Date of Award

Fall 2024

Document Type

Thesis

Terms of Use

© 2024 Olivia A. Colace. This work is freely available courtesy of the author. It may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. For all other uses, please contact the copyright holder.

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Linguistics Department

First Advisor

Noah Elkins

Second Advisor

Rikker Dockum

Abstract

Singers face the daunting task of learning how to precisely control parts of their body that they cannot see. As a result, vocal pedagogy relies heavily on metaphorical language. This thesis will investigate 10 such adjectives used to describe, teach, and elicit vowel sounds in choral singing: “bright”, “dark”, “wide”, “narrow”, “open”, “closed”, “warm”, “harsh”, “rich”, and “thin.” This thesis seeks to discover if these vowel metaphors have specific acoustic and thus corresponding articulatory correlates in a sound symbolic capacity. A survey was conducted to assess judgments of sung vowels with respect to each vowel metaphor. Judgments were analyzed with respect to F1, F2, F3, and musician identity. Significant acoustic correlates were found for all 10 adjectives. The results of this study have important implications for vocal pedagogy, the perception of singing, and sound symbolism at large.

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