DOI: 10.36871/hon.202203014
Authors
A. V. Limitovskaya
Kaluga State University named after K. E. Tsiolkovsky, Kaluga, 248023, Russian Federation
Abstract
The article presents the results of the research on the influence of the timbre of the singing
voice on the listeners' perception and interpretation of musical content of a vocal work. The
author considers timbre as one of the main instruments to transmit semantic and aesthetic
information, fixed in detail in the musical text. The peculiarities of this process are revealed
by means of interdisciplinary methodology combining the approaches of psychoacoustics,
as well as the methods of performing and timbre analyses. The musical samples were the
soprano singers' interpretations of S. V. Rachmaninov's romance "It's Good Here", irreproachable
from the musical-aesthetic and vocal-technical points of view.
Our research revealed that the acoustic characteristics of soprano perfectly complies with
the sound images of the musical contents of the romance. Through different versions of the
performers' interpretation of this vocal work, it is demonstrated that the semantic accents are
mainly in accordance with the acoustic characteristics of a particular singer's voice. Among
these are the primary zone of the singer's voice and the concentration of high and low singing
formants, which determine the prevailing timbre colours. Besides, certain vocal techniques
not only enrich the natural timbre with new overtones, but also result in a number of subtle
metamorphoses in the listener's perception of the musical contents of the romance.
The view on the musical contents of a vocal composition through the prism of the timbre
component determines the novelty of the present article. The study of the special role of timbre
in transmitting aesthetic and semantic musical information forms a promising direction
course for further researches.
Keywords
interpretation, harmonic spectrum of voice, singing formants, primary zone, vocal techniques, covering, thinning
