On Tue, 2010-01-19 at 14:52 +0100, Lorenzo wrote: > Hi Simon, > > > My sister is a specialist teacher for hearing-impaired primary school > > children. As part of her curriculum she includes music and in > > particular, nursery rhymes etc for the younger children. She would like > > them to be able to sing these at home with and/or for their parents. For > > those children with non-hearing-impaired parents, this is not a problem > > but many of the children also have hearing-impaired parents. Therefore > > she would like to produce a CD of her singing for the children to take > > home and use. I would really appreciate any help members can give me as > > I am not a professional musician or recording engineer. > > > > 1) She will be singing unaccompanied (she is a trained singer and is > > perfectly competent to do this) in an alto register to avoid any > > distraction for the children from accompaniments etc. Does anyone have > > any suggestions about this? (eg effects for recording, effects for the > > headphone mix etc) > > > Do you mean the final CD will only have her voice on but she will be > having an accompaniment during recording? The final CD will definitely be only her voice. She is perfectly capable of recording unaccompanied but we may well play a simple MIDI piano version of the melody into her phones to ensure accuracy of pitch. > Or no accompaniment at all at any stage? > > 2) This one's a bit more specialist so you may not be able to help - > > hearing impairment often starts with loss of high frequency response. > > The obvious thing would seem to be to boost these but I don't know if > > that would be correct. Does anyone know? > > > Not sure about the effect/benefit in case of impairment. Anyhow > frequency manipulation can be done using various types of equalizer. > Some suggest 'pushing' 3Khz and around up a little to enhance voice > clarity.. But it all much depends on the recording and performer's > quality (in neutral sense) and also the repertoire. > Also some compression may come in handy in this case if you'd like to > have a fairly uniform level (I am not sure if impairment would affect > sensitivity to dynamics?) > I'm trying to obtain a copy of :- Darrow, A. A. (1990). The effect of frequency adjustment on the vocal reproduction accuracy of hearing impaired children. Journal of Music Therapy, 27, 24-33. to see if it will help but the implication of the summaries I've seen seems to lead us down the route of individually mastered CD's for each child. That is a little beyond my abilities, the scope of the project and the available information. The repertoire will be nursery rhymes and childrens songs - I think fairly uniform dynamics will be a useful thing to aim for. > One other, maybe trivial, but often overlooked suggestion especially for > such a specific case is to test the final CD on the audience's 'expected > listening equipment'. What I mean is that it may sound great on > expensive studio gear but if the children and families are going to play > it on cheap home stereo it may not sound as good, so testing the CD on > these and in a non-so-good acoustical environment might be a good idea. > > Any comments on any other aspects of this project would also be more > > than welcome. The end-user equipment is not likely to be of a high standard in many cases and your point is a good one. There is unlikely to be much in the way of EQ on the children's playback equipment - this is another reason for trying to find out what would be appropriate at the recording/mastering stage. > It seems very interesting. Keep us updated :) > I'll be happy to although timescales depend on us both being in the same county at the same time and haven't been arranged yet. > Kind regards, > Lorenzo Regards, Simon _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
