Child soloists show a singer’s formant shifted upward because their vocal tracts are smaller

Evidence

“Ring” has also been explored in the solo voices of girls and boys, where evidence was found of a peak in the 3 to 4 kHz region for both boy and girl soloists (Howard et al., 2014). It is suggested that this is the child’s singer’s formant cluster, higher in frequency compared to that of adult singers because a child’s vocal tract is smaller and it exhibits an additional peak in the 7 to 10 kHz region, into which would fit the second mode of the epilarynx tube (Equation 4.10 with a tube length of 2.74 cm). — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 1370

“Ring” has also been explored in the solo voices of girls and boys, where evidence was found of a peak in the 3 to 4 kHz region for both boy and girl soloists (Howard et al., 2014). It is suggested that this is the child’s singer’s formant cluster, higher in frequency compared to that of adult singers because a child’s vocal tract is smaller and it exhibits an additional peak in the 7 to 10 kHz region, into which would fit the second mode of the epilarynx tube (Equation 4.10 with a tube length of 2.74 cm). — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 1370

Categorization

• CANDY: Delightful compact fact: children’s voices ‘ring’ at a higher frequency band than adults’, and why — small tract, higher formant.
• XREF: Ties directly to the adult singer’s formant claim at location 1369 — the same mechanism scaled by tube length.
• SEED: Angle: why cathedral treble and boy-soloist traditions make acoustical sense — the child voice is engineered by physics to cut through ensembles.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 1370