Vocal music

Vocal music

Vocal music is a genre of music performed by one or more singers, with or without instrumental accompaniment, in which singing (i.e. vocal performance) provides the main focus of the piece.[1] Music which employs singing but does not feature it prominently is generally considered instrumental music (e.g. the wordless women's choir in the final movement of Holst's The Planets) as is music without singing. Music without any non-vocal instrumental accompaniment is referred to as a cappella.[2]

Vocal music typically features sung words called lyrics, although there are notable examples of vocal music that are performed using non-linguistic syllables or noises, sometimes as musical onomatopoeia. A short piece of vocal music with lyrics is broadly termed a song.

Vocal music is probably the oldest form of music, since it does not require any instrument besides the human voice. All musical cultures have some form of vocal music.
Vocal music without lyrics
World traditions

* Elaborate untexted vocal improvisation was and still is an important element in Turkish and Middle Eastern music traditions. Such music existed prior to the 1200s and the First Crusade into Palestine and the city of Jerusalem, possibly even before the year 900.
* The modern descendants of the ancient Kung tribes and clans of Southern Africa utilize similar traditional music techniques.
* A form of improvisation known as thillana is a very important feature of Carnatic music from South India.
* Tuva n throat singing often features wordless and improvised song. The sygyt technique is a particularly good example of this.
* The Sámi yoik is a predominantly wordless form of vocal expression.
* The musical tradition of mouth music (Puirt á beul) was used in various forms of traditional music in the Anglo-Saxon and Gaelic communities.
* Hasidic Jews use a form of voice improvisation called nigunim. This consists of wordless tunes vocalized with sounds such as "Bim-bim-bam" or "Ai-yai-yai!” often accompanied by rhythmic clapping and drumming on the table.
* Puirt a beul, also known as "Mouth Music", is a Scottish technique based around imitating the sounds of bagpipes, fiddles, and other instruments used in traditional Scottish music. It was popularized in North America by Scottish immigrants, and has been incorporated into many forms of American music from roots music to bluegrass.

European classical vocal music

Solfege, a vocalized musical scale, assigns various syllables such as ‘‘Do-Re-Mi‘‘ to each note. A variety of similar tools are found in traditional Indian music, and scat singing of jazz.
Jazz and popular music

Hip hop music has a very distinct form of vocal percussion known as beatboxing. It involves creating beats, rhythms, and scratching.

The singer of Iceland IC group Sigur Rós, Jón Birgisson, often uses vocals without words, as does Icelandic singer/songwriter, Björk. Her album Medúlla is composed entirely of processed and acoustic vocal music, including beatboxing, choral arrangements and throat singing.

Singer Bobby McFerrin has recorded a number of albums using only his voice and body, sometimes consisting of a texted melody supported by untexted vocalizations.
Vocal music with lyrics
Songs

See Song and Category: Song forms for short forms of music with sung words.
Extended techniques that involve lyrics

The Second Viennese School, especially Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg, pioneered a technique called Sprechstimme in which singers half-talk, half-sing, and only approximate pitche
Vocal learning
Vocal learning is the ability of animals to modify vocal signals in form as a result of experience with those of other individuals. This can lead to signals that are either similar or dissimilar to the model [1]. A more restrictive definition limits vocal learning to cases where animals learn to produce sounds not included in their genetic repertoire, by mimicking what they hear in their acoustic environment

Occurrence

A classical example of vocal learning is birdsong in the bird species whose repertoire is not entirely innate – songbirds, parrots and hummingbirds. In mammals, seals and cetaceans have been found to have this capacity as well [4]. Further reports exist on bats and elephants.

In evolutionary psychology, human spe

ech and vocal music are regarded as complex forms of vocal learning.
Animal cogniti
on

Animal cognition is the title given to a modern approach to the mental capacities of non-human animals. It has developed out of comparative psychology, but has also been strongly influenced by the approach of ethology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary psychology. The alternative name cognitive ethology is therefore sometimes used; and much of what used to be considered under the title of animal intelligence is now thought of under this heading.
In practice, animal cognition mostly concerns mammals, especially primates, cetaceans and elephants, besides canidae, felidae and rodents, but research also extends to non-mammalian vertebrates such as birds such as parrots and pigeons, lizards or fish, and even to non-vertebrates (cephalopods)
Historical background

For most of the twentieth century, the dominant approach to animal psychology was to use experiments on intelligence in animals to uncover simple processes (such as classical conditioning and operant conditioning) that might then account for the apparently more complex intellectual abilities of humans. This approach is well summarised in the mid-century book by Hilgard (1958), but its reductionist philosophy was combined with a strongly behaviorist methodology, in which overt behavior was taken as the only valid data for the study of psychology, and in its more extreme forms (the radical behaviorism of B. F. Skinner and his experimental analysis of behavior) behavi

or was taken as the only topic of interest. In effect, the mental processes that humans experience in themselves were viewed as epiphenomena (see, for example, Skinner, 1969).

The success of cognitive psychology in addressin

g human mental processes, which began in the late 1950s and was proclaimed by Neisser (1967), led to a re-evaluation of the research paradigm, and researchers began to address animal mental processes from the opposite direction, by taking what is known about human mental processes and looking for evidence of comparable processes in other species. In a sense this was a return to the approach of Darwin's protegé George Romanes (e.g. 1886), arguably the first comparative psychologist of the modern era. However, whereas Romanes relied heavily on anecdote and an anthropomorphic projection of human capacities onto other species, modern researchers in animal cognition are in most cases firmly behaviorist in methodology, even though they differ sharply from the behaviorist philosophy. There are some exceptions to the rule of b

ehaviorist methodology, such as John Lilly and, some would argue, Donald Griffin (e.g. 1992), who have been prepared to take a strong position that other animals do have minds and that humans should approach the study of their cognition accordingly. However

, their claims have not found wide acceptance in the scientific community, though they have attracted an enthusiastic following among lay people.

The development of animal cognition was also strongly influenced by:

* increased use of and interest in primates (and also cetaceans) rather than the rats and pigeons that had become the classic species of the comparative psychology laboratory, and by developments within primatology;
* advancing knowledge of animals' behavior in their natural environments through studies in ethology, sociobiology and behavioral ecology; such studies often showed that animals needed certain cognitive abilities in order to adapt to their ecological niche (as for example in studies of caching birds such as Clark's Nutcracker by Alan Kamil and his colleagues (e.g. Kamil & Balda, 1990), or appeared to use cognitive abilities under natural conditions (for example in Jane Goodall's studies of chimpanz ees, see Goodall (1991);
* one or two high profile projects, in particular Allen and Beatrice Gardner's Washoe project in which a chimpanzee learned at least some elements of American Sign Language.
* advancing understanding of brain function through work in physiological psychology and cognitive neuropsych ology

This account of the history of the study of animal cognition is inevitably oversimplified. From Romanes on, there have always been comparative psychologists who have been more or less cognitively inclined: obvious examples are Wolfgang Köhler, famous for his studies of insight in chimpanzees, and Edward C. Tolman, who introduced into psychology, as an explanation of the behavior of rats in mazes, two ideas that have been immensely influential in human

cognitive psychology - the cognitive map and the idea of decision-making in risky choice according to expected value.
Methodology

Research in animal cognition continues to use some of the established research techniques of comparative psychology and the experimental analysis of behavior, such as mazes and Skinner boxes, though it employs them in new varieties (such as the 8-arm maze and Morris water maze that have been used in many studies of spatial memory) and in new ways. However, it complements those with observation of animals in their natural environments, or quasi-natural environments and also with field experiments. It has also been characterised by a number of very long term projects, such as the Washoe project and other ape-language experiments (e.g. project Nim), Irene Pepperberg's extended series of studies with the African Gray Parrot Alex, Louis Herman's work with bottlenosed dolphins, and studies of long-term memory in pigeons in which birds were shown to remember pictures for periods of several years. Some cognitive research also requires the management of animal behavior, and the use of operant conditioning to facilitate animal training. In general, the conclusion of concept formation in an animal requires a generalization test where the animal responds appropriately to a novel stimulus to which associative learning cannot explain th

e response behavior. Some researchers ha

ve made effective use of a Piagetian methodology, taking tasks which human children are known to master at different stages of development, and investigating which of them can be performed by particular species. Others have been inspired by concerns for animal welfare and the management of domestic species: for example Temple Grandin has harnessed her unique expertise in animal welfare and the ethical treatment of farm livestock to highlight underlying similarities between humans and other animals.
Research questions
The common Chimpanzee can use tools. This chimpanzee is using a stick in order to get food.

Given the broad program of animal cognition, of looking for the animal analogs of human cognitive processes, the areas of stu

dy in animal cognition follow more or less from

those in human cognitive psychology. However, progress in the different areas has been variable. Among the fields of interest are:
Attention

Research has focused on animals' ability to distribute attention between different aspects of a stimulus, and on visual search. As in humans, it appears that sharing attention between stimulus features reduces the capacity to detect any one of them, though there are some ecologically relevant visual search tasks at which particular species show remarkable abilities (for example, pigeons have an extraordinary capacity to pick out grain from substrate).
Categorization

Following pioneering research by Richard Herrnstein, there has been a mass of research on birds' ability to discriminate between cate

gories of stimuli, including the kinds of ill-defined category that are used in everyday human speech. Birds have been found to learn this ki

nd of task easily, and to transfer correct responses readily to new instances of the categories.
Memory

The categories that have been developed to analyze human memory (short term memory, long term memory, working memory) have been applied to the study of animal memory, and some of the phenomena characteristic of human short term memory (e.g. the serial position effect) have been detected in animals, particularly monkeys[citation needed]. However most progress has been made in the analysis of spatial memory, partly in relation to studies of the physiological basis of spatial memory and the role of the

hippocampus, and partly in relation to scatter-hoarder animals such as Clark's Nutcracker, certain jays, tits and certain squirrels, whose ecological niches require them to remember the locations of thousands of caches, often following radic

al changes in the environment.
Spatial Cognition

The ability to properly navigate and search through the environment is a critical task for many animals. Research in this area (Brown & Cook, 2006) has focused on such diffuse topics as landmark and beacon use by ants and bees, the encoding and use of geometric properties of the environment by pigeons, and the ability of rats to represent a spatial pattern in either radial arm mazes or pole box mazes. Sometimes included under the envelope of Spatial Cognition is work in h

umans and other animals in visual search tasks, which aim to experimentally address questions about searching through one's environment for a particular object.
Tool and weapon use
Further information: Tool use by animals

Some species, such as the Woodpecker Finch of the Galapagos Islands, use particular tools as an essential part of their foraging behavior. However, these behaviors are often quite inflexible and cannot be applied effectively in new situations. Several species have now been shown to be capable of more flexible tool use. A well known example is Jane Goodall's observation of chimpanzees "fishing" for termites in their natural environment, and captive great apes are often observed to use tools effectively; several species of corvids have also been trained to use tools in controlled experiments, or use bread crumbs for bait-fishing

Research in 2007 shows that chimpa

nzees in the Fongoli savannah sharpen sticks

to use as spears when hunting, considered the first evidence of systematic use of weapons in a species other than humans.
Reasoning and problem solving

Closely related to tool use is the study of reasoning and problem solving. It has been observed that the manner in which chimpanzees solve problems, such as that of retrieving bananas positioned out of reach, is not through trial-and-error. Instead, they were observed to proceed in a manner that was “unwaveringly purposeful.”

It is clear that animals of quite a range of species are capable of solving a range of problems that are argued to involve abstract reasoning[citation needed]; modern research has tended to show that the performances of Wolfgang Köhler's chimpanzees, who could achieve spontaneous solutions to problems without training, were by no means unique to that species, and that apparently similar behavior can be

found in animals usually thought of as much less intelligent, if appropriate training is given.[citation needed] Causal reasoning has also been observed in rooks and New Caledonian crows.
Language

The modeling of human language in animals is known as animal language research. In addition to the ape-language experiments mentioned above, there have also been more or less successful attempts to teach language or language-like behavior to some non-primate species, including parrots and Great Spotted Woodpeckers. Louis Herman published research on

artificial language comprehension in the bottlenosed dolphin using cognitive research methods at the hei

ght of the skepticism produced by Herbert Terrace's criticism of chimpanzee language experiments through his own results with the animal Nim Chimpsky. In particular, the focus on the comprehension mode only allowed cognitive methods of utilizing blinded observers to grade the animals' gross physical behavior, rather than trying to interpret putative language production. Herman's results (Herman, Richards, & Wolz, 1984) were published in the (human) journal Cognition, regarding work on the dolphins Akeakamai and Phoenix. All such research has been controversial among cognitive linguists.
Consciousness

The sense in which animals can be said to have consciousness or a self-concept has been hotly debated; it is often referred to as the debate over animal minds. The best known research technique in this area is the mirror test devised

by Gordon G. Gallup, in which an animal's skin is marked in some way while it is asleep or sedated, and it is then allowed to see its reflection in a mirror; if the animal spontaneously directs grooming behavior towards the mark, that is taken as an indication that it is aware of itself. Self-awareness, by this criterion, has been reported for chimpanzees and also for some other great apes, the European Magpie[6], some cetaceans and a solitary elephant, but not for monkeys. The mirror test has attracted controversy among some researchers because it is entirely focused on vision, the primary sense in humans, while other species rely more heavily on other senses such as the olfa

ctory sense in dogs.[citation needed]

A different approach to determine whether a non-human animal is conscious derives from passive speech research with a macaw (see Arielle). Some researchers propose that by passively listening to an animal's voluntary speech, it is possible to learn about the thoughts of another creature and to determine that the speaker is c

onscious. This type of research was originally used to investigate a child's crib speech by Weir (1962) and in investigations of early speech in children by Greenfield and others (1976). With speech-capable birds, the methods of passive-speech research open a new avenue for investigation.
Mathematics

Some animals are capable of distinguishing between different amounts and rudimentary counting. Elephants have been known to perform simple arithmetic and rhesus monkeys can count. Ants are able to use quantitative values and transmit this information. For instance, ants of several species are able to estimate quite precisely numbers of encounters with members of other colonies on their feeding territories.Young chimpanzees have outperformed human college students in tasks requiring remembering numbers.
Cognitive faculty by specie
s

Some animals, including great apes, crows, dolphins, dogs, elephants, cats, pigs, rats, and parrots are still typically thought by laypeople[clar

ification needed] as intelligent in ways that some other species of animal are not. For example, crows are attributed with human-like intelligence in the folklore of many cultures. A number of recent survey studies have demonstrated the consistency of these rankings between people in a given culture and indeed to a considerable extent across cultures (e.g. Nakajima et al., 2002).

A common image is the scala naturae, th

e ladder of nature on which animals of different species occupy successively higher rungs, with humans typically at the top

A more fruitful approach has been to recognise that different animals may have different kinds of cognitive processes, which are better understood in terms of the ways in which they are cognitively adapted to their different ecological niches, than by positing any kind of hierarchy. (See Shettleworth (1998), Reznikova (2007).)

One question that can be asked coherently is how far different species are intelligent in the same ways as humans are, i.e., are their cognitive processes similar to ours. Not surprisingly, our closest biological relatives, the great apes, tend to do best on such an assessment. Among the birds, corvids and parrots have

typically been found to perform well. Despite ambitious claims, evidence of unusually high human-like intelligence among cetaceans is pat

chy, partly because the cost and difficulty of carrying out research with marine mammals mean that experiments frequently suffer from small sample sizes and inadequate controls and replication.[citation needed] Octopuses have also been shown to exhibit a number of higher-level skills such as tool use but the amount of research on cephalopod intelligence is still limited.
Human voice

The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal folds for talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, etc. Human voice is specifically that part of human sound production in which the vocal folds (vocal cords) are the primary sound source. Generally speaking, the mechanism for generating the human voice can be subdivided into three parts; the lungs, the vocal folds within the larynx, and the articulators. The lung (the pump) must produce adequate airflow and air pressure to vibrate vocal folds (this air pressure is the fuel of the voice). The vocal folds (vocal cords) are a vibrating valve that chops up the airflow from the lungs into audible pulses that form the laryngeal sound source. The muscles of the larynx adjust the length and tension of the vocal folds to ‘fine tune’ pitch and tone. The articulators (the parts of the vocal tract above the larynx consisting of tongue, palate, cheek, lips, etc.) articulate and filter the sound emanating from the larynx and to some degree can interact with the laryngeal airflow to strengthen it or weaken it as a sound source.
The vocal folds, in combination with the articulators, are capable of producing highly intricate arrays of sound.[1][2][3] The tone of voice may be modulated to suggest emotions such as anger, surprise, or happiness.[4][5] Singers use the human voice as an instrument for creating music.

Voice types and the folds (cords) themselves

Adult men and women have different vocal folds sizes; reflecting the male-female differences in larynx size. Adult male voices are usually lower-pitched and have larger folds. The male vocal folds (which would be measured vertically in the opposite diagram), are between 17 mm and 25 mm in length. [7] the female vocal folds are between 12.5 mm and 17.5 mm in length.

As seen in the illustration, the folds are located just above the vertebrate trachea (the windpipe which travels from the lungs). Food and drink do not pass through the cords but instead pass through the esophagus, an unlinked tube. Both t

ubes are separated by the epiglottis, a "flap" that covers the opening of the trachea while swallowing.

The folds in both sexes are within the larynx. They are attached at the back (side nearest the spinal cord) to the arytenoids cartilages, and at the front (side under the chin) to the thyroid cartilage. They have no outer edge as they blend into the side of the breathing tube (the illustration is out of date and does not show this well) while their inner edges or "margins" are free to vibrate (the hole). They have a three layer construction of an epithelium, vocal ligament, then muscle (vocalis muscle), which can shorten and bulge the folds. They are flat triangular bands and are pearly white in color. Above both sides of the vocal cord is the vestibular fold or false vocal cord, which has a small sac between its two folds (not illustrated).

The difference in vocal folds size between men and women means that they have differently pitched voices. Additionally, genetics also causes variances amongst the same sex, with men and women's singing voices being categorized into types. For example, among men, there are bass, baritone, tenor and countertenor (ranging from E2 to even F6), and among women, contralto, mezzo-soprano and soprano (ranging from F3 to C6). There are additional categories for operatic voices, see voice type. This is not the only source of difference between male and female voice. Men, generally speaking, have a larger vocal tract, which essentially gives the resultant voice a lower-sounding timbre. This is mostly independent of the vocal folds themselves.