Exploring a systemic functional semiotics approach to understanding emotional expression in singing performance: Implications for music education

Engagement with songs through performance and analysis is a key component of music curricula worldwide. Music learning has a significant impact on a number of student competencies, including enhancing students’ communicative abilities as they learn to manipulate, express, and share sound in both voice qualities and lyrics. However, common analyses of singing performance rarely focus exclusively on voice quality, and there is no systematic framework which considers how emotional meaning in lyrics interacts with emotional meaning in voice quality. Drawing on systemic functional semiotics, this article proposes a unified theoretical framework for examining how emotional meaning is co-constructed in the voice and lyrics in singing performance. This framework provides a novel approach for discussing and teaching song analysis and performance. The framework will be illustrated through the analysis of the interaction between voice quality and lyrics in the song “Someone Like You” performed by Adele.

Rethinking singing on screen: the case for contemporary American ‘screensong’ across the film musical, music television and the music video

The last 20 years have seen extensive scholarship on changing audiovisual aesthetics and the blurring boundaries between all screen media. This article draws on this scholarship and engages with critical debates around the musical genre to examine contemporary song-based screen media. While song and singing have a long history across film, television and video, the digital convergence era has engendered new types of song performance and song-based screen formats. To understand the complex connections and exchanges between different forms of singing on screen, this article develops a new evaluative and conceptual framework. I propose the term screensong to refer to audiovisual representations of singing performance across screen-based media. This article understands screensong as both a broad category of song-based screen texts, genres and formats and as a particular type of song-driven, highly commodified, audiovisual and narrative unit – the screensong – prevalent in contemporary American popular screen media.

An Empirical Comparative Study on the Two Methods of Eliciting Singers’ Emotions in Singing: Self-Imagination and VR Training

Emotional singing can affect vocal performance and the audience’s engagement. Chinese universities use traditional training techniques for teaching theoretical and applied knowledge. Self-imagination is the predominant training method for emotional singing. Recently, virtual reality (VR) technologies have been applied in several fields for training purposes. In this empirical comparative study, a VR training task was implemented to elicit emotions from singers and further assist them with improving their emotional singing performance. The VR training method was compared against the traditional self-imagination method. By conducting a two-stage experiment, the two methods were compared in terms of emotions’ elicitation and emotional singing performance. In the first stage, electroencephalographic (EEG) data were collected from the subjects. In the second stage, self-rating reports and third-party teachers’ evaluations were collected. The EEG data were analyzed by adopting the max-relevance and min-redundancy algorithm for feature selection and the support vector machine (SVM) for emotion recognition. Based on the results of EEG emotion classification and subjective scale, VR can better elicit the positive, neutral, and negative emotional states from the singers than not using this technology (i.e., self-imagination). Furthermore, due to the improvement of emotional activation, VR brings the improvement of singing performance. The VR hence appears to be an effective approach that may improve and complement the available vocal music teaching methods.

The appropriation of the necessary technique in singing performance

This article wants to highlight the fact that for an opera/operetta performer, just talent and voice are not enough, he must have a multilateral, detailed and disciplined training. Of course, the nature of the voice is the starting point of any path in subsequent evolution. To reach a high level of interpretation you have to go through certain stages of approaching an opera/operetta role. You can't start the road without knowing your vocal apparatus, its components and how to use it, for later to be able to get to the interpretation, style and personal note. A perfect opera/operetta performer will be the one who, in addition to his voice, is able to understand the subtleties of music and implicitly of the libretto, and will also have a very fair and organized technical and informational training, "The sincerity of the expressiveness of a voice that does not take into account the real personal potentials, she will be doubtful” (Cîmpeanu 1975, 28).

Instrument Of Singing Performance Assesment With The Android Based Inventor App

Singing performance assessment still subjectively graded by jury, teacher, or committee. To understand assessment aspects in singing, the information was obtained from two experts one from junior high school 24 Semarang and the other a musician, Purwacaka, who has Musical School Purwacaka in Indonesia. This research aimed to produce singing performance assessment application with App Inventor 2 (AI2) that managed by Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT). AI2 is a cloud-based saving that could be accessed from internet browser. ADDIE development model with 5 steps, which are: Analysis, Design, Develop, Implementation, and evaluate. Indicators in this research were practicality, attractiveness, accuracy, and quickness in assess. Data collection for needs analysis taken qualitatively by interview and documentation. The singing assessment application consist of four assessment criteria, there are: technique, expression, song interpretation, and demonstration that form 18 items. This application has been tested by three experts by result: attractive, accurate score, and faster score calculation. The improvement for this application was score that could only be seen one by one later should be showed entirely and could be printed Keywords: Performance Assesment, Singing, Based on Android, ADDIE

THE PERFORMER AND TRADITION: PERSONALITY AS A PHENOMENON IN TRANSMISSION OF THE UDMURT CULTURAL HERITAGE

For the first time, this article concentrates on the phenomenon of personality in the Udmurt ethnical culture. This is a good framework to talk about Olga Nikolaevna Solovyova (1932-2018), well-known among the Udmurt as Dzhaky/Dzhakapay/Dzhakyapay (litt.: Jay/aunt Jay). There are several reasons for scientific interest about her: she had a huge knowledge of singing repertoire and rituals, she was able to improvise freely within her local tradition, she had exceptional musical abilities. The analysis of Olga Solovyova’s character as a performer allows to connect the songs in her repertoire with her singer’s fate. Many of her non-ritual songs are indeed autobiographic narratives with her reflections about her unhappy life, her fate as an orphan. A large corpus in her songs belongs to the so-called personal songs, a kind of memory about a person in musical, singing form. Another original feature in her singing art was the knowledge of other communities’ songs (Russian, Mari, Tatar), from the surrounding villages, both in the original languages as in translation into Udmurt. Because of her knowledge of the local ritual tradition, Olga Solovyova was a significant and respected member of her village community. Until her life’s last day, she respected the traditional worldview positions, the behavioural rules, the canons of ritual and singing performance, which she endeavoured to instil in her entourage. All this arose genuine interest in social and scientific circles. And today, when she is no more among us, her name comes back to life in numerous different projects.

Vox Populi, Vox Divo

Chapter 2 examines a specific site of multivocality, a type of singing performance designated as “popera” or vocal “classical crossover.” Identifying the various aesthetic characteristics and preferred repertories of popera, the chapter integrates the experiences of several (mostly tenor) participants in well-known crossover productions and groups. Popera, in the end, is sold as a neoliberal expansion of consumer choice by virtue of conflation, courting the tastes of pop fans and opera fans alike in one place. And it provides an acoustic space for the reunion of classical and popular musics and their social registers, and for the negotiation of alterity.