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Brief Overview: Demi Lovato steals the show with her 2020 Super Bowl performance characterized by extensive vibrato use, a wide pitch range, and impressive vocal control without autotune. She demonstrated powerful high notes and versatile low tones with clear consonant enunciation and clarity throughout.
Vibrato: Demi Lovato makes heavy use of vibrato throughout her performance. The image on the right, a snippet of the pitch track and narrowband spectrogram from her performance, illustrates this heavy use. There are over 30 instances of vibrato throughout Lovato's entire performance, which one can determine by closely examining the entire pitch track.
Figure 1: Pitch tracking (66.5-97s)
There are a few standout moments which highlight Demi's vibrato style.
During the final word, “Brave,” we see Demi hit two distinct notes, changing tone during the [a] vowel. The word is held for a very long time and the second vibrato is especially impressive due to the uniformity and length.
Here we see Demi hitting multiple vibratos, one for each note of the passage “O say does that star spangled”
Next, we see two vibratos with a passing tone in between during the performance of the word “wave.”
Pitch range and register: Demi showcases an incredible vocal range in her performance. The data reveals that the average pitch of her singing is approximately 459.3 Hz, demonstrating her ability to maintain a strong middle register. Impressively, her maximum pitch reaches up to 1210.5 Hz, highlighting her capacity for hitting high notes with clarity and power. On the other end of the spectrum, her minimum pitch dips to 162.7 Hz, which showcases her versatility and control in lower tones. This broad range effectively illustrates her exceptional vocal talent.
Autotune: There is no evidence of autotune. This is evident from the vocal slides and lack of online evidence of autotune during this super bowl performance.
Presence of belting: Given Demi's strong vocals and vocal range, there are quite a few instances of belting, which is characterized by a stronger second partial (with respect to F0).
"a" Glair
note for later: there isn't actually belting here.
"a" Air
"a" in wave
Singer's formant: Demi's very strong, full and high pitched voice makes it difficult to detect singer's formant in the long-term FFT.
Above: Wide-range (note hertz range) long-term FFT. As we can see, it looks like there may be some singer's formant but it is not immediately obvious because there is a lot of noise in the FFT and Demi's high-pitched powerful voice obscures any clear cluster patterns.
Above: Same long-term FFT (only up to 500 Hz). Again here we see that around 3000 Hz, the volume is certainly within 30dB of the maximum, however, the formant pattern is not as clear as what we've seen in class.
Intelligibility of consonants: throughout the performance, consonants are clear and the enunciation makes it easy to understand each word. In particular, for the consonants in “rocket’s red glare,” we note that
[r] is voiced, sonorant
[k] is voiceless, obstruent
[t] is voiceless, obstruent
[s] is voiceless, obstruent
[d] is voiced, obstruent
[g] is voiced, obstruent
and [l] is voiced, sonorant
As we can see, Demi slides up on the [a] in “and,” and slides off on the [r] in “glare.”
Pitch Interruption: Additionally, we can see that from the spectrogram and pitch track, pitch is not interrupted much if at all despite the voiceless and obstruent consonants in the phrase.
Vibrato: There is heavy use of vibrato throughout the five words. Below I have provided an example on the use of it in the word "glare."
Starts after consonant “g” on vowel/diphthong [eɪ] in the word “glare”
Trail off / glide out (seen above)
Duration: 1.1s = 1100 ms
Num cycles: 7
Average vibrato rate: 7/1.1 Hz = 6.36 Hz
Average pitch: 659.1 Hz (D#5)
Average max pitch: 694.2 Hz
Average min pitch: 586.0 Hz
Full range: 569.0 to 716.9 Hz
Extent: 54.1 Hz
Extent in semitones: 6*log_2(694.2/586.0) = 1.47 st
Extent description: 659 Hz ± 1.47 st
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