Within Japanese traditional music, the existence of Ryukyu music is of great importance. Okinawa was, geographically, an important waypoint on the route by which culture travelled from China and Southeast Asia to Japan. In music as well, the sanxian came from China, and was developed into the sanshin in Okinawa, and then further into the shamisen on the Japanese mainland. In all cases, they were used as an accompaniment for singing, and had a wide influence. The climate and environment of Okinawa are quite different from those of the Japanese mainland, but nevertheless a number of old Japanese customs and expressions still survive there. The vocalization of songs is one such example. In contrast to Japanese music, where head voice and falsetto may be used for high notes depending on vocal range, in Ryukyu music the natural voice is used to sing all registers. This practice comes from Japan’s Buddhist practices of scriptural chant. This research focuses particularly on traditional Ryukyu music within the musical traditions of Okinawa, traces the development of its vocalization, and clarifies its points of similarity and difference with Japanese music from the perspective of voice analysis. It traces this process through previous research and sources, and also in notational practices, supplemented by experimental analysis of vocalization in Japanese Buddhist shõmyõ. The experimental results show that Buddhist shõmyõ has characteristic vocalizations in the natural voice. This suggests the possibility that Buddhist shõmyõ and traditional Ryukyu music share the practice of vocalization in the natural voice.

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The purpose of this study is to review the references on <voices that echo far away in solo singing< and <choral singing<, and to examine for <voices that sound far away in choral singing<. The survey was conducted by referring to several well-known books in each field of singing techniques, CiNii (Information datable operated by the National Institute of Informatics), and Journal of Research in Singing and Voice for the past 10 years. The following results were obtained: For singing far away voices, J.Sundberg (1974), T. Bartholomew (1934), S. Wang(1983), B. L. Pelsky (1942), W. Seidner (1983) and others have shown that they have the singer's formant acoustic feature. In Japan, several studies have reported the effects of singing instruction by measuring the growth rate of the singer's formant before and after singing instruction. Next, the result of investigating the literature on <choral singing<. Voicing volume is slightly lower than the solo, and the high-frequency spectrum level is also reduced. There is almost no difference in vocalization between solo and chorus. In choral singing, it should be possible to avoid the appearance of beats due to the vibrato sound effect, and pitch accuracy is required when vibrato is few. From these investigations, in order to obtain a voice that echo far away in chorus, the vocalization method that makes the singer's formant appear, the volume that can be sung while listening to the sounds of other parts, and the singing method that sings with less vibrate were obtained as knowledge. From now on, the development of the applied teaching method in choral singing will be needed to solve these issues.

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