In psychological and cross-cultural (e.g. ethnomusicological) research the analysis of song-singing had always been an intricate and serious obstacle. Singing is a transient and mostly unstable patterning of vocal sounds that is organised by applying more or less linguistic and musical rules. Traditionally, a sung performance has been analysed by mere listening and by using the western musical notation for representing its structure. Since this method neglects any in-between categories with respect to pitch and time, it proves to be culturally biased. However, acoustic measures as used in speech analysis have had limited application and were primarily used to quantify isolated parameters of sung performances.
For analysing and representing the organisation of pitch in relation to the syllables of the lyrics, and its temporal structure, we devised a computer-aided method in combination with a new symbolic representation. The computer program provides detailed acoustic measures on pitch and time. We reduce the redundancy of the detailed information by a notation system that shows pitch and time each on a continuous scale, including glissandi, breathing, joint singing, and instructional help. By combining acoustic with auditory analyses, this method allows to describe reliably sung performance's structures with respect to the organisation of pitches, together with syllables, and their timing. The resulting configuration of data includes qualitative aspects such as stable and unstable pitches. Such microanalytic descriptions are very useful for studying the nature of sung performances, their structures, and processes of change due to learning and development.
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