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From: Tako Oda
To: VOCALIST <vocalist>
Subject: Re: Questions... (extreme notes)
Send reply to: VOCALIST <vocalist>

"Julian Lovegrove" wrote:
> I'd love to hear proof. I've never heard of anyone singing over 3
> octaves. And I mean singing, not vocalising.
>
>> To anyone who thinks that 7 octaves is impossible they are wrong...I
>> can hit (I know for sure) 5 octaves. I'm not bragging or anything
>> but i think that it is possible.
>>
>>Sabrina

Dear Julian,

Below is an example of an unamplified E1 recorded live for a performance
of Dylan Bolles' "This is Truth". Maybe the excerpt below is not what
you would call "singing" but I believe it served an expressive purpose
within the context of the piece. So to me, that's singing. In this
excerpt I am singing a pedal tone, but I can sing words down there too.

http://
www.mills.edu/PEOPLE/gr.pages/toda.public.html/music/sounds/truth_deep.wav
or
www.mills.edu/PEOPLE/gr.pages/toda.public.html/music/sounds/truth_deep.aif

It is low enough that you'll barely be able to hear me over the string
bass playing E3 unless you've got decent sized speakers on your
computer. Most computer speakers are too small to really do justice to
frequencies lower than C2.

So anyway, that gives me quite a bit more than 4 octaves (my usual range
is countertenor) that don't require amplification. I personally would
never sing below a D3 (low alto D) in an "classical" context, because
the timbre below that isn't in line with that aesthetic. But the world
doesn't revolve around classical, and I find it quite liberating to sing
different kinds of musics. It's all singing to me :)

Tako Oda
Graduate Student in Composition
Mills College Music Department
http://www.mills.edu/PEOPLE/gr.pages/toda.public.html/music/singer.html