Manual Transcription and Instrumental Analysis of Singing through Praat

Abstract

In the field of ethnomusicology, the main tool-of-the-trade for music analysis has been musical transcription on the score, despite its acknowledged cultural bias and the limits of staff notation as a means of representing music conceived and performed outside of the Western music culture. In the digital era, a number of analytical tools have been designed which may serve to solve some of the problems related to the use of the score as a method for describing and visualizing music. These tools allow analyses to be performed, which were virtually impossible for most ethnomusicologists until a few decades ago. Praat, the well known software developed by Paul Boersma and David Weenink and designed for phonetic studies, may also be helpful for the annotation and analysis of the singing voice. This paper deals with some aspects of the use of this program for musicological aims, focussing on the relation between acoustic data and subjective musical interpretations and their relevance in analytic and perceptual investigations.