On Thu, 7 Dec 2000, Isabelle Bracamonte wrote:
> I don't think women always spoke in chest voice. Victorian fiction,
> for example, is full of references to the sweet, melodic, high,
> birdlike voices of its heroines and ladies of virtue.
Aha, but that's the whole point. It's the same sexist "virtues" that made
the higher voice less threatening to men in that era, both in singing and
speaking. It's culturally defined - "Victorian" upperclass women in Japan
had to live up to the same idiocy. If you look at musics which were
defined by the working classes, you will discover chesty sounds from the
women (Blues, modern Gospel, Bulgarian folk, Atlantic pop). I
think speaking in a head based mix can occur normally, but speaking in
sqeaky high head voice for a grown woman is a hegemonic phenomenon.
> So, mike, I dispute the idea that women "naturally"
> speak and ought to sing in chest voice. I think it's
> just a 20th-century thing, imposed by cultural ideas,
> and that the "ideal" women's voice wasn't supposed to
> be either strong or low in the past centuries... so it
> was allowed to be heady, its natural state.
Now I agree with you here that we shouldn't limit ourselves to our
speaking registers. That's going a little far, IMO. Still, Mike has a
point that we should remember from whence some of our treasured cultural
biases come.
Tako
|
|  |
