When you sing nothing at all

I have been in a choral group since I was 8 years old. My love for music developed ever since and the thirst to learn more became more evident in the years that followed. We were taught how to discriminate between notes, how to get the right pitch, how to follow beats and rhythms and how to blend in with the other voices. It was a tedious task at first but as you go along, the knowledge becomes implicit to the point where you can no longer verbally explain how you were able to do it. You just listen and you just know.


In relation to this, a study done by Krumhansi and Iverson (1992), researched on the perceptual interaction between pitch and timbre. Although they were much focused on that of the musical instruments', i find it useful to know that the vocal chords are considered to be a musical instrument as well and that we can apply the voice as the output of that instrument. 


The participants were all from Cornell University, each with a requirement of having studied at least one musical instrument for a minimum of 5 years ending not more than 3 years before participating in the study. The procedure was to simply categorize the presented tones in several ways. After hearing a tone from the speaker they will proceed to reading the categories on the screen (e.g. Category 1 = high trumpret, Category 2 = low piano, etc.) and they were instructed to press the number of the category from which they think will best fit the tone. 


The results showed that subjects could not attend to the pitch of a tone without being influenced by its timbre and could not attend to the pitch of a tone without being influenced by its pitch. The interaction effects were symmetrical. Now I understand why not all singers can have a duet or a solo because it depends on the vocal timbre as every instruments' vary. So the next time that Sir Raul asks us the choir to sing as one (as to maintain a single timbre per voice), I will not be annoyed because this affects the precision from which the other aspects of  the music are perceived. 


Krumhansl, C. L., & Iverson, P. (1992). Perceptual interactions between musical pitch and timbre. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 18(3), 739-751. doi:10.1037/0096-1523.18.3.739