International Phonetic Alphabet for Singers

The International Phonetic Alphabet is the lingua franca of vocal pedagogy. Not only does it help you teach diction, but also vocal pedagogy, especially advanced pedagogy. The IPA serves singers well because in addition to marking single phonemes and allophones with a single symbol—giving teachers and students a common reference for distinctions in sound—it marks a system of coordinating the articulators.

For instance, it describes the forward part of the tongue to produce the forward vowels, a series of phonemes that arise when moving the arch of the tongue from nearest the teeth toward the soft palate—the kind of movement your students must master for such matters as vowel modification, formant tuning, and allophonic variations required by different languages.

You can view a sample of this tongue motion as it produces forward and backward vowels, showing another feature of how the multimedia platform helps you bring critical concepts alive in your classes.

With its significance for all aspects of learning to sing, the IPA in all its dimensions needs to be drilled and learned, which this text helps you achieve easily. Most professors nearly always adopt IPA for Singers in combination with Diction for Singers as part of our diction multimedia platform, which is a great place for students to absorb the material. Professors like it because it helps students become fluent with reading, writing, and articulating the individual phonemes and allophones of language, which they later combine and coordinate through the language settings spelled out in Diction for Singers and the Online Listening Labs. At the same time, they use it to introduce English diction.

Like oil in an engine, it makes running the concepts of diction and vocal pedagogy hum along smoothly. In this way, it helps you meet multiple purposes with your students:

• learn the linqua franca of diction and vocal pedagogy

• learn the movements of the articulators for fine allophonic variations in diction

• learn the movements of the articulators for optimum resonance

• set up the basis for Diction for Singers

• set up the basis for English diction

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To see how The International Phonetic Alphabet for Singers fits within the overall diction multimedia platform, consider clicking on the following links, particularly the independent doctoral dissertation written specifically to compile many professor's evaluations of the strengths and weaknesses of various published works for helping teach diction.

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