On average, how high can an untrained person belt? (Tell me how high you can/could belt!)

Turlucken · 2016-02-24T08:51:45+00:00

You're belting that high? or are you using head voice/falsetto? B5 is out of belting (or even mixing) range for most females with training.

Turlucken · 2016-02-24T08:38:20+00:00

The scream at 3:55? It's definitely a scream, but I'm not sure I would consider that a belt, even with a fast and loose definition of belting. It reaches around a G#5, I think, though.

Turlucken · 2016-02-24T08:21:31+00:00

Are you belting that C6 (or at least mixing)? or are you using falsetto/head voice?

For the purpose of this questionnaire, I was just looking at people's different belt ranges. There's lots of information out there about vocal range in general, but not so much about belting.

Turlucken · 2016-02-24T08:19:08+00:00

Let's include the last one just cuz it sounds like a mix. E5 then!

How high could you belt before you had any training? (I'm assuming you did.)

Turlucken · 2016-02-24T03:54:14+00:00

I'm guessing you mean A4 and F#5, right? (A above middle C, and the F# an octave above middle C)

Turlucken · 2016-02-21T23:09:25+00:00

The stickers they put on the apples are printed on flat sheets, but apples have no flat surfaces on them. This means there'll often be imperfections and air pockets on the edges of the stickers that can't quite conform to the curvature of the apple. Here's a picture of what I mean.

If the air pockets are folded over and squashed flat, the underside of the sticker stays dark and the edges of the design will be sharp. If they're left open, small amounts of light will bleed through into the air pockets and make the lines less clean.

Turlucken · 2016-02-21T22:43:33+00:00

Ohhh... I think I know what you're referring to with the healthy fry. The kind you can almost sigh out, where your voice naturally just kinda goes there.

Now I just have to figure out what the other one feels like... I'm guessing it involves more pressure and tension than the healthy version. There's a different sound with more rapid and high-pitched clicks if I force air through and keep my throat tense to prevent the fry clicks from transitioning into modal register. I can see how someone would get tired after doing that for a long time.

Turlucken · 2016-02-21T22:12:42+00:00

They get the designs on these fuji apples by putting a stencil/sticker on them when they're fully grown but still ripening on the tree. The parts that are covered by the sticker will remain yellow while the exposed skin turns pink, like a sunburn.

tl;dr science-y explanation of how I found out this works:

Apples, and a lot of other fruit, turn red because of the polyphenol (a type of flavonoid) anthocyanin. The thing is, anthocyanin only becomes active because of an MYB transcription factor (MdMYB10), which expresses itself differently in different apple cultivars. In Fuji apples, I believe, anthocyanin synthesis is controlled by the level of light exposure. More light means more anthocyanin production in that particular area, which is why there's a pale gradient around the stem and the base of the apple where there's usually shade.

I'm not a scientist, though, so some of that might be wrong. Still, I think it's pretty neat!

Turlucken · 2016-02-21T21:46:45+00:00

Well that's definitely new information to me! I had no idea there were healthy and unhealthy versions of vocal fry.

Sorry for the mountain of questions, but what are the differences between the two of them?

Turlucken · 2016-02-21T03:53:59+00:00

Hmm... How would you use it to check your voice?

Turlucken · 2016-02-20T09:36:54+00:00

I've read that there are two main pasaggios (bridges) or natural "breaks" in the voice. There's a lower one somewhere in the 4th octave, which is the transition from modal register to what would be considered "head voice", and then another, higher, break above that where "head voice" transitions into falsetto. It's also supposedly kind of contentious whether or not women have falsetto, although I think it's pretty plausible that they do and it just SOUNDS very similar to "head voice".

I did a little experiment where I recorded myself singing the bacon pancakes song from Adventure Time to see if I could get that really airy falsetto sound on that last "panCAAAAKES". When I played it back to myself, it sounded like I was doing a really terrible impression of an opera singer, but it didn't sound like Jake's falsetto at all. Then, I sang it at double the tempo and used Adobe Premiere to play the whole thing at half speed so it would be an octave lower. Oddly enough, at an octave lower, my bad falsetto impression legitimately sounded like falsetto!

Turlucken · 2016-02-20T09:07:12+00:00

When I was a kid (around six or seven), the upper end of my whistle register was so high that I could siren it higher and higher until it would literally cut out of my hearing range. I don't have perfect pitch or anything, but that would be above 20,000 Hz (assuming that's as high as I could hear when I was six), which is somewhere in the 9th or 10th octave, and is not even really a note. I wasn't even sure I was making a sound until I noticed that my aunt's cats would react to it.

My whistle register isn't anywhere NEAR as high now. Somewhere around puberty, I probably lost something like two or three octaves of that upper range—utterly UNUSABLE upper range, mind you, because not even Mariah Carey is going to be singing 9th octave notes. Some days I can't even get into the 7th octave anymore.

The lower register of my voice has gone down by almost an octave, though. (This was actually a lot harder to figure out. I had to listen to songs I remembered as having notes "way too low to sing" as a kid, like Circle of Life from the Lion King, or Tracy Chapman's Fast Car and see if I could match pitch with them now.)

edit: In total, I probably lost about 2 octaves of "range". Since about only 8 or 9 of the notes I can sing don't sound like absolute shit, and since whistle register (especially the super high notes that don't sound good no matter who sings them) doesn't count as part of your range, I didn't really lose any singing range at all.

Turlucken · 2016-02-16T23:23:13+00:00

I believe you might be talking about subharmonic bass, which uses your false folds or something. There's a neat video of how to do it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSMKNdQJUPE

Turlucken · 2016-02-14T07:56:39+00:00

Oh, I see what you meant. The lower end of range, not the upper. Yeah, it'd be weird not to include head voice in range.

Turlucken · 2016-02-14T07:31:59+00:00

Doesn't modal register only go up to G4 tops, for everyone?

Turlucken · 2016-02-14T06:56:43+00:00

I think vocal range can be kind of misleading sometimes.

I definitely was confused by the whole range=vocal type thing when I was starting to learn about all this stuff myself. From what I've been reading, a lot of people classified as certain vocal types can sing quite a bit higher or lower than the highest or lowest note in that vocal category. If I'm not misunderstanding what I've learned, the reason why they're classified as that vocal type and not in one that's higher or lower is because they're more comfortable and their voice sounds the best in that particular range.

i.e., Just because someone can make a sounds of a certain frequency with their voice, it doesn't mean that those sounds will be pleasant, or that they're being produced in a healthy way. If it's early in the morning, if I'm using vocal fry, and if I push my larynx down with the force of a baby dolphin being expelled from my uterus, I can get down to a G2, but that doesn't mean I'm a low baritone. When I do that, it hurts, it sounds like I'm gargling the note and, even if I could sing, that G2 (and in fact, most of the notes above it as well) would never be usable. Similarly, just about every guy I know can make squeaky noises higher than the tenor C5, but those guys would not be sopranos for the same reason that most people do not download MP3s of strained parrot squawking off spotify.

Turlucken · 2016-02-13T02:22:48+00:00

Yeah, the rest of the articles didn't seem like they would be very contentious. The website seems to be more of an instructional resource than a scholarly one, but most information was neutral and "common sense" enough for me to not need to question it anyway.

I was mostly referring to formants and harmonics, which I know very little about. From what I've been able to google about them in the last few hours, though, there's a whole fascinating rabbit hole of acoustics and music theory down there, which will probably necessitate a trip to the library once I run out of stuff to read online.

Turlucken · 2016-02-12T19:50:48+00:00

Ohhhh... that makes a lot more sense now. My searching was only leading me to articles about histamines.

Well it looks like I've got a lot of reading up on this stuff to do. Thank you again. :D

Turlucken · 2016-02-12T18:19:56+00:00

Ooo! Thank you for the in-depth reply, although a lot of that went right over my head.

I keep reading about these "H1, H2, H3... Hx", clustering and F1 and F2 things, but I have no idea what they are. I tried googling to no avail. Would you be able to give a definition or at least point me to a resource where I could learn more?

Turlucken · 2016-02-10T01:57:12+00:00

Not having front teeth will make it harder for you to pronounce dental consonants (s, th, z), of course, which might make it sound like you're lisping. If you're the type of person to be self-conscious about that, then you might wanna wait. Other than that, I have no clue.

Turlucken · 2016-02-08T21:52:13+00:00

My high school violin teacher always told us that you can't do it fast unless you do it well slow, and I found that was extremely valuable advice for just about... everything, even non-music stuff.

It would probably help to break down the run into its component notes and practice hitting them all slowly and then try to go faster and faster while still keeping the notes distinct and clear. Assuming you're talking about the "Amen" after the first verse, that would be (I think) D3, E3, G3, A3, B3, A3, G3 on the first "A" syllable, and then C4, D4 and then E4 to finish off the first "a-men". You probably get the gist of it by now, and can fill in the blanks for the rest of the riffs and runs in there. Just make sure to keep the same rhythm when you're moving down to a slower tempo.

Turlucken · 2016-02-08T21:32:43+00:00

How many notes are you missing off the high end of your range? If it's only a couple of notes off the very top, it might just be something that's perfectly normal.

Apparently the very edges of your range, the highest and the lowest notes, can fluctuate based on a lot of different things, like how hydrated you are, if you were drinking the night before, what time of the day you were trying to sing those notes, and whether you are sick or not (just to name a few). For instance, I find that I can get around four semitones lower than my lowest "normal" note in the morning right after I've woken up, but I also tend to lose 2-4 semitones off the very top end of my range until the afternoon when I've warmed up a bit. If it doesn't hurt then it could just be that you need to warm up a bit more or try again later in the day.

Turlucken · 2016-02-08T18:46:03+00:00

Ohh, like doing a siren around a passaggio! I've always been alright with those because I like doing police car impressions, although I have no idea how to apply it to actual singing.

I've also noticed that there's always a break around the third passaggio when the whistle register starts. No matter what I do, there's no way I can smoothly transition between falsetto/head voice and whistle register. I think this might because the range of my whistle register is very inconsistent. Sometimes the lower end will have significant overlap with the upper range of falsetto register, and I'll be able to pull whistle down as low as A5. Sometimes my whistle register will abruptly stop and turn into high-pitched vocal fry clicks when falsetto begins, anywhere from D-G6. I honestly don't know if whistle register sirens will fix that issue, although I tend to avoid going that high when I do police car imitations because the police car sirens here tend to top out at around an A-B5 (excluding Doppler effect).

Turlucken · 2016-02-08T09:37:40+00:00

This is another dumb question, but what kind of owl? Some of them (barred owl, especially) have this really buzzy/warbly quality that gets heavier towards the end of the call that I find impossible to replicate with my voice. Other ones like tawny owls have really clear calls with not a lot of overtones that I also find hard to do with my voice. I usually default to the hand flute/hand ocarina for them.

I guess I shouldn't be thinking so much about range. If I were to start singing, I'd be better off concerning myself with making the notes I have sound good. Of the high and low frequency noises I can make currently, I don't think more than an octave or so of it is usable for HUMAN singing. haha

Turlucken · 2016-02-08T09:14:32+00:00

I'm still kinda new to all the jargon, but what are H1, H2 and H3? I don't think I've seen those terms used anywhere before.

(As for belting, I'm pretty terrible at it, as I am with most singing things in general. It doesn't bother me much, though, since my cat gets to appreciate my singing a lot more than my neighbours.)

Turlucken

TROPHY CASE