Dear Nick:
I studied your WEB page in which you define Reid's view of the historical meanings of register terms and the construct he has created to explain these historical terms in light of his understanding of "present" knowledge about vocal function. The only difficult I have with his approach is that it is not in line with present facts about vocal function.
The names we give to registers is not important. The names that have been give to vocal registers throughout history is even less important because we seldom can know what early writers really meant by their subjective definitions.
But, we do have quite clear knowledge of what occurs within the vocal mechanism as we ascend the scale from the lowest comfortable notes of a voice to the highest notes which an individual voice may achieve.
I quote from an earlier post I made regarding vocal fold function:
Your comments about the chest voice muscles and the head voice muscles are not correct. I could go into some details with you about this but at this point is is perhaps best to emphasize that it is the vocal folds which produce the oscillation that is the driver for a phonated tone (a tone as it emerges from the larynx) and it is the quality of this phonated tone that is the source sound material out of which the final resonated vocal sound is created through resonance.
The muscles that close the vocal folds (adduction) are the arytenoid muscles (lateral cricoarytenoids, and the interarytenoids) as they pivot the arytenoid cartilages and the vocal folds which are attached to them, into a closed position which is necessary for phonation. The degree of closure determines the quality of the phonated sound. A partial closure will produce a more breathy phonated tone or, if the vocal folds are long enough as in the male voice, a falsetto tone. A complete closure that is achieved as the result of correct pre-phonatory tuning will produce a balanced phonated tone that is rich in the correct harmonic spectrum. A complete closure that has an excessive degree of medial tension across the vocal folds will produce a pressed tone that sounds overly tense and contains some harmonic spectrum that is not natural for the fundamental being phonated. Only the second example given above ( A complete closure that is achieved as the result of correct pre-phonatory tuning) displays the maximum quality potential of the individual voice.
The cricothyroid muscles are basically stretching muscles that lengthen the vocal folds and, in so doing, increase the longitudinal tension along the folds. The cricothyroid muscles achieve this lengthening of the vocal folds by contracting and thereby pulling the lower posterior of the thyroid cartilage toward the posterior of the cricothyroid cartilage.
Neither the arytenoid nor the cricothyroid muscles come in direct contact with the vocal folds themselves. They act only on the cartilages to which the vocal folds are attached. Therefore it is not possible for either of these muscles to be solely the chest voice muscles or head voice muscles. The arytenoid muscles only are involved in closure of the vocal folds and the cricothyroid muscles are only involved in the stretching of the vocal folds.
Because a complete, balanced closure of the vocal folds is usually considered the most desirable posture for maximum efficiency in phonation, once this condition is achieved the arytenoid muscles have no more effect on the phonated tone except to maintain that ideal closure position.
However, as the cricothyroid muscles stretch and lengthen the vocal folds the folds began to thin along their longitudinal edges and are thus capable of oscillating more quickly which, in turn, produces a phonated tone of higher and higher pitch. Chest voice is nothing more than short fat vocal folds which tend to oscillate more slowly because of their increased mass. Head voice is nothing more than longer, thinner vocal folds which oscillate more quickly because of their reduced mass. There is also some degree of damping of the vocal folds, that is, reducing or eliminating oscillation of a portion of the folds for the highest notes and this damping is partially induced by a tipping of the arytenoid cartilages toward the center of the glottis. It is believed that the arytenoid muscles have some responsibility for this tipping action. Such damping does not occur in all voices.
Falsetto is simply an incomplete oscillation of the lengthened vocal folds which occurs because the vocal folds are not in complete closure or adduction and are, therefore, less efficient. Only the very edges of the vocal folds are set in oscillation (the mucosal membrane) and their very slight mass produces a tone that is lacking in the harmonic spectrum that would normally be present. Falsetto, therefore, is not a form of head voice. Head voice requires a complete closure of the vocal folds.
Going from falsetto into head voice is an extremely difficult procedure for most singers. It requires that the partially adducted vocal folds be completely adducted in a correctly balanced manner. This degree of control of vocal function can only be achieved with special exercises and a rather long training period. It is much easier to achieve complete balanced and accurate adduction of the vocal folds by practicing correct vocal onsets because such onsets invoke the body's natural tendency to prepare muscle system for activation. This is called pre-phonatory tuning. In other words, the traditional Italian technique of practicing how the voice begins a tone (now called "onset of tone" previously called "attack of tone") is key to learning correct phonation.
Mixing chest voice with head voice in some arrangement or other is often spoken of on this list. but the reality is that the voice is merely in transition from thicker vocal folds to thinner folds. One cannot be in a thick folds conformation and, at the same time, be in a thinner vocal fold configuration. In that sense it is not possible to mix chest voice and head voice. But it is possible to be singing a given pitch, say in the upper middle of the vocal range, in a choice of conformations such as with slightly thicker vocal folds (chest voice sounding) or slightly thinner vocal folds (head voice sounding). But each configuration of the vocal folds in this example is unique and they are not mixtures of each other. -- -- Lloyd W. Hanson
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