Score Following Using the Sung Voice

While nished peices of music have often relied on score following using the ute, clarinet, trumpet, violin, and piano, little has been written or performed using the sung voice. Consequently, the special opportunities ooered by combining the live, sung voice with state-of-the-art electronics remain largely unexplored. This paper describes the special challenges encountered when trying to use score following on the voice and some techniques that can partly overcome them. 1 Score following generalities Computers are capable of making a much wider range of sounds than one could possibly specify in real time. One important area of research in the eld of computer music is how best to map the small amount of information which a live player is capable of expressing, into the much larger space of sounds the computer can generate in response. Among the many strategies which have been proposed, a special niche is occupied by so-called score following. Independently developed score followers were demonstrated during the 1984 ICMC by Dannenburg 84] and Vercoe 84], both of which focussed on the speciic problem of extracting tempo from live, solo, monophonic instrumental parts. The underlying asumption was that the solo player would play the notated rhythms accurately, diiering from performance to performance mostly in the choice of tempo, which was supposed to change slowly with time. Under these conditions, the computer could actually anticipate the onset of new events by the performer. The computer could thus pre-prepare events which would be played simultaneously with the live player, or provide musical events 1