New Technology for Teaching Voice Science and Pedagogy The Madde Synthesizer Svante Granqvist
A new edition of the MADDE Synthesizer by Svante Granqvist was introduced in the spring of 2011 that added the top octave of the keyboard and a keyboard display of formants and partials. These improvements have rendered MADDE an especially clear pedagogic tool for explaining and demonstrating the basic acoustic elements of the voice source and the vocal tract filter, as well as all source/filter interactions. This paper shows how MADDE can be used to explain and display the effect of the number of source harmonics, the roll off in power of the source spectrum, the implication of roll off on the laryngeal registration of the voice source, the locations and bandwidths of vocal tract formants, the acoustic effects of harmonic/formant relationships and crossings, such as open timbre, âturning over,â close timbre, and âwhoopâ timbre.