Maura Johnston , a music writer for the Village Voice, posted a link on her Tumblr to a site called Voice of Men, which is really the voices of popular female singers pitched so they sound like men, except they don't. Sort of. She adds:
As the person who alerted me to it noted, “The male voice allows us to more clearly see the feminine singing styles and vocal tics that we take for granted in women.” So true.I'm not sure I'd go as far as to call them "female vocal tics," but the inflection, phrasing, and timbre in most women's singing (and speaking) voices in different enough from men's that just lowering the pitch doesn't make women "sound like men." Of course, a lot of this can be chalked up to female pop singers' pressure to "sexy it up," but I think it says more about the way women's speech is allowed to be, or is even expected to be, expressive in a way that men's speech isn't.
It also reminds me of John Oswald's "Pretender" in which he takes Dolly Parton's voice from treble all the way to bass, essentially "masculinizing" her in contrast to her hyper-feminine, campy sex appeal. When I first heard it, I thought, "Ha, she sounds just like... Cher." Then it just got weird.
Deeper, darker women's voices still sound "female," to our ears they're still within the range of what "a woman's voice" is supposed to sound like. As steeped as that is in gender essentialism, it's a large part of why we're so confused when someone steps out of that box.
Hey. I'm actually the girl who alerted Maura to the project in the first place, and I agree with what you're saying. Perhaps "tics" wasn't the right word, but I find it hard to find a word that accurately describes the vocalizations and manner of singing that makes women's singing different from men's. Especially for R&B, as with Beyonce. I find that, like you said, it's about expressiveness - women are allowed to make feminine coos, to wail, to moan, to sort of "chew" on their consonants, to be emotional, and to inflect their vocals and terminate phrases with tossed-off "uhs." I also find that women's voices in R&B tend to have a certain full-bodiedness, while men's voices are a little bit on the whiny, thin side.
ReplyDeleteFor me, I buy these voices as male, and so it's interesting to see how a voice that we gender female can sound within a male register. Plus, it allows us to see what women are allowed (or required) to sing about vis-a-vis men. It's novel to hear a man sing "Make love to me," I think (as in "1+1").
Thanks for stopping by.
ReplyDeleteThis is incredibly interesting to me, but as someone who's not a professional singer, nor have I even set foot in a music class in more than two decades, I found it a little hard to write, especially without being too reductive while pointing out that women's speech is allowed to be expressive, and that probably spills over into singing.
To be honest, some of these altered vocals remind of Antony Hegarty's style of singing. Antony is trans, and while his (I think he uses male pronouns -- someone correct me if I wrong) voice falls within the tenor range, he has a feminine quality to his phrasing.
I'm not a musicologist by any stretch, either, but I've read a bit on male vs female voices and manners of articulation, registers, etc. I'm super interested in this stuff, too.
ReplyDeleteYES on the Antony reference. I'm a big Antony fan (and I'm pretty sure he prefers male pronouns), and what I find so interesting about him is how his music and vocality feels so unplaceable. There are a lot of things he does with his voice that make it sound feminine - like the way he ends phrases, or pronounces esses. Yet his tenor range grounds these feminine qualities in an unfamiliar range. Another figure who sounds like this Voice of Men thing, as Maura pointed out in her blog post, is Jacob Lusk. He has a more full-bodied voice than a lot of R&B singers, as well as a tendency to do a feminine "wail" in chest voice rather than go the more typically male route of singing in falsetto. (Again - can't claim to be a musicologist here, but this is what I've seen most male R&B singers do.) He sounds very similar to male Beyonce (except for his quick, warbly vibrato, which has actually been likened to Antony - we've come full circle!). He's part of the reason I was able to accept some of the voices as male - because I've heard such voices now coming out of males.
Anyway. It's so nice chatting with somebody who enjoys this stuff as much as I do!
I'd never heard of Jacob Lusk, so I checked out a few videos on youtube. His voice is a lot like Antony's though his style is more R&B/gospel (but I bet Antony could do a great gospel album -- he definitely has flourishes of that in his music).
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