Vowel Intelligibility in Classical Singing

Vowel intelligibility during singing is an important aspect of communication during performance. The intelligibility of isolated vowels sung by Western classically trained singers has been found to be relatively low, in fact, decreasing as pitch rises, and it is lower for women than for men. The lack of contextual cues significantly deteriorates vowel intelligibility. It was postulated in this study that the reduced intelligibility of isolated sung vowels may be partly from the vowels used by the singers in their daily vocalises. More specifically, if classically trained singers sang only a few American English vowels during their vocalises, their intelligibility for American English vowels would be less than for those classically trained singers who usually vocalize on most American English vowels. In this study, there were 21 subjects (15 women, 6 men), all Western classically trained performers as well as teachers of classical singing. They sang 11 words containing 11 different American English vowels, singing on two pitches a musical fifth apart. Subjects were divided into two groups, those who normally vocalize on 4, 5, or 6 vowels, and those who sing all 11 vowels during their daily vocalises. The sung words were cropped to isolate the vowels, and listening tapes were created. Two listening groups, four singing teachers and five speech-language pathologists, were asked to identify the vowels intended by the singers. Results suggest that singing fewer vowels during daily vocalises does not decrease intelligibility compared with singing the 11 American English vowels. Also, in general, vowel intelligibility was lower with the higher pitch, and vowels sung by the women were less intelligible than those sung by the men. Identification accuracy was about the same for the singing teacher listeners and the speech-language pathologist listeners except for the lower pitch, where the singing teachers were more accurate.     

Harmonic Algebraic Curves and Noncrossing Partitions

Motivated by Gauss's first proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, we study the topology of harmonic algebraic curves. By the maximum principle, a harmonic curve has no bounded components; its topology is determined by the combinatorial data of a noncrossing matching. Similarly, every complex polynomial gives rise to a related combinatorial object that we call a basketball, consisting of a pair of noncrossing matchings satisfying one additional constraint. We prove that every noncrossing matching arises from some harmonic curve, and deduce from this that every basketball arises from some polynomial.     

Establishing vicinal proton-proton connectivities using two-dimensional proton zero quantum coherence NMR

Phenanthro[3,4:3′,4′]phenanthro[2,1-b]thiophene ( 1 ) served as the model system to evaluate two-dimensional proton zero quantum coherence nmr in order to establish the vicinal proton-proton connectivities. The utility of the two-dimensional proton zero quantum nmr experiment has been compared with the utility of the traditional autocorrelated proton-proton (COSY) experiment. In the case of a molecule such as 1 , where the proton chemical shifts are so highly congested, the zero quantum coherence experiment provides data not obtainable from the COSY experiment.     

New reals: Can live with them,can live without them

We give a self‐contained proof of the preservation theorem for proper countable support iterations known as “tools‐preservation”, “Case A” or “first preservation theorem” in the literature. We do not assume that the forcings add reals. (© 2006 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

Preservation of logarithmic concavity by the Mellin transform and applications to the Schrödinger equation for certain classes of potentials

We prove that the Mellin transform of a function log-concave (convex) is, after division by (+1), where is the argument of the transform, itself log-concave (convex) in . This theorem is first applied to the moments of the ground state wave function of the Schrödinger equation where the Laplacian of the central potential has a given sign, and generalized to other situations. This is used to derive inequalities linking thel ^th derivative of the ground state wave function at the origin for angular momentuml and the expectation value of the kinetic energy, and applied to quarkonium physics. A generalization to higher radial excitations is shown to be plausible by using the WKB approximation. Finally, new bounds on ground-state energies in power potentials are obtained.     

Generalized Lax pairs,the modified classical Yang-Baxter equation,and affine geometry of Lie groups

We generalize the usual Lax equationd/dt L=[M, L] byd/dt L=–(M)L, where is an arbitrary representation of a Lie algebra g (the values ofM) in a representation spaceV (the values ofL). The usual classicalr-matrix programme for Hamiltonian integrable systems is generalized tor-matrices taking values in gV. Ther-matrices are then considered as left invariant torsion-free covariant derivatives on a Lie groupK (with Lie algebraV ^*). The Classical Yang-Baxter Equation (CYBE) is equivalent to the flatness ofK whereas the Modified CYBE implies thatK is an affine locally symmetric space. An example is discussed.