How voice production of singers is influenced by room acoustics

Performers, whether instrumentalists or singers, tend to develop rather individual adaptation patterns across room acoustical conditions. While instrumentalists mostly adapt in terms of tempo, singers tend to emphasize variations of loudness and timbral colour in conjunction with related room-acoustical parameters, namely Stage Support and Bass Ratio. Adaptation to room acoustics has also been investigated on talkers in terms of vocal effort, explicitly mentioned by participants and correlated to voice intensity. Vocal effort while talking was found to be larger in rooms that lack early reflections. Such adaptation should be reflected on glottal-source parameters. Electroglottographic measurements enable to non-invasively assess several features of glottal behaviour, such as contact quotient (duration of glottal contact over a cycle) or its counterpart, open quotient. In speech, contact quotient was found to be correlated to vocal effort. In singing, it was found to be strongly related to vocal intensity in laryngeal mechanism M1, and to fundamental frequency in mechanism M2. The present study aims at investigating the singing adaptation process in rooms with various acoustics, by assessing voice production by means of acoustical and electroglottographical in-situ measurements.