19 Jan
2010
19 Jan
'10
10:25 a.m.
On Tue, 2010-01-19 at 14:52 +0100, Lorenzo wrote:
Hi Simon,
The final CD will definitely be only her voice. She is perfectly capable
of recording unaccompanied but we may well play a simple MIDI piano
version of the melody into her phones to ensure accuracy of pitch.
My sister is a specialist teacher for
hearing-impaired primary school
children. As part of her curriculum she includes music and in
particular, nursery rhymes etc for the younger children. She would like
them to be able to sing these at home with and/or for their parents. For
those children with non-hearing-impaired parents, this is not a problem
but many of the children also have hearing-impaired parents. Therefore
she would like to produce a CD of her singing for the children to take
home and use. I would really appreciate any help members can give me as
I am not a professional musician or recording engineer.
1) She will be singing unaccompanied (she is a trained singer and is
perfectly competent to do this) in an alto register to avoid any
distraction for the children from accompaniments etc. Does anyone have
any suggestions about this? (eg effects for recording, effects for the
headphone mix etc)
Do you mean the final CD will only have her voice on but she will be
having an accompaniment during recording? Or no accompaniment at all at any stage?
I'm trying to obtain a copy of :-
Darrow, A. A. (1990). The effect of frequency adjustment on the vocal
reproduction accuracy of hearing impaired children. Journal of Music
Therapy, 27, 24-33.
to see if it will help but the implication of the summaries I've seen
seems to lead us down the route of individually mastered CD's for each
child. That is a little beyond my abilities, the scope of the project
and the available information.
The repertoire will be nursery rhymes and childrens songs - I think
fairly uniform dynamics will be a useful thing to aim for.
2) This one's a bit more specialist so you
may not be able to help -
hearing impairment often starts with loss of high frequency response.
The obvious thing would seem to be to boost these but I don't know if
that would be correct. Does anyone know?
Not sure about the effect/benefit in case of impairment. Anyhow
frequency manipulation can be done using various types of equalizer.
Some suggest 'pushing' 3Khz and around up a little to enhance voice
clarity.. But it all much depends on the recording and performer's
quality (in neutral sense) and also the repertoire.
Also some compression may come in handy in this case if you'd like to
have a fairly uniform level (I am not sure if impairment would affect
sensitivity to dynamics?)
One other, maybe trivial, but often overlooked
suggestion especially for
such a specific case is to test the final CD on the audience's 'expected
listening equipment'. What I mean is that it may sound great on
expensive studio gear but if the children and families are going to play
it on cheap home stereo it may not sound as good, so testing the CD on
these and in a non-so-good acoustical environment might be a good idea.
> Any comments on any other aspects of this project would also be more
> than welcome.
The end-user equipment is not likely to be of a high standard in many
cases and your point is a good one. There is unlikely to be much in the
way of EQ on the children's playback equipment - this is another reason
for trying to find out what would be appropriate at the
recording/mastering stage.
It seems very interesting. Keep us updated :)
I'll be happy to although timescales depend on us both being in the same
county at the same time and haven't been arranged yet.
Kind regards,
Lorenzo
Regards,
Simon