Vocalist.org archive


From:  Tako Oda <toda@m...>
Date:  Mon May 6, 2002  6:18 pm
Subject:  acoustic properties of head voice ques.

Mike wrote:

> if the answer is no, to the last question, what about the very light
> tenor? does his voice behave more similarly to a female voice than to a
> bass? every once in a while, i come across a tenor whose voice didn't
> change over night (the way mine did). instead, their voices got gradually
> lower over the period of as much as two years. these guys usually have no
> break or, falsetto.

Fwiw, my voice never broke. My speaking voice descended gradually through my
teens, but I did not lose my soprano extension until I was in my early twenties,
when it changed into an alto voice after a brief period of illness. Now I am a
run-of-the-mill countertenor with a not-unusually-high speaking voice.

In one of his books, Peter Giles actually talks about how many professional
countertenors report not having "cracked" in their teens:

Giles, P. The Countertenor. London: Frederick Muller Limited, 1982.

It is a strange phenomenon that makes me wonder about the differences in upper
voice between countertenors and your usual falsetto-producing men. There's been
precious little research in this area, but Ardran and Wulstan produced some
x-rays that implied there isn't much mechanical difference between the two. So
who knows?

Ardran, G. M. and David Wulstan. “The Alto or Countertenor Voice.” Music and
Letters 48, no. 1 (1967): 17-22.

I can almost always tell which register I am using, and so do the vast majority
of male and female alto and mezzo singers. If my recent study is any indication,
9 out of 10. The haute contre had smooth changes, everyone else had to negotiate
the registers consciously. This doesn't mean you can hear our breaks, we just
know they're there.

Tako




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