SUMMARY
Objective
Using voice to speak or to sing is made possible by remarkably complex sensorimotor
processes. Like any other sensorimotor system, the speech motor controller guides
its actions with maximum performance at minimum cost, using available sources of information,
among which, auditory feedback plays a major role. Manipulation of this feedback forces
the speech monitoring system to refine its expectations for further actions. The present
study hypothesizes that the duration of this refinement and the weight applied on
different feedbacks loops would depend on the intended sounds to be produced, namely
reading aloud versus singing.
Material and Methods
We asked participants to sing “Happy Birthday” and read a paragraph of Harry Potter
before and after experiencing pitch-shifted feedback. A detailed fundamental frequency
(F0) analysis was conducted for each note in the song and each segment in the paragraph
(at the level of a sentence, a word, or a vowel) to determine whether some aspects
of F0 production changed in response to the pitch perturbations experienced during
the adaptation paradigm.
Results
Our results showed that changes in the degree of F0-drift across the song or the paragraph
was the metric that was the most consistent with a carry-over effect of adaptation,
and in this regard, reading new material was more influenced by recent remapping than
singing.
Conclusion
The motor commands used by (normally-hearing) speakers are malleable via altered-feedback
paradigms, perhaps more so when reading aloud than when singing. But these effects
are not revealed through simple indicators such as an overall change in mean F0 or
F0 range, but rather through subtle metrics, such as a drift of the voice pitch across
the recordings.
KEY WORDS
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: March 18, 2021
Accepted:
February 11,
2021
Identification
Copyright
Crown Copyright © 2021 Published by Elsevier Inc. on behalf of The Voice Foundation. All rights reserved.
