> More on a quasi-falsetto in Wagnerian sopranos: can > I just say that the > marvellous Deborah Voigt had not a trace of it
I like the term "quasi-falsetto" for what the technical purists call "pure/unsupported head tone."
When I sing (in that flipped, high breathy little-girl tone), I call it falsetto because it feels like a different technical method than singing in head voice. I can not, for example, crescendo this type of tone without a big ugly yodel break (followed by a sudden leap in volume as I find myself in regular old head voice). It feels just the same as when, an octave or two lower, I make the big ugly break between head and belty chest voice.
I know that tenors can train their voices to mix and switch without a preceptible break -- so a tenor can begin a note in falsetto, swell it into full voice, and you'll never hear the difference -- but I've never trained my falsetto, and only use it for effect (when I need a pianissimo on a high note, say a B or C, that I can't manage the "real" way). I consider it cheating, though.
I suspect that the female voice has three registers (chest, head, falsetto). Not knowing what whistle register is or how it is produced or feels, I acknowledge that there may be in fact four registers, including whistle.
I know that my perception of these registers has been rebuffed by the graph-and-spectrum school of vocal pedagogy (Lloyd or someone, doesn't Miller disregard the female falsetto?), but what I feel is what I got.
Isabelle B.
===== Isabelle Bracamonte San Francisco, CA ibracamonte@y...
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