Marthea, the terms that work for me is falsetto is a quality of voice that is weak and breathy. It is the typical starting quality of the head range for both male and females. Once the vocal muscles start to develop the tone becomes more focused and you get what I call pure head voice. Many still call this falsetto, but I make a distinction because the pure head voice can be further developed to add more depth, to the point of reaching the complete performance quality top voice in the male. Falsetto is characterized by incomplete closure of the glottis and only the edges of the folds vibrating. I would say that what I am calling pure head voice still only has the edges of the folds vibrating, but the glottal opening is in a parallel position so you have a true phonation and no excess breath passing over the folds. This quality can be exercised through the complete range from top to bottom. It has an obviously odd feel in the lower voice, but is an excellent exercise to eliminate excess weight in the bottom half of the voice. This is helpful in preparing one to approach the passaggio in an easy manner. Once the head voice is purified it is a small step to allow the complete voice to take part in the tone. This has been very successful for me in avoiding too large of a tone in the lower range. It should still be focused and brilliant so it has carrying power, but slender so you can pass into the top range with relative ease. This can help explain some of the confusion between male/female and tenor/counter-tenor. In the male voice the folds are longer and thicker, so there is a more obvious excursion when allowing more depth into the tone. There is an excellent statement on this subject in Jerome Hines' book "Great Singers on Great Singing". The chapter with the voice doctor Leo Reckford, he stated that in relation to Garcia's theory of registers there was something missing. You have two different mechanical principals, one the edge is vibrating the other the complete width. Reckford postulated that it was actually only a difference in quantity of fold that vibrated that determined what we hear as register differences. So what we hear as falsetto is only the edges vibrating, and you can add air pressure to that so you vibrate more than the edges. He says "When you can finally mix it to the degree that half of the width of each vocal cord is vibrating, you have the ideal mixed tone. But it is still only a quantitative difference between the falsetto and the full tone of the head voice...That means that it is only the quantity of vibration which changes. It is not the quality of the whole production." I would say you could change the whole quality, but that is how you get drastic changes in tonal quality as in yodeling or when the voice "breaks". The way I would explain counter-tenor singing then would be they sing so only a smaller amount of the width of the fold vibrates. This would correlate to a similar amount of fold width the female uses in their complete voice because of the difference in innate length and thickness. This also explains why the old italian school used the messa di voce exercise. Through the exercise of increasing loudness on a single pitch they could exercise the gradual increase of vocal fold width vibrating to join the registers functioning together. So to recap; pure head is piano like falsetto but not breathy, a pure tone. As the width of vibrating fold is increased on the same pitch you increase the loudness, or vice versa. It really is more complicated than this, but to try to explain it would make me keel over from my brain tripping on itself.
Michael
>I have a question. How many of you can tell when a male voice is singing >in >falsetto? I've encountered a few men who go into "head" (I think) and I'm >just not sure which it is. Your comment, John, makes me think that if it >sounds full and rich then it can't possibly be falsetto. Aside from the >sound (and being able to peer into someone's throat) is there a way the >singer himself knows that he's singing in falsetto? I'm not disputing your >thoughts. I just don't have a great deal of experience working with the >male voice and am trying to learn more about it! > >Thanks! > >Marthea > >
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