In a field populated by avid researchers and skilled practitioners, the most common academic contributions tend to be those that advance the field in baby steps, offering a little more clarity to well-trodden paths. It is rare to find a radical shift in thought, one that opens considerably new opportunities for everyone. Ian Howell’s “Parsing the Spectral Envelope” is just such a work, however. Howell has tackled one of the longest-held, and most unsatisfying, concepts in musical science, namely, that sound is a combination of loudness, pitch, and timbre, with timbre being “everything else”. Not only has he tackled it, he’s given us definitions to work with that astound the imagination, and charts, graphs, and videos that so easily bring us into these new definitions that, after working with them for a few minutes, it’s hard to imagine how we’ve functioned without them until now. At VoiceScienceWorks, we’ve been using several of his definitions for almost a year, having been privy to his thought process in development, and they have profoundly altered the ways that we explain singing. Ian has opened the doors, now we all have the joy of walking through them to see what brilliant discoveries await. This relatively short piece may have just changed the way we understand the voice, forever. We can all be pleased to have lived to see such a moment.
For now, at least, you can download it for free (video links are listed in the body of the paper) here.
~David
For now, at least, you can download it for free (video links are listed in the body of the paper) here.
~David