Isabelle,
I've noticed before that when you talk about your voice, it seems like a
female version of my own baritone voice. I assume that yours is not a
common perspective for a female singer.
I too have a high falsetto and yet I can swell and diminuendo on it (I
just tried, and since this is a library I had to be discrete!). I think
what makes me want to call it falsetto is that it has that flutey,
sine-tone sort of quality: the larynx is very high, but, at least at a
quiet dynamic, it's fairly easy to do. (This contradicts a post of mine
from earlier this afternoon. oh well) It has a ceiling of around mf,
though, which means that it would only be useful for small rooms or
microphone work - I suppose it's what Bobby McFerrin does to get his upper
range.
I have another falsetto, which has a similar tone quality, can be much
louder and is so strenuous in alt to produce that it isn't good for me to
do for very long at a time. This one I can add to or blend with head tone,
like those tenors of which you write. I had to practice to minimise the
yodel/click/flip effect - and in practice if I want to sing a high G or A
at any dynamic level less that mp I have to so mix. (There, I wasn't
contradicting myself after all!)
In sum: I define falsetto by the sound quality - somewhat flutey - and
assume that this is the result of vocal chords vibrating in an air stream
without coming close enough either to interfere with one another's
vibration or to close and thus produce a square wave rather than a sine wave.
(I was speaking to a teenage girl yesterday who had had a laryngoscope
examination which showed that only one of her vocal chords vibrated,
according to the doctor. I wonder if this is related? My own idea, which I
communicated to her, was that this may have been due to the airstream being
mis-directed either above or below the chords. He speaking voice did seem
slightly odd, as if she had a cold or adenoidal problems, which, if one
tries to mental subtract the effects of vowel resonance, might well equate
to a sine wave kind of sound. Hmmm!)
I wonder if, Isabelle, you feel that your head and chest voice are
separated in a particular zone, or if, as I do, you feel you can take chest
up high or head down low? I might also (too many ideas, I know) suggest
something whose truth I have yet to discover: that good breath support and
gola aperta, combined with maximal resonance, might utilize the resonance
characteristics of both head and chest voice and thus essentially make it
'one voice'?
Sorry to go on so long. It's quieter here in the summer. john
At 01:17 PM 5/30/00 -0700, you wrote:
...
>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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John Blyth
Baritono robusto e lirico
Brandon, Manitoba, Canada
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