Course talk:PHYS341/Archive/2016wTerm2/UnderstandingSopranoVoice

Overall the project is very good and contains all the elements required, and should realistically not require much more work. I have a few specific recommendations and a couple areas where general improvement can be made so that the project can really stand out. Specific: -The only instance of improper grammar is in the opening, when you say “Recent studies uses”. This should probably read more along the lines of “recent studies have used” or a “a recent study uses”. -I believe you have too many links in your article, which are often superfluous or not explained. According to the wiki style guide, links should primarily be used when you’re using jargon, and you should provide a small resume of the link you are using (so that a layman can understand without needing to read the entire link you have provided) For example, I do not think ‘physics’ and ‘sound’ need links.

General improvements: Your project is slightly below the required word count, but you shouldn’t have trouble finding more stuff to write about. I found myself wanting more thorough explanations for some of your concepts, especially the physics of your main point (the muddling of vowels in opera). I think you should explain more exactly why tuning R1 to F0 hampers a singer’s ability to enunciate vowels. You could also add slightly more to the singer’s formant, but your graph on that was really great so that’s necessarily needed. I think we’re following the wiki style guide very closely, then some of your article may too complicated in terms of language. I think it definitely gets a bit jargon-y in “Vocal Tract Resonance and Fundamental Frequencies”, but that can be fixed by including the descriptions I suggested earlier (an explanation of resonance may be the most useful). While I always understood what you were saying, I’m not sure if someone outside of our class would be able to follow it as easily. Your section vocal tract tuning obviously needs to be expanded but you’ve already noted that. All of that said, I think you’ve done an amazing job with the project thus far. It’s very well put together and looks very professional. I was also very impressed with your use of great sources (which were all properly cited). Your images were also very good, especially your hand drawn graph. I was also on the lookout for various pitfalls that the style guide warns of (such as weasel words and such) but I could not find any.

• Your article is in great shape. The pictures, graphs, headings and links to larger articles makes for a complete wikipedia article. Your tone is impersonal and detached and does not try to put forth an argument; rather, it is simply providing the facts, which is what we'd expect from a wikipedia article

• I would suggest perhaps adding a bit more context to a few of the terms you use. While you provide links for the more complicated terms, it might be useful to give a quick explanation or definition as to what they mean. I understand wanting to keep the text brief and to the point, but as the Wikipedia: Writing Better Articles suggests, you should try and find a balance "between comprehensibility and detail so that readers can gain information from the article." (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_better_articles#Evaluating_context). A good question to ask is if a layperson was reading the article, particularly if it was printed out, would they be able to understand everything you are saying? For example, under the heading 'Soprano Voice', consider explain exactly how the mouth creates acoustic impedance.

• You make good use of interlinking your article with other Wikipedia articles. However, beware that you are not overdoing it. For example, you interlink the words "opera", "soprano", "frequencies" on multiple occasions. Because of the short nature of our articles, it is not necessary to link it more than once.

• You may have a different opinion on this than I do, but I am not quite sure what the purpose of the subscript symbols are in your article (such as "The fundamental frequency, f₀,..."). Typically, it would be necessary to do this if you had an equation and wanted to assign meaning to the variables. On the other hand, it could also be used as a shorthand for future use (i.e., using f₀ instead of saying fundamental frequency) but you seem to prefer using the full term. You do use them as shorthands once ("the soprano singer needs to tune R₁ to match f₀ in order to keep the singer's formant"), however in this case I believe it might be clearer to the audience if you simply typed out resonant frequency and fundamental frequency.

• This is just a minor tweak, but the in-text footnotes (the superscript numbers) should come after the punctuation. E.g., Example 1.¹ ; instead of Example 1¹.