In Tune with Pitch

This talk considers how the ear processes the pitch of sounds and then which aspects of a musical note can affect the perceived pitch. Whilst the most obvious (the fundamental frequency of the sound) has the greatest effect by far, there are other features of the sound that can affect the pitch including the timbre, loudness and vibrato. This talk will focus most of its examples around the singing voice and in part around choral tuning, the overall discussion is relevant to consideration of the pitch of any note played on any instrument.

David M. Howard is a renowned voice scientist from Royal Holloway, University of London, with a deep dedication to furthering understanding of singing and speaking voice production. As an electronic engineer, with a background in music technology, phonetics and experimental speech science, his innovative drive has resulted in a number of fascinating and pedagogical visualizations of vocal fold vibration patterns. His PhD involved creating an electronic fundamental frequency analysis system for single electrode cochlear implants, and among many other things, he has also created a playable ‘pipe’ organ out of 3D printed vocal tracts, acquired from magnetic resonance imaging that are placed on loudspeakers, to recreate human vowel sounds. In addition, he has been involved in a number of forensic audio cases for the UK judiciary and he has presented two BBC TV programs, one on human voice production and one on the castrato voice which involved creating an electronic castrato that sang ‘Ombra mai fu’ with a professional baroque orchestra.