The intensities of vowels and plosive bursts and their impact on text intelligibility in singinga).

In classical singing, there are often problems with the intelligibility of sung text. The present study aims to test the hypotheses that (1) in loud operatic singing, compared with speaking, the intensity of voiceless plosives increases less than the intensity of vowels, leading to poorer recognition of plosives; and (2) pronouncing the plosive bursts with greater intensity improves their recognition. The acoustic analysis of nine opera arias in Italian from the Classical and Romantic periods performed by ten classically trained singers showed that the average difference in the intensity of vowels when sung and spoken was 14.6 dB [standard deviation (SD) = 7.2 dB], while the difference in the intensity of voiceless plosive bursts was only 6.6 dB (SD = 6 dB). In a perception test with 73 participants, increasing the intensity of the plosive bursts generally improved the recognition of plosives in the sung /a-plosive-a/ sequences, but mainly when reverberation and/or pink noise imitating instrumental accompaniments were added to the stimuli. At the same time, recognition of plosives was often better than chance even when the plosive burst was missing and replaced by silence.

Data sharing practices and data availability upon request differ across scientific disciplines.

Data sharing is one of the cornerstones of modern science that enables large-scale analyses and reproducibility. We evaluated data availability in research articles across nine disciplines in Nature and Science magazines and recorded corresponding authors' concerns, requests and reasons for declining data sharing. Although data sharing has improved in the last decade and particularly in recent years, data availability and willingness to share data still differ greatly among disciplines. We observed that statements of data availability upon (reasonable) request are inefficient and should not be allowed by journals. To improve data sharing at the time of manuscript acceptance, researchers should be better motivated to release their data with real benefits such as recognition, or bonus points in grant and job applications. We recommend that data management costs should be covered by funding agencies; publicly available research data ought to be included in the evaluation of applications; and surveillance of data sharing should be enforced by both academic publishers and funders. These cross-discipline survey data are available from the plutoF repository.