"Resonance in Singing" now available.
Read the first chapter of "Resonance in Singing" and see the other topics contained in this book. Order the book from Inside View Press, which includes a full version of VoceVista-Pro software for Windows, with support for live audio and electroglottograph input.
Pavarotti's Legacy -- NEW - Recent discussion at this website of Pavarotti's approach to the upper range has led to a short article distributed in Voice Prints, a periodic letter to the membership of NYSTA, the New York Singing Teachers' Association. The article is repeated here, together with links to the singing examples.
New smaller, more affortable EGG now available for purchase for use with VoceVista! See the EGGs for Singers website for more information.
We build products for analyzing vocal signals that can be used in a variety of ways. While our products can be used by voice pathologists or other fields, they were developed primarily to provide objective tools for singing teachers to help their students improve.
Our primary product is VoceVista ("visible voice") a unique hardware/software
package which incorporates the two electronic signals most revealing of the singing
voice (real-time spectrum analysis and electroglottograph) into an integrated, user-friendly package for a standard multimedia PC (133 MHz, 16 MB
memory, Windows 95 and above, desktop or laptop). Simple to operate, it is non-invasive and intended for use by those whose expertise concerns the singing
voice, rather than signal processing. VoceVista displays the signals in
combinations of three basic formats: spectrogram, power spectrum, and high
time-resolution waveforms.
Recently we have developed a significantly cheaper version of an electroglottograph (EGG) that is small, light and simple to set up. This device can be used in a number of fields, but when paired with VoceVista, it affords the teacher a powerful pedagogical tool that helps takes the mystery out of the teaching process. See the EGGs for Singers website for more information.
VoceVista is not simply devoted to selling its products: we are interested in the long-term development of vocal study through objective means and the growth of a community of singing teachers involved in this project. As such, an important function of this website is to provide a forum where people can share ideas and research to promote the growth of this important endeavor. Please visit out Community page for more information, and while you're at it, sign our guestbook so that you can begin the process of involving yourself in this growing field.
History
VoceVista is an outgrowth of a quest to get past the subjectivity that limits all descriptions of voice and to arrive at its factual, objective features. In the second half of the 20th century, spectrum analysis allowed us to peer into the patterns of frequency components that determine voice quality and the various vowels. By the mid-nineties affordable personal computers had developed to the point where they could display spectrum analysis in real time. At the Groningen Voice Research Lab Harm K. Schutte and Donald G. Miller, who were pursuing research on the singing voice in the wake of Janwillem van den Berg and William Vennard, decided to integrate the two most important non-invasive signals for the singing voice -- from a microphone and an electroglottograph -- in a computer program that would analyze and display them. At the national conference of National Association of Teachers of Singers (NATS) n St. Louis (USA), VoceVista made its public debut on the last day of 1996.
One year later Garyth Nair visited in Groningen, bringing knowledge of Richard Horne , an extraordinary programmer whose freeware spectrogram program "Gram" had attracted the attention of early users of spectrum analysis, among them Nair. Horne joined the enterprise, and he and Miller then began a cooperative, continuing upgrade of VoceVista as interest gradually grew among forward-looking singing teachers.
