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Vocal arts medicine provides care and prevention strategies for professional voice disorders in performing artists. The issue of correct "Fach" determination depending on the presence of a lyric or dramatic voice structure is of crucial importance for opera singers, as chronic overuse often leads to vocal fold damage. To avoid phonomicrosurgery or prevent a premature career end, our aim is to offer singers an improved, objective fach counseling using digital sound analyses and machine learning procedures. For this purpose, a large database of 2004 sound samples from professional opera singers was compiled. Building on this dataset, we employed a classic ensemble learning method, namely the Random Forest algorithm, to construct an efficient fach classifier. This model was trained to learn from features embedded within the sound samples, subsequently enabling voice classification as either lyric or dramatic. As a result, the developed system can decide with an accuracy of about 80% in most examined voice types whether a sound sample has a lyric or dramatic character. To advance diagnostic tools and health in vocal arts medicine and singing voice pedagogy, further machine learning methods will be applied to find the best and most efficient classification method based on artificial intelligence approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article has two main goals. The first is to give a personal point of view regarding excellence through singing, referring the experience of the author as an opera singer, who sung in the opera company of Cluj Opera House at the 80's. It will be done a special reference to another artist of excellence, the mezzo soprano Lya Pop, who was a founder member of the first Romanian Opera House, the Cluj Opera House. The second goal is to honor this institution, the Romanian National Opera House Cluj-Napoca, that celebrates in 2020 its first century of existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is targeted at both students engaged in full-time study and those who guide them, who, through knowledge, professionalism, and discernment, assume responsibility to build successful careers together with those whom they guide. The voice, the frail tool that links spirit and matter, requires, beside native endowment, constant and persevering practice, under the careful guidance of a teacher, who has to create stages and doses of information so that at the end of the route covered, the student becomes an artist prepared to meet an impresario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses both professional singers in the midst of their career and those who study the art of singing and prepare themselves for this path in life. I bring to the attention and awareness that a minor disorder of the phonatory apparatus, if ignored and not treated on time, can sometimes lead to irreversible damage. Therefore, I stress the importance of a phonatory physician and voice therapy prevention that should be maintained through the entire career of a professional singer, mentioning the main factors that lead to the occurrence of these disorders and the connection of healing through conscious breathing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this pilot study, 46 professional opera singers were surveyed, exploring their physical, emotional, financial and social wellbeing. While most of the participants in this study were American, the other participants included South Africans, Canadians and Germans. Of the 46 participants, 24 were female and 22 male. Professional singers provided pertinent advice to aspiring singers so that they could make informed decisions when considering a career as an opera singer. Data collected through both quantitative and qualitative methods indicated that pursuing a career as an opera singer is indeed viable. Most of the singers surveyed, however, did not only perform as their main career focus. Many of the participants also taught singing to supplement their income. Financially, the majority of this sample regarded themselves as comfortable. Physical and psychological ailments were minimal and the reported instances of ailments were treatable. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In some descriptions from the first half of the nineteenth century, scientific categories are used syncretically to explain opera singers' talents, including their innate and acquired dispositions, and their effects on audiences. Phrenology sought to read on the surface of skulls the developments of cerebral zones that corresponded to various instincts, or to affective and intellectual faculties. According to the partisans of this "only true Science of the Human Mind," one could thus explain any aspect of human activity and life. Franz Joseph Gall's followers applied these theories to music and musicians, which constituted one of their privileged fields of observation, still largely unexplored by historians and philosophers of science. The singer united the qualities of the musician and actor, and stimulated abundant illustrative material--biographical and anecdotal, portraits, busts, and prints. Phrenologists thus fueled specific discursive models of observation and enunciation among early-nineteenth-century operatic audiences, which reflected and nourished the media doxa. A series of French and English texts highlight the phrenological and physiological "conditions" necessary to become an opera singer, and the combinations suited to a particular type of music. These sources contributed to the processes of operatic creation and reception, and to the forging of new interpretations of singers' public images, as both exceptional artists and socially normalized individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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