| The singer's formant (Fs) is a prominent spectrum envelope peak near 3000 Hz that appears in voices sung by trained Western classical singers. It is a raising cluster of formant 3, 4, and 5 and is especially important since this energy allows singers voices to be heard over the loud orchestra in the big concert or opera (Fant, 1970, Sundberg, 1970).;Over the years, numerous researches have investigated the Fs by using many different methodologies. Taken together, an overview of the studies gives a good picture of the influences that affect the production of a Fs, that is, the Fs could not be explained merely by the influence of one factor. This study was to investigate the Fs by comparing two completely different training techniques: Trained Chinese opera singing techniques vs. Western classically trained singing techniques. Different methodologies were compared to examine whether they impacted the Fs. The effects of different factors on the Fs such as fundamental frequency, intensity and vowel quality were also investigated in this study.;Our findings showed that not only the Western classically trained singing; the traditional Chinese opera singing also exhibited the Fs. The perceptual judgments and qualitative analysis of the LTAS seemed to be reliable tools to investigate the presence or absence of the Fs. Other acoustic measures such as quantitative analyses - the energy differences between the high and low frequency regions of the LTAS, the L3-L1 of LTAS analysis, and the L3-L1 of short-term spectrum analysis might not be sufficient tools to determine the Fs. Factors such as singing technique, fundamental frequency, intensity, and vowel quality either interacted or trade-off to signal the Fs; they interacted differently to impact each individual singer. |
