Analysis of the Associations between Voice Quality of Singing Voice and Color

Abstract

This paper describes the relationship between voice quality of singing voice and color. We conducted 2 experiments. As stimuli, 28 voices were recorded from 11 amateur female singers. First, matching between voice quality and color was made with paired comparison. Color stimuli were categorized by 3 conditions and selected from the PCCS color system. As a result of binomial test, raters tended to agree with each other in the lightness condition. Second, voice stimuli were evaluated with 13 pairs of word as psychological features and 3 factors were extracted by factor analysis. In addition, 10 acoustic features were calculated as physical features. Based on the result of correlation analysis, it turned out that many features of colors are associated with impressions like a factor of “activity”. We also found that spectral centroid and spectral tilt might be related to some of the color features in the analysis of physical features.