Research on the singing voice in retrospect

Many years have elapsed since the first articles on various aspects of the singing voice were published. Here my own research on singer’s formant, formant tuning, breathing, and voice source are reviewed in the light of later contributions. Detweiler’s and Wang’s studies of the singer’s formant are commented. The idea that singers tend to tune F1 and/or F2 to harmonic partials is analysed and some open questions are pointed out. Various investigations of the voice source and breathing are discussed and some attractive topics for future research are described. The article was written at the request of the recent conference on Physiology and Acoustics of Singing in Groningen, where researchers were asked to review their own research on the singing voice.