Lloyd wrote:
>If one is singing a fundamental whose partials
> do not match the required formants for a given vowel, that vowel is
> not a good choice for that particular pitch and must be modified in
> some way. The most accurate manner of altering a vowel is to simply
> change it to a neighboring vowel which has formants that will match
> the partials of the sung pitch. <
Ok, but here we have a problem for opera sung in English. It's something
that you, English speakers, don't seem to notice, since you have many more
vowel sounds than we, Romance language speakers, do.
To us, there are basically 7 vowels: A, open and closed E, I, open and
closed O and U. We interprete anything that is 'in between' as being one or
another of those vowels. And when I say 'interprete' I don't mean: "OK,
that's different from what we would normally say. Mmmm... now I see, it's a
modified I!"
I mean that, when the vowel sound gets into our ears and make those tiny
muscles vibrate, the electric impulses are involuntarily interpreted by the
brain as belonging to one of those 7 vowel categories. Each of them has a
lower and a higher threshold within which those many English vowels will
fit. In other words, you may say 'fIt' or 'fEEt' and we'll 'hear' feet ( the
only 'I' we have ); 'bAd' or 'bEd', and we'll hear an open E only in both
cases; 'pUt' or 'fOOl' and we'll hear a U only; and all those Ah vowels are
only a single Ah for us.
The whole vowel modification system used in Italian opera was created
because it's not a problem to ITALIAN ears. But for English native speakers
it DOES make a big difference! If we hear 'lIve' or 'lEAve', it's all the
same, but not for you! Let's say someone is singing " I don't want to stay,
I want to leave" with the vowel in 'leave' modified, that will sound as
'live', which is not exactly what was meant!
Just for you to have an idea, no teacher I've ever had has mentioned such a
thing as vowel modification, although all of them have told me to do that.
Instead of saying "do an 'i' as in live, not as in leave", they said "do
that 'i' with the mouth open wider". It never came to my mind- and I can
guarantee nor to theirs- that we'd be feeling like singing a diferent vowel.
It's nothing but a single 'I'... to us!
bye,
Caio Rossi
Sao Paulo, Brazil
|
|  |
