Comparative Studies on Japanese Traditional Singing and Bel Canto

Compared here is Japanese traditional singing and Bel Canto for Japanese letters. Various genres of Japanese traditional singing are recorded in anechoic chamber for singing and natural voices employing many “living national treasures” as informants. Comparison is made on articulation and temporal features of fundamental frequency. Articulation for vowels is discussed from the points of formant frequency and cepstrum. Deviation of singing utterance from natural utterance within each individual is compared mainly in the formant frequency domain. Temporal features in fundamental frequency are discussed as characteristics of vibrato, particularly its depth and build-up time. INTRODUCTION The main purpose of this paper is to point out how to sing Japanese letters by clarifying the differences between acoustic features of Japanese traditional singing and Western Bel Canto. One of the aims of this paper is to put a claim on Japanese education system for music, or singing Japanese letters in particular. In the beginning of Japanese civilization in Meiji era or around 1870, the Japanese Government authoeized European music as music to be tought in schools in Japan though Japan had her own flourish music culture. Japanese teachers in music were forced to teach the theory of harmony to the people that were accustomed to sing and listen to music that begins and ends with ``Re". They taught Bel canto instead of ``rohkyoku" and ``ko-uta" that were popular in Japanese society at that time. So, Japanese traditional music has come to be taught in private houses of masters (``o-sshosan") apart from authorized school, and Japanese people has come to think that school music is different thing from their daily music. The situation is now changing somewhat, as Japanese traditional music is treated in textbooks for primary school children. The problem now is that there is few teachers who can teach Japanese traditional music. The following section briefly explains features of Japanese traditional music, then the paper describes the data employed, and discusses deviation of singing voices from natural voices concerning outstanding performers of Japanese traditional music. The last section compares vibrato in Japanese traditional singing and that in Bel canto. FEATURES OF JAPANESE TRADITIONAL MUSIC Japanese traditional music has following features: a. Genre independency: Very few common factors in instrument, voicing, musical scale, rhythm, notation, composer, performer, performing place and so forth. Situation is completely different from that of western music, which usually involves many instruments on common factors. b. Changes similar to cell division in contrast to evolutional changes in western music: New schools come out of old schools and usually coexist emphasizing the difference from the old even if it is small. c. Respect for timbre or instruments: If a music piece is played on different instruments, they are regarded as pieces of different genres. d. Integrated art: Most genres are connected to some other items such as literature, dance, drama playing, religion and local or national events. Then, the integrated arts such as Noh, Bunraku and Kabuki are collectively called ``Geinoh" (public entertainment) including their music. e. Weights on singing: Most of traditional music is sung music, though there are some exceptions such as shakuhachi-solo and instrumental performance by soh. Division of singing and playing depends on customs of the genre. Songs are roughly divided into ``utai-mono" (songs for singing) and ``katari-mono" (narrative songs) according to their features. f. Features from a viewpoint of Music Theory: (i) Generally monophonic. (ii) Complicated rhythmic asynchrony between song and instruments. ( i i i ) Pentatonic scales (Folk music scale, Miyakobushi -, R i tsu-, Ryukyu-scales) (iv) Relative but not absolute scale except Gagaku (Imperial Court Music). (v) Mainly duple meter but not constant rhythm. (vi) Frequent use of melisma. (vii) Combinatorial use of custom phrases rather than structural composition. (viii) Tablature is used rather than staff notation. DATA OF SINGING AND NATURAL VOICES The range of informants contributed to our research project covers most genres of Japanese traditional singing music including TV-news reading and western Bel canto. Singers of Japanese traditional music are, in particular, representative performers of the genres, among them 17 are “living national treasures”. Singers were asked to utter in four modes: 1) to sing a common letter “Kaede iroduku yamano asa wa . ”, 2) to sing Japanese five vowels in the style of his/her genre, 3) to utter the five Japanese vowels in isolation in natural speaking style and 4) to sing a typical excerpt of the genre. All the recording were made on digital audio tape in anechoic chamber except one called “the last GOZE(blind female street singer)”, who has been living in hospital. The data used in the current research is only a part of the data of mode 2) and 3) described above. ARTICULATION OF VOWELS