Professor hears the sweet sound of success
By Ileiren Byles
Dr. Laurier Fagnon with visual images of sound.
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November 23, 2006 - Edmonton - Canada's first vocal acoustics laboratory will give University of Alberta researchers a chance to see what beautiful music looks like.
The laboratory at the U of A's Campus Saint-Jean is able to take the energy and vibration of sound and turn it into a visual graph that researchers can use to quantify tone, harmonics and the beauty of music, said lab director, Dr. Laurier Fagnon, professor of music responsible for the vocal/choral program at Campus Saint-Jean.
Fagnan's work with choirs is based on the bel canto method of vocal instruction. This traditional Italian teaching method had been used for centuries to improve the output of solo opera singers, but it had never been systematically employed to improve the sound of choirs.
"The human voice is the human voice, whether you're singing in a choir or you're singing in an opera," he said. "What I do is take what's good about those techniques - the very efficient vibration of the vocal cords, the very complete exploitation of the resonance system and great breath control - and I try to apply it to choral singing in a way that will make each singer feel like he or she has complete control of their voice and can give 100 per cent of their vocal potential to the beauty of the sound."
In working on his doctorate, however, Fagnan struggled with how to prove that this method was working. "I knew this worked, but I can't just say, 'Well, there you go, it worked. Listen to it. It's beautiful."
Fagnan went to the world's foremost acoustics research facility in Paris, the Institute for Research in Acoustical Music, to look for a solution. "There they helped me to develop some neat programs that can actually quantify differences scientifically and not just say, 'There it's more beautiful. It's more catchy here, it's more in-tune here,'" he said. "In choral singing, there are 50 voices coming at the microphone, singing four or six different notes at a time, and before it had been almost impossible to separate all of that into separate acoustic components. They helped to write some programs that could dissect that kind of acoustic information and comment on it in a scientific manner."
Thanks to a grant from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and funds from the University of Alberta, Campus Saint-Jean is opening a lab to allow researchers access to these tools. The lab's state-of-the-art equipment will be used to research the singing voice, the spoken voice, linguistics, and even aid teachers who lose their voices in the classroom, said Fagnan.
"It will certainly be a multi-tasking kind of lab," he said. "There will be a lot of equipment and software aimed at analyzing the human voice and analyzing its different components of vocal energy, all of its harmonic structure. When we sing a note, there's the note that we sing, but above that there's a whole series of harmonics which give the sound its character and its richness and its carrying power."
http://www.expressnews.ualberta.ca/article.cfm?id=8041
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ART IS NOT ABOUT QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS YOU DUMBFUCK
By Ileiren Byles
Dr. Laurier Fagnon with visual images of sound.
Print story | Email story
November 23, 2006 - Edmonton - Canada's first vocal acoustics laboratory will give University of Alberta researchers a chance to see what beautiful music looks like.
The laboratory at the U of A's Campus Saint-Jean is able to take the energy and vibration of sound and turn it into a visual graph that researchers can use to quantify tone, harmonics and the beauty of music, said lab director, Dr. Laurier Fagnon, professor of music responsible for the vocal/choral program at Campus Saint-Jean.
Fagnan's work with choirs is based on the bel canto method of vocal instruction. This traditional Italian teaching method had been used for centuries to improve the output of solo opera singers, but it had never been systematically employed to improve the sound of choirs.
"The human voice is the human voice, whether you're singing in a choir or you're singing in an opera," he said. "What I do is take what's good about those techniques - the very efficient vibration of the vocal cords, the very complete exploitation of the resonance system and great breath control - and I try to apply it to choral singing in a way that will make each singer feel like he or she has complete control of their voice and can give 100 per cent of their vocal potential to the beauty of the sound."
In working on his doctorate, however, Fagnan struggled with how to prove that this method was working. "I knew this worked, but I can't just say, 'Well, there you go, it worked. Listen to it. It's beautiful."
Fagnan went to the world's foremost acoustics research facility in Paris, the Institute for Research in Acoustical Music, to look for a solution. "There they helped me to develop some neat programs that can actually quantify differences scientifically and not just say, 'There it's more beautiful. It's more catchy here, it's more in-tune here,'" he said. "In choral singing, there are 50 voices coming at the microphone, singing four or six different notes at a time, and before it had been almost impossible to separate all of that into separate acoustic components. They helped to write some programs that could dissect that kind of acoustic information and comment on it in a scientific manner."
Thanks to a grant from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and funds from the University of Alberta, Campus Saint-Jean is opening a lab to allow researchers access to these tools. The lab's state-of-the-art equipment will be used to research the singing voice, the spoken voice, linguistics, and even aid teachers who lose their voices in the classroom, said Fagnan.
"It will certainly be a multi-tasking kind of lab," he said. "There will be a lot of equipment and software aimed at analyzing the human voice and analyzing its different components of vocal energy, all of its harmonic structure. When we sing a note, there's the note that we sing, but above that there's a whole series of harmonics which give the sound its character and its richness and its carrying power."
http://www.expressnews.ualberta.ca/article.cfm?id=8041
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ART IS NOT ABOUT QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS YOU DUMBFUCK
