When Does a Sung Tone Start?

Although the consonant is mostly considered as the start of a syllable in phonetics and orthography, musicians generally agree that the vowel onset in singing should be synchronized with the beat. As a test of this assumption, the current investigation analyzes the time interval between vowel onsets and piano accompaniment onsets in a set of songs performed by international vocal artists and published on commercial CD recordings. The results show that, most commonly, the accompanists synchronized their tones with the singers' vowel onsets. Nevertheless, examples of lead and lag were found, probably made for expressive purposes. The lead and lag varied greatly between songs, being smallest in a song performed in a fast tempo and longest in a song performed in a slow tempo.