Digital libraries of music have the potential to capture popular imagination in ways that more scholarly libraries cannot. We are working towards a comprehensive digital library of musical material, including popular music. We have developed new ways of collecting musical material, accessing it through searching and browsing, and presenting the results to the user. We work with different representations of music: facsimile images of scores, the internal representation of a music editing program, page images typeset by a music editor, MIDI files, audio files representing sung user input, and textual metadata such as title, composer and arranger, and lyrics. This paper describes a comprehensive suite of tools that we have built for this project. These tools gather musical material, convert between many of these representations, allow searching based on combined musical and textual criteria, and help present the results of searching and browsing. Although we do not yet have a single fully-blown digital music library, we have built several exploratory prototype collections of music, some of them very large (100,000 tunes), and critical components of the system have been evaluated.
The intelligibility of the front vowels (/i/, /I/, /epsilon/, and /ae/) was investigated as sung in four different ways: (1) operatic, (2) in consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) context, (3) with a raised larynx, and (4) with both raised larynx and in CVC context. Al syllables were sung by a trained soprano at F4, A4, C sharp 5, F5, A5, and C sharp 6. Ten subjects listened and identified randomized sets of ten tokens of each vowel per condition (method of articulation) at each note. Results showed that, from C sharp 5 (nominal 554 Hz) to F5 (698 Hz), the intelligibility of operatic vowels (condition 1) fell from 56% to 16%. The mean intelligibility of the vowels at the three highest notes (F5, A5, C sharp 6) was 10% for condition 1, 64% for condition 2, 62% for condition 3, and 83% for condition 4. Results indicate that increased intelligibility across conditions is a function of increased energy in the higher harmonics and presence of consonantal transitions. The generally accepted notion that vowel sounds are largely unintelligible on higher notes pertains only to a restricted manner of production.
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