Dear Mike and Vocalisters
My apologies if I misunderstood your statement about female falsetto. I
thought you were suggesting that it was found in the range of the high
female voice.
If I understand your most recent post you are suggesting that the range in
which David Daniels sings, which corresponds to the low and lower middle
register in the female voice, is produced by the same function of the vocal
folds regardless of the sex of the singer.
This is an interesting idea and one I would like to discuss on this list.
Miller considers the voice between the female low passaggio and the high
passaggio point as the female middle voice. In female voices these two
points are usually about an octave or better apart in the area around D4-F4
and E5-G5. This would give the female voice a middle range of about and
octave or better.
Miller also calls the range between the male first passaggio and second
passaggio the male middle voice. The distance between these two passaggio
points in the male voice is about a fourth and it occurs in the area
between B3 and G4, depending on the voice type.
The reason Miller chooses to consider either of these seemingly different
ranges as middle voice is, if I understand him correctly, because these
ranges can be a kind of no-mans-land between the chest voice and the high
voice or head voice. It is necessary in this middle voice to learn how to
mix or blend the chest voice with the high voice and Miller gives a lot of
exercises to acheive this goal. How much chest is to be mixed with how
much middle is not determined by Miller but, through his workshops, I have
seen him ask for a variety of mixes in this range.
The difficulty with this mix for the male voice is that it must be achieved
within the range of about a fourth. This requires a more abrupt change
because the range is so small.
The difficulty with this mix for the female voice is that it must be
smoothed out over a bit more than an octave in the very heart of the music
they are asked to sing. Consequently, the female middle voice is often
split into the upper middle voice and the lower middle voice. The upper
middle voice mixes more head and less, if any chest. The lower middle
voice mixes more chest and less, if any head.
Singing in chest voice beyond about G4 is not recommended by Miller nor by
most voice teachers. Belters carry the heavy mechanism, which is the
foundation of the chest voice, above G4 all the way up to D5 and sometime
higher. Most belters do not consider this use of heavy mechanism above G4
to be chest voice but, rather, a completely different register because it
has much more ring than chest voice and it is usually achieved with a
substantially raised larynx and strong breath pressure.
Now to your suggestion that Daniels singing in the female middle register
and the possibility that it is functionally the same vocal mode regardless
of the sex of the singer. I would agree with this if the at-rest length
and mass of the vocal folds of the male who is singing in this range are
about the same as the at-rest length and mass of the female singer. This
would allow either to assume matching functional use in this vocal range.
However, if the at-rest length and mass of the vocal folds of the male is
greater than the at-rest length and mass of the vocal folds of the female
singer, it would seem unlikely that matching functional use could be
achieved. Clearly the male vocal folds would have to have substantially
more longitudinal tension than the female because their longer vocal folds
would have a naturally lower at-rest frequency. Another possibility is
that the male vocal folds would have some operating procedure to reduce
their length to match those of the female. If this latter condition is
possible, and I do not have any information that such is the case in full
singing, it would still not be a match for the vocal function of the female
voice in the same range.
Regards
--
Lloyd W. Hanson, DMA
Professor of Voice, Vocal Pedagogy
School of Performing Arts
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, AZ 86011
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