michael,
in the old italian textbook my wife has ('prego' published by random
house-sorry, couldn't find my dictionary), squillare is defined as 'to ring'.
squillo, in the glossary to jerome hines 'great singers on great singing'
is defined as 'a trumpet-like quality to a voice'. in richard miller's
'training tenor voices', in spectral analyses of corelli, pavarotti, domingo
and bjoerling, it appears that there is more activity above 3300hz. in the
voices of corelli and pavarotti than there is in the other two. it is my
impression that the voices of the former are considered to have more
'squillo' than the voices of the latter, the latter two often being
considered more baritonal and therefore, darker in sound.
with regard to twang, twang is often coupled with 'nasal'. ross perot
might be a good example of someone who would be considered to have a 'nasal
twang'. someone afflicted with a cleft soft-palate, i'm guessing, might
also make a 'nasal murmur' similar to that of a parkinson's sufferer. (here
comes the silly part) imitating both, i did a spectral analysis (i'm very new
at it) using gram50 on my home pc. the cleft palate imitation produced a
reading with everything bunched up in the lower frequencies while the ross
perot imitation produced a reading with eveything bunched up in the
2000-3800hz. range with everything more spread out in the lower frequencies.
the terms 'nasal', 'ring', 'squillo', 'twang', etc. are all clearly
subjective descriptions of sound. ring, squillo and twang may, to some
people, mean exactly the same thing where, to others, they may represent the
good, the bad and the ugly of the same general idea. to me, 'nasal' means
nothing anymore. ross perot is called nasal and so is sylvester stallone.
they couldn't be more opposite.
mike
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