BDB Bertsolaritzaren datu-basea

Artists and Sardinian music experts agree in considering vibrato an essential feature of the traditional singing styles of Sardinia. According to many of them, “Sardinian vibrato” is something ‘typical’. It is deemed like a stylistic seal of the traditional vocality of the Island, a kind of ornamentation different from the vibrato of other singing styles. No formal analysis has been carried out so far to shed light on this aspect of vocal ornamentation. In this paper, measurements of the acoustic features of vocal vibrato in four singing poets are presented and discussed. The research corpus includes 506 segments of vibrato that have been recorded during a real performance held in a small village of Southern Sardinia in Summer 2010, a poetic contest named cantada campidanesa performed by the improvising/singing poets (cantadoris) with the accompaniment of a two-part choir (su bàsciu e contra). On one hand the results of the analysis show the heterogeneous characteristics of the poets, on the other they stress the tendency towards a vibrato with high rate (up to 8 Hz), narrow extent (not exceeding a mean value of ±0.4 st) and a notable waving in the overall intonation, the latter being measured with reference to the spread between the overall F0 mean and the moving mean between adjacent peaks in each segment. In a second step of the analysis, vocal timbre (i.e. singing on different vowels), pitch (singing on different scale degrees) and duration have been tested as prospective predictors of variability in the examined vibrato features. Whereas vocal timbre does not seem to be a valid explaining factor (apart from one exception), scale degree and duration are able to account for the variance in various respects.