i have just realized i have violated my own rule about giving examples of what i mean. the idea of the expression of speech being carried over into singing, is best seen in people like tony bennett, frank sinatra, mel torme (who do not sing with a classical technique, as has been suugested in the past on this list) and most anyone considered a crooner. paul mccartney and john lennon are/were both speech like singers. chrissy hynde, sara evans and jamie o'neal, too.
i would say that most pop singers we hear these days are very speech oriented singers. in fact, i think most forms of vocal music are sung in a speech like manner. as most are amateurs and self taught professionals. what else would they do?
when i say speech like, i mean the tone and the emphasis of words. these are the only two factors that can be carried over from speech to singing. if we are specific about a pitch, that is different from speech. while the stretching of a word's length might be a distortion of how one would speak that, it is still a distortion. the longer the word is stretched, the less like speech it becomes. when one goes out of the speaking range, the singing is either going to be the same or, different. if one keeps singing in the same manner as in the speaking range, on the higher pitches, it will sound 'yelly'. if one makes changes, the more changes one makes, the less like speech the singing will become.
singers who do something different when singing out of the speech range will either try to make the speech range match the 'something different' or, not. classical singers are the group that make the biggest attempt to make the speaking range match the 'something different'. because female classical singers sing so much in what they claim to be 'head' voice, their low range or, speaking range, tend to be more garbled than the men. compare joan sutherland (or, leontyne price, for that matter) singing almost anything to teresa stratas' recordings of weill songs. stratas' low range is more speech like for these recordings than is usual for a female classical singer, including her. one can understand the words she sings rather well. joan sutherland, on the other hand...well, don't you think she just sang 'ah' for everything?
if constructed tone resembled nothing in human vocal usage, one might say 'ah, what an achievement' but unfortunately, the constructed tone of female opera singers is easily ridiculed. that's not to say that the mocking imitations are an exact replica, it simply means that, when most people hear it for the first time, their usual reaction is not 'ooh, how magical', their first reaction is to make fun of it. i had a friend in college (a female classical singer) who used to practice in her first floor apartment. one day, after practicing, she was headed to the grocery store. the kids in the neighborhood had been standing outside her apartment. they asked her "hey lady, what were you doing in there?" she said "i was practicing my singing." the boy responded "oh! we thought you were crazy." the point is: even classical singing resembles something found in human vocal usage so, it is a real stretch to call it an abstraction. in fact, it might be speech like singing, as well, if one speaks like ted baxter or julia childs.
mike
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