musical phonemes

JaneHudson

I am doing a project in song without language (lilting, scatting, etc) and I am trying to analyse which phonemes are easy to sing and which are not. Does anyone know where I can find resources on this kind of thing? I am hoping there would be pronunciation guides for opera singers and that kind of thing but I imagine there must also have been linguistic studies done on sounds that people find easily pronouncable/singable.

simu

JaneHudson wrote:

I am doing a project in song without language (lilting, scatting, etc) and I am trying to analyse which phonemes are easy to sing and which are not. Does anyone know where I can find resources on this kind of thing? I am hoping there would be pronunciation guides for opera singers and that kind of thing but I imagine there must also have been linguistic studies done on sounds that people find easily pronouncable/singable.

Would it not depend on what languages they speak?

JaneHudson

I was thinking that might also be a good angle to investigate. I think stuff like "tra la la" or "la la la" would be common to several languages though. (I found a bit of it in French opera at any rate.) Then once you are listening to Irish trad lilting you get sounds like "skithery-idle-dootle-dum" coming in there that I think would present problems to people who do not speak English.

tbh

JaneHudson wrote:

I was thinking that might also be a good angle to investigate. I think stuff like "tra la la" or "la la la" would be common to several languages though. (I found a bit of it in French opera at any rate.) Then once you are listening to Irish trad lilting you get sounds like "skithery-idle-dootle-dum" coming in there that I think would present problems to people who do not speak English.

probably the early Irish trad singers didn't speak English tho. Interesting project anyway.

Piste

I find it much easier to sing in Italian than English because Italian words nearly all end in vowels and it's so much less gutteral so the sound comes out nicer.