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3 weeks ago
1
Many years ago I read a book where the author interviewed 40 famous opera singers, including Pavarotti, on their technique.
I remember being struck by the differences in the ways the singers thought about their craft. While the interviewer didn’t exactly ask everyone the same questions, there was enough overlap that the tensions between them were clear.
What I was most curious about – how different singers answered the same questions about their technique – was not easy to see because of the structure of the book: I wanted the data organized by topic, but the book was organized by interview.
So I spent some time yesterday playing around with seeing if Claude could do a first pass at this kind of digital-humanities-style data analysis by taking the knowledge from the book and restructuring it into a form where previously hidden connections would be revealed.
I initially thought I would need to do a lot of manual preprocessing, and spent some time figuring out how to segment the body text away from the annotations that appear on each page.
Here’s a visualization I made to help me evaluate how a particular value for the decision boundary would look when applied across more pages.
After some more unsatisfactory futzing around I realized that if all I was interested in was an approximate answer, the raw messiness is okay and given the forgiving nature of LLMs, this level of attention to detail was probably just a waste of time.
So I decided to just chuck all the text into Claude to see how it would do.
Here’s Claude’s response to a simple prompt asking it to find and catalog the most striking juxtapositions of disagreement areas between two singers on the same subject. I asked it to reorder the topics so that the topics that are more relatable to non-singers come first, and within each topic, to reorder the items so that they maximally contrast with the items to either side of them.
| NATURAL VS. TECHNICAL | Rise Stevens | Less technical thinking is better | “When I did not know about the larynx I was singing better… Some people think so much about all of these technical things that they really mess themselves up” |
| Luciano Pavarotti | Years of intense technical work required | “It took me six years of study… never change ideas… the first five or six months it is very depressing” | |
| John Alexander | Singing is natural like speaking | “Singing is simply sustained speech… I feel almost all vocal problems can be solved by shaping the singing technique to conform to the speaking technique” | |
| MENTAL FOCUS | Birgit Nilsson | Think low for high notes | “The higher the note goes, the lower the support. The support is as low as possible” |
| Martina Arroyo | Stay mentally high throughout | “You should stay mentally high throughout the entire scale” | |
| Luciano Pavarotti | Position never changes, always high | “For me the position never changes… it is high, even when I sing a low note” | |
| PLACEMENT | Cornell MacNeil | Sing backward, placement is nonsense | “Placement is nonsense… utter, complete crap. You sing it backward” |
| Anna Moffo | Extreme forward placement | “The place is the most forward, focused sound, complete with overtones” | |
| James McCracken | Warns against over-focusing on mask | “If somebody decides he’s going to sing in the mask before he knows how to sing… it’s thin. There’s not enough body resonance” | |
| Placido Domingo | Think way out in front | “My thinking of singing is over there… Way out in front of me… I’m not thinking of placing the voice in the mask” | |
| Paul Plishka | Everything in the nose | “To me, everything happens here in the nose” | |
| SUPPORT/APPOGGIO | Luciano Pavarotti | Push down, compress against cords | “Appoggiare means… push down the voice… in a way that it doesn’t move anymore…” |
| Cornell MacNeil | Floating ribs, diaphragm overrated | “I think the diaphragm is enormously overrated… I think it comes more from the floating ribs in the back” | |
| Rosa Ponselle | Lean on diaphragm, push out | “Appoggiare… lean on it… Always push out with the stomach and abdomen during the phrase, not in” | |
| Beverly Sills | Both diaphragm AND larynx | “How does one exist without the other?… I use that ‘sitting on the diaphragm’ to produce the feeling that I want in my throat” | |
| THROAT SPACE | John Alexander | Same space throughout range | “I try to keep as much space as possible, but always the same throughout the entire range of my voice” |
| Sherrill Milnes | More space going higher | “More spacing… More lift of the soft palate as you’re going higher, and… more opening in the throat” | |
| Luciano Pavarotti | Less space in passaggio | “I think I give less space when I go through the passaggio, and then more space after I’ve left it” | |
| Placido Domingo | Horizontal to vertical shift | “You are having a horizontal sound… to think vertical, in a way… up and down at the same time” | |
| OPEN THROAT | Cornell MacNeil | Meaningless concept | “It doesn’t mean anything to me… I think it’s nonsense!” |
| Paul Plishka | No sensation in throat at all | “I don’t know. I know the vocal cords are in the throat, but when I’m singing I have no sensation in my throat at all” | |
| Magda Olivero | Don’t force larynx down | “If you teach a young student to push down the larynx… goodbye! That he should do automatically” | |
| LARYNX POSITION | Bonaldo Giaiotti | Firmly lower it all the way | “He demonstrated… breathing deeply, which caused his Adam’s apple to descend firmly all the way down” |
| Dr. Leo Reckford | Minimal movement only (millimeters) | “The larynx should make minimal excursions up or down… measured in millimeters… It’s definitely wrong!” | |
| Louis Quilico | Must bring it down independently | “To bring down the larynx is not a natural thing… Yes!” (demonstrated independent up/down jiggling) | |
| Pablo Elvira | Never pull it down | “The larynx should never be pulled down… You should never feel a down pull” | |
| Sherrill Milnes | Low larynx equals open throat | “Open throat… low larynx… Those are in a sense the same thing. If your throat is open your larynx is low” | |
| Cornell MacNeil | Don’t think about it at all | “As soon as you pull something somewhere, you’ve already created a tension” | |
| James McCracken | Larynx slightly down | “Do we agree that an open throat has to do with the larynx being slightly down? Yep” | |
| Régine Crespin | Beginning of yawn sensation | “The beginning of the yawn… Be suddenly, quickly astonished… Start breathing by the nose, and be astonished” | |
| PASSAGGIO | Luciano Pavarotti | Squeeze intensely for years | “It took me six years… you become cyanotic, red in the face… you must really make the voice more squeezed” |
| John Alexander | Don’t think about it | “The less we think about passaggio, the better off we are” | |
| Marilyn Horne | Squeeze | “We really tightened up the middle and especially the passaggio. We squeezed on that passaggio” |
I spot-checked some entries and confirmed that the quotes I looked at were accurately sourced from the underlying interviews. (I’ve also fixed up some entries manually, and see other problems that I’m not going to bother fixing right now since this is just a quick post.)
The level of synthesis here is pretty impressive to me. While the result isn’t of particularly high quality, it nonetheless captures some real patterns from the underlying text that are worth investigating further. A real analysis would take orders of magnitude more time and this exploration at least shows that a table like the above is an interesting way to look at the data.
I think there’s a huge amount of potential in this kind of ad-hoc, task-specific dimensionality reduction, particularly for books and other rich source material, where the same knowledge can be projected into many different structures from which it is possible to much more easily make surprising connections.
