Teatro Musical no Brasil: características vocais de cantoras nas vertentes nacional e de franquia da Broadway

Abstract

Introduction: since the debut of Broadway’s franchise musical Les Misérables (2001) in Sao Paulo, Brazilian musical theater has become more professional than ever before. For this reason, singing was strongly influenced by North American musical theater techniques, especially belting. The hypothesis is that singers, when playing national musicals’ songs of Brazilian popular tradition, have experienced interference from this technique. Objective: to compare the characteristics from both the national and Broadway franchise strands when sung by professional musical theater singers. Method: the sample was composed of seven professional singers of musical theater. It was requested to perform an excerpt of the songs "Folhetim" from the musical Ópera do Malandro as well as "Tudo é Jazz" from Chicago. The singers filled out a characterization questionnaire, followed by stating their opinion on the difference between singing in the national musical theater and in the Broadway franchise. The recordings were evaluated in a perceptual-auditory manner by a group of judges who are voice teachers and speech therapists, all of whom experienced in singing voice. For this, a visual analog scale with seven parameters was used: tension, breathiness, vocal attack, metal, vowel “color”, loudness and vibrato. For these results, statistics were used. The recordings also underwent acoustic analysis to extract the long-term average spectrum (LTAS), spectral decline curve and amplitude level of the first two harmonics (H1-H2) from the source spectrum. Results: the singers' average age was 30.6 years, professional career time 10 years, voice lesson time 11.6 years and a higher average of Broadway franchise musicals. As for the perceptive-auditory evaluation executed by the group of voice teachers and speech therapists judges, there was statistically significant agreement concerning the variable tension while singing the national musical, and tension and vibrato while singing the Broadway franchise musical. The confidence interval indicated for breathness the smallest variation in both strands according to the groups of judges. The LTAS analysis showed no spectral peak in the singers’ formant region in both strands. Regarding the spectral decline curve, the national musical performance obtained more pronounced curves in relation to Broadway’s, as well as lower numerical value of the biggest decline. The values of H1-H2 ratio were mainly lower Broadway’s musical performance when compared to the national. Conclusion: the samples analyzed in this study showed that belting influence is observed in the national musical theater when compared to Broadway’s franchise. These characteristics were verified by the greatest presence of metal, clear vowel “color” and vibrato