Skip to main content

Demystifying the Falsetto Obsession in Pop & Rock Music

Though its name sounds derogatory, falsetto is not some kind of trickery but a technique used by humans for as long as they have been singing. It has its histories in indigenous, folk, and classical music. Yet modern ears probably associate it most with pop music of all kinds—from the harmonious vocal blends of Doo Wop to the operatic harmonies of Queen (especially Roger Taylor, below) to… well, virtually every song from a male singer today.

Falsetto is different from what’s called “head voice,” as many a vocal coach will point out. “Usually found in the upper registers of male and female singers,” writes one such coach, “the breathy quality of falsetto” is often “used for effect to sound otherworldly and beautiful or young.” Need a fuller exploration of why falsetto has such purchase in popular music? See the above Vox Earworm explainer by Estelle Caswell, tackling “pop music’s falsetto obsession.”

Falsetto has had phases when women adopted it to majorly prominent effect (see the age of Julee Cruise and Mazzy Star). It has of late become a very clear trend among male pop stars, Caswell theorizes: “Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, Bruno Mars, Drake, Charlie Puth, Shawn Mendes, Adam Levine, Sam Smith… the list goes on and on and on.” What’s all this about?

Caswell decided to “crunch the numbers and quantify” the use of falsetto in pop to see if her perception of its current ubiquity could be substantiated. Enlisting the help of data science and detailed analytics from Pandora, she traced falsetto singing in popular music from a yodeler in 1911 to “the iconic voice of Thom Yorke.” The Billboard Hot 100 is fed into the dataset, “fancy programs” do their thing and humans try to correct errors.

Opera singer Anthony Roth Costanzo shows up to explain the difference between falsetto and vocal register, and we learn much more about what falsetto is, and isn’t, and how, and maybe why, it’s so popular a style for male pop vocalists. Caswell also put together a Spotify playlist of falsetto pop and rock, featuring everything from the aforementioned Queen and Radiohead to Curtis Mayfield, Frankie Valli, the Bee Gees, and Childish Gambino.

What does the data say? Caswell is honest to a fault about the problems with a statistical approach—there are too many hit songs missing from the Pandora dataset, and the AI’s falsetto scoring system (yes, such a thing exists) has serious flaws. Turns out it may take a human ear to recognize the technique, and even then, there's room for disagreement.

But to sum up: millennials might feel like they live in a golden age of falsetto male pop singers because it’s all they’ve ever known. But ask anyone who grew up hearing Queen, the Bee Gees, or Marvin Gaye, or The Four Tops, even the Stones' "Emotional Rescue," or the yodeler who had that hit in 1911….

Related Content:

Hear Marvin Gaye Sing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” A Capella: The Haunting Isolated Vocal Track

How to Sing Two Notes At Once (aka Polyphonic Overtone Singing): Lessons from Singer Anna-Maria Hefele

Hear Freddie Mercury & Queen’s Isolated Vocals on Their Enduring Classic Song, “We Are The Champions”

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Demystifying the Falsetto Obsession in Pop & Rock Music is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/30WBgx0
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zamrock: An Introduction to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psychedelic Rock Scene

The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only lately, however, that large audiences are discovering how much pioneering music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and other postcolonial countries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Soundway (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defining the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017). Germany’s Analogue Africa , a label that reissues classic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music happened decades ago.” Only most Western audiences weren’t paying attention—with notable exceptions, of course: superstar drummer Ginger Baker apprenticed himself to Fela Kuti and became an evangelist for African drumming; Brian Eno and Talking Heads’ David Byrne ( who ...
Post a Comment
Read more