Individual Lingual and Labial Articulatory Strategies of Four Male Singers of Corsican Polyphonic Traditional Singing.

Authors

Louise McKeever, Angélique Amelot, Martine Adda-Decker, Catherine Herrgott, Lise Crevier-Buchman, Claire Pillot-Loiseau

Published in

Journal of voice : official journal of the Voice Foundation. Aug 10, 2026. Epub Aug 10, 2026.

Abstract

Cantu in Paghjella is a three-voice Corsican polyphonic singing tradition characterized by sustained vowels, stable pitch relations, and marked divergence from speech-like vocal production. Although prior work has described acoustic outcomes in this repertoire, the articulatory strategies by which singers implement this singing state, and the extent to which these strategies reflect hyperarticulation versus individual solutions, remain poorly documented. This study quantifies tongue and lip dynamics in Cantu in Paghjella compared to speech and singing and tests whether supralaryngeal articulation covaries with fundamental frequency (f_o) during sustained phonation.
Archival multimodal recordings of four expert male Paghjella singers (two secunda, one bassu, one terza) were analyzed using ultrasound tongue imaging, frontal lip video, and synchronized audio captured with a helmet-mounted multisensor system. Tongue-body position and lip aperture and stretch were extracted using markerless tracking. Time-varying articulatory trajectories over the normalized vowel interval were modeled with generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs). f_o was measured, and within-speaker linear mixed-effects models were fit at 25%, 50%, and 75% of vowel duration to test condition-specific articulatory-f_o coupling.
Across singers, singing produced a robust shift in phonatory task, with elevated f_o relative to speech. GAMMs revealed significant sung-spoken differences in supralaryngeal articulation, including increased lip aperture and lowered tongue-body posture, across speakers. The GAMM did not indicate a significant overall difference in mean lip stretch between sung and spoken productions. However, there was marked intersinger variation in magnitude, vowel dependence, and temporal organization. Articulatory-f_o coupling was sparse in speech but more frequent in singing; coupling direction differed across singers, indicating multiple coordination strategies rather than a uniform biomechanical relation.
Cantu in Paghjella involves a shared singing mode relative to speech, but its articulatory implementation is singer-specific. Hyperarticulation, where present, is selective and strategy-dependent rather than global. These findings highlight flexible articulatory pathways to stable ensemble outcomes in traditional polyphonic singing.

PMID:
42575769
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 11 Aug 2026.

Read full publication at:
Please sign in to see all details.

Stats

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this publication? Sign in in to submit your rating.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.