Hall, D.J. (2006) How do they do it? The difference between
singing and speaking in female altos. Penn Working Papers in
Linguistics, 12 (1). pp. 123-135. ISSN 1524-9549. This paper
reports the first set of results of an investigation into the
phonetic correlates of female altos’ singing (compared to the
extensive research which has been done on males’ singing). Based
on the author’s previous research (Hall 2003), predictions for
this experiment were that when producing a ‘singing’ sound: -
singers would increase the amplitude of H2 to a level above the
amplitude of H1 - at least the most experienced of the singers
would produce a ‘singer’s formant’ - some formant tuning of F1
and possibly F2 would be observed: that is, singers would change
the locations of F1 and F2 in order to amplify their sound. The
degree to which they needed to do this would depend on f0
frequency. (Two notes on terminology in this paper: 1) H1 here
means ‘f0, the leftmost peak in the spectrum’; H2 refers to the
peak above f0 in frequen