Strategies and Suggestions for Singing in Foreign Languages Based on Phonetic Musical Notation

There are different approaches to a good pronunciation when singing in foreign languages. One promising example is the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Transcribing lyrics with this alphabet has a tradition of several decades, but it can be very time-consuming when done manually, especially if you want to store IPA information directly within a score. We investigated, for what musicians the use of IPA is useful and what they normally do when singing in foreign languages. In a questionnaire with more than 450 participants from 19 different countries we asked singers and conductors about their strategies when singing in a foreign language and whether they thought it was useful to have IPA inside a score. We identified a variety of strategies which are used for singing in foreign languages like listening to recordings or to experts of the target language. Additionally, 60-70 % of all participants and 90 % of opera singers think that a phonetic alphabet could be helpful in a score. Test subjects were also asked to name the languages they wanted as transcriptions in the notes, where Russian was second to none. As a consequence of these results, we are working on an automated approach for writing IPA information directly in MusicXML data, thus combining IPA transcription with the original score