The Science of Singing
Course overview
Everybody sings. We sing during religious ceremonies, in the shower, to our children, at concerts, to learn and memorize, and to express our feelings. Every culture on the planet has its own tradition of song. But despite how common singing is, many people don’t know how it works, or how it relates to speaking. This course is about how the human voice creates song and the wide variety of singing styles the voice can produce.
This course draws inspiration from a wide range of disciplines. You will get a strong foundation in the physical properties of sound and how they are used across cultures, the mechanics of the vocal tract and how motion creates sound, and the relationship between singing and the mind. You will find ways to improve your own singing through technological analysis, such as the cutting-edge real-time MRI video technology pioneered by engineers and linguists at USC. This class is especially useful for students in Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Fine Arts, Physics, Engineering, and Music, or for anyone interested in how singing works.
Learning objectives
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
- Discuss aspects of singing related to cognitive science
- Identify similarities and differences between singing and speech
- Explain theories that address the differences between singing and speech
- Explain facets of singing performance based on how the body produces sound
- Collect and analyze measurements that describe singing and speech, such as frequency and amplitude
- Compare different singing strategies (e.g. types of vocal fold activity, resonance choices) from a selection of contemporary world music
Recommended preparation
There are no prerequisites for this course. Experience with phonetics, phonology, or other linguistics courses may be helpful.
Technology notes
Lecture slides, handouts, and other in-class materials will be posted on the course website. Some topics in this class will involve signal processing and analysis on a computer; you may occasionally be asked to bring a laptop to class for in-class work. You will need to download Praat, a speech analysis program used by many linguists.
Requirements
| Category | % of grade |
|---|---|
| In-class work | 15% |
| Homework | 30% |
| Quizzes | 15% |
| Comparison paper | 10% |
| Final project | 30% |
In-class work
Some in-class work will be collected and graded. You may also be graded on in-class discussions and group activities.
After each unit, there will be a day of Exploration to help you become more familiar with a particular singing style (see below). Exploration days will be largely driven by questions that you prepare in advance; you will be graded on the questions you prepare.
The degree to which you participate will have a direct impact on your grade. For your own benefit, I recommend keeping your phones out of sight and out of mind.
Homework
There will be five homework assignments distributed throughout the semester, each worth 9% of the final grade.
Weekly readings will be posted on Blackboard. You are expected to do the readings in advance to facilitate discussion during class time.
Midterm comparison paper
By the end of the first half of the semester, you will be familiar with a few different styles of singing. This paper is your opportunity to compare two different singing styles, and to discuss how those styles relate to some of the broader issues in our class. The comparison paper will be due before Spring Break.
Final project
The final project is a cumulative research project in which you perform a case study of a singer. This will involve finding a singer to study, preparing questions to elicit potentially informative utterances, collecting data from an audio recording, analyzing the data you collect, and relating your analysis to the larger questions that we discuss in class.
To make the final project more manageable, you will build it up from a prospectus into a rough draft that will be edited by a peer. You will then use your rough draft to present your project to the class, at which time you will receive additional feedback that you will incorporate into the final paper.
Prospectus
You will submit an overview (“prospectus”) of your final project. The point of the prospectus is to show that you know what style of singing you plan to analyze, that you understand what kinds of questions you will ask, and that you know what kind of results you expect your case study to produce.
Rough draft
The purpose of the rough draft is twofold: to encourage you to make steady progress on your project throughout the second half of the semester, and to give you an opportunity to have your work looked over in advance.
The rough draft will minimally be an expanded version of your prospectus. You will not be expected to have analyzed all of your data by this time, but ideally you will have at least begun the data collection process, and have some idea of how you intend to explore that data in your final paper. That said, the more complete your rough draft is, the more useful the feedback on your draft will be.
Peer feedback
Writing clearly and efficiently is difficult, especially without guidance. To help you help yourself, you will provide feedback on another student’s rough draft. Your paper should benefit both from the feedback you receive on your own draft, and from your experience as an editor.
Presentation
You will give a presentation of your final project to the class during the last week of school. For this presentation, you should have made good progress toward completing your project, though you do not need to have finished. You are expected to integrate feedback from the presentation into your final paper.
Paper
Final papers are due on May 10, 2017 at 4pm. Your paper should be as long as it needs to be to express your work clearly, thoughtfully, and completely (around 10-15 pages, double-spaced).
Schedule
The schedule may change depending on how fast we go through everything, or if class interests diverge from the initial plan.
| Date | Topic |
|---|---|
| Week 1 | Introduction: This class, science and art, anthropophonics |
| Week 2 | Breathing: Anatomy, physics, the role of breathing in talking and singing |
| Week 3 | Vibration; Exploration: Opera |
| Week 4 | Waveforms; Vocal fold anatomy |
| Week 5 | Physics of phonation; Spectra |
| Week 6 | Exploration:Throat singing; Spectra part 2 |
| Week 7 | Larynx anatomy; Exploration: Metal |
| Week 8 | Articulation: Anatomy, vowels |
| Week 9 | Articulation: Consonants; Exploration: Beatboxing |
| Week 10 | Resonance: Phase, natural frequency, and reflection |
| Week 11 | Standing waves; The science of instruments: strings |
| Week 12 | The Science of Instruments: Winds, brass, and the vocal instrument |
| Week 13 | Resonance: Formants, register |
| Week 14 | Resonance: Passaggio; Wrapping up |
| Week 15 | Paper presentations |
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