1Planning and Execution in Soprano Singing and Speaking Behavior: an Acoustic/Articulatory Study Using Real-Time MRI

This paper examines three different behavioral modalities of production in the human vocal tract: read speech, spontaneous speech and singing. We observe and quantify differences in planning and execution of these three behaviors. We use audio-synchronized real-time magnetic resonance imaging technology [1] to record speech and song data from 4 formally trained, professional sopranos. To ana-lyze the data, we propose fully automatic measures of average articulator speed, posture and acoustic spectra to analyze the data. Finally, we provide evidence that these different behavioral modalities involve speech planning mechanisms in different ways