-directed speech was "highly consistent" across languages from around the world: Cantonese, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Mandarin, Polish, Russian and Spanish.
This idea is consistent with the discrimination of percussive and sustained sounds among musical timbres.
In short, we found no evidence that participants attempted to modify their actual performance on our note-naming task to be consistent with their claims about difficulties identifying the pitch of certain timbres.
The same mother speaks to a researcher in the Princeton Baby Lab, illustrating the shifts in pitch, cadence and timbre between regular speech and "motherese". She and her colleagues found that the timbre shift was consistent across women who speak 10 languages, including English, and that the differences are strong enough to be reliably picked out by a machine learning algorithm.
The data support the assumption that there are consistent anatomical laryngeal differences between singers of different voice classifications, which are of relevance to pitch range and timbre of the voice.
Extremely nasal timbre thus stresses different overtones than mellow timbre.
