Lloyd,
I know you are planning to read Don Miller's dissertation,
but I couldn't resist making one more comment :) .
COMMENT:
The 'call of the voice', which Richard Miller describes, is
explained in Don Miller's register theory by the tendency
of male singers to tune the first (lowest) formant of the vocal
tract to the second harmonic of the sung tone, when approaching
the passaggio. This tuning implies a raising of the larynx as pitch
ascends and the resulting sound quality (with a dominant second
harmonic) sounds like 'calling' or 'belting'.
Avoiding the 'call' thus implies leaving the first formant in
place (a.o. by keeping a low larynx) and moving to an alternative
resonance, based on the second formant and/or the singer's formant.
This results in a relatively dark, but ringing vowel, in which the
dominant harmonic is no longer the second, but rather the third,
fourth or even fifth harmonic, depending on the vowel.
The crux of this is that learning to traverse the male passaggio
(and similarly the female passaggio) seems to be simply based
on 'clever' vocal tract tuning. It was quite a shock for me to learn
this, since terms like 'mixing chest and head' (apart from their
subjective meaning) become rather questionable.
Wim Ritzerfeld
- engineer, singer and aspiring voice teacher -
(in no particular order)
> To define the male passaggio area, Miller suggests that the singer
sing in
> his chest voice in a continuing ascending scale. When the call
voice
> appears one has found the lower passaggio point. When, as the
singer
> continues to ascend the scale the call voice gives way to either
the head
> voice or the falsetto, one has found the top of the passaggio
area. With
> this approach it is usually quite easy to know the problem area for
the
> male voice and then begin the process of implementing the head
voice above
> the passaggio and once that is accomplished , bringing that head
voice down
> through the passaggio and adding in the necessary chest voice but
in such a
> manner that the call voice is avoided. Singing down from the head
voice,
> adding the chest voice to create a mixed voice in the passaggio is
the key
> to building a male voice that does not appear to have any passaggio
breaks.
>
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