{"id":811,"date":"2004-01-13T04:34:30","date_gmt":"2004-01-13T04:34:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=811"},"modified":"2011-05-01T18:33:27","modified_gmt":"2011-05-01T23:33:27","slug":"physics-opera-singers-really-are-hard-to-understand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=811","title":{"rendered":"physics: opera singers really are hard to understand"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Do you find opera perplexing? Grossly overweight  consumptives notwithstanding, many people have trouble figuring out what  the performers are actually singing, even when the opera is in their  native language, hence the ubiquity of electronic subtitling in opera  houses today. Australian physicists report in the Jan. 8 <em>Nature<\/em> that  they&#8217;ve figured out why opera singers are hard to understand, at least  for sopranos singing at the high end of their range. Singers wishing to  be heard in a large auditorium against a loud orchestral accompaniment  do so at the expense of vowel clarity, making their words  unintelligible. Researchers from The University of New South Wales  studied eight sopranos, measuring the resonance and pitch frequencies as  they sang ascending scales. To produce the loudest and highest notes,  singers adjust their vocal tracts, usually dropping their lower jaws and  opening their mouths wide, making them distort their pronunciation. The  distinction between words such as hard, heard, hoard and who&#8217;d, for  example, can be easily lost. It appears that hitting high C&#8217;s also means  losing your A, E, I, O, and U&#8217;s.<\/span><\/p>\n<h6><em>This news brief appeared in the Discoveries column of the <\/em>Boston Globe&#8217;s<em> Health\/Science section on 1\/13\/2004.<\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Do you find opera perplexing? Grossly overweight consumptives notwithstanding, many people have trouble figuring out what the performers are actually singing, even when the opera is in their native language, hence the ubiquity of electronic subtitling in opera houses today. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=811\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boston-globe-3","category-news-briefs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=811"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1091,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811\/revisions\/1091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}