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2019 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

How to Interprete Early Recordings? Artefacts and Resonances in Recording and Reproduction of Singing Voices

Authors : Malte Kob, Tobias A. Weege

Published in: Computational Phonogram Archiving

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Voice recordings in the beginning of the 20th century required a complex acoustic and mechanical set-up for transfer of the singing voice sound from singer via horns, ducts, soundbox and needle to a cylinder or disc. A similar construction was used to reproduce the voice. Both signal paths had significant impact on various properties of the voice signals—mostly the voice signal quality was reduced and distortions were produced. Another effect were changes in details of the voice spectrum due to the interaction of resonances in the voice signal and the transfer paths of recording and reproduction devices. We present analyses of the voice signal modifications and relate them to parts of the devices. This work is funded by the German Research Foundation.

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previous chapter 3D Imaging of Musical Instruments: Methods and Applications

For details on the measurement setups, please refer to [18].

When using more than one horn, a junction connecting the acoustic signals coming from the different horns would additionally be needed. This special cases will not be treated here.

Typical ranges were 30–50 mm and 0.17–0.25 mm, respectively [3, p. 269].

This decision, aiming for having a reasonably similar ending impedance in the recording chain, is based on the similarity of the functioning principal between reproducing and recording soundboxes. Nevertheless, the differences between them, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, would certainly influence the frequency response function in some extent, what should be investigated in further works, when guaranteed the access to an original exemplar.

A 10 cm tube was used as element linking the horn replica to the soundbox, since this is reported to have been a commonly used length for this element [3], as already mentioned in Sect. 3.2.

Optical digitizing methods, that were developed already in the 1980s [6, 7], and could considerably minimize this influence still have many limitations, which discussion is beyond the scope of this text.

The influence of the needle type on sound is perceptible and relevant, but introduces an enormous variance factor that was not part of this study, where only a medium tone steel needle was used.

This movement is emulated with a shaker. The input velocity is tracked by means of an accelerometer. For details on the measurement setups, please refer to [18]. There can also be found the results of comparative measurements on 4 models of soundboxes.

The term “combined” transfer path is intentionally used instead of “complete”, since there are aspects like the wax impedance and the influence of using different needles that were neglected in this work, as mentioned earlier in the text.

The impulse response is the time-domain equivalent of the FRF.

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Title: How to Interprete Early Recordings? Artefacts and Resonances in Recording and Reproduction of Singing Voices
Authors: Malte Kob
Tobias A. Weege
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Computational Phonogram Archiving
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-02694-3

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-02695-0

Copyright Year: 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02695-0_16

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