Does Virtual Reality Match Reality? Vocal Performance Across Environments
Pasquale Bottalico – pb81@illinois.edu
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Champaign, IL 61820
United States
Carly Wingfield2, Charlie Nudelman1, Joshua Glasner3, Yvonne Gonzales Redman1,2
- Department of Speech and Hearing Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- School of Music University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- School of Graduate Studies, Delaware Valley University
Popular version of 2aAAa1 – Does Virtual Reality Match Reality? Vocal Performance Across Environments
Presented at the 188th ASA Meeting
Read the abstract at https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0037496
–The research described in this Acoustics Lay Language Paper may not have yet been peer reviewed–
Singers often perform in very different spaces than where they practice—sometimes in small, dry rooms and later in large, echoey concert halls. Many singers have shared that this mismatch can affect how they sing. Some say they end up singing too loudly because they can’t hear themselves well, while others say they hold back because the room makes them sound louder than they are. Singers have to adapt their voices to unfamiliar concert halls, and often they have very little rehearsal time to adjust.
While research has shown that instrumentalists adjust their playing depending on the room they are in, there’s been less work looking specifically at singers. Past studies have found that different rooms can change how singers use their voices, including how their vibrato (the small, natural variation in pitch) changes depending on the room’s echo and clarity.
At the University of Illinois, our research team from the School of Music and the Department of Speech and Hearing Science is studying whether virtual reality (VR) can help singers train for different acoustic environments. The big question: can a virtual concert hall give singers the same experience as a real one?
To explore this, we created virtual versions of three real performance spaces on campus (Figure 1).
Figure 1. 360 degree images of the three performance spaces investigated.
Singers wore open-backed headphones and a VR headset while singing into a microphone in a sound booth. As they sang, their voices were processed in real time to sound like they were in one of the real venues, and this audio was sent back to them through the headphones. In the Video (Video1), you can see a singer performing in the sound booth where the acoustic environments were recreated virtually. In the audio file (Audio1), you can hear exactly what the singer heard: the real-time, acoustically processed sound being sent back to their ears through the open-backed headphones.
Video 1. Singer performing in the virtual environment.
Audio 1. Example of real-time auralized feedback.
Ten trained singers performed in both the actual venues (Figure 2) and in virtual versions of those same spaces.
Figure 2. Singer performing in the rear environment.
We then compared how they sang and how they felt during each performance. The results showed no significant differences in how the singers used their voices or how they perceived the experience between real and virtual environments.
This is an exciting finding because it suggests that virtual reality could become a valuable tool in voice training. If a singer can’t practice in a real concert hall, a VR simulation could help them get used to the sound and feel of the space ahead of time. This technology could give students greater access to performance preparation and allow voice teachers to guide students through the process in a more flexible and affordable way.