Revisited: The Male Britney, Katy, and Beyonce

(Originally posted on 9/26/11 )

I wanted to go back to this post from over a year ago, because I think it's so interesting that one would think that only altering the pitch of a female singer's voice makes it indistinguishable from a man's. There are factors other than highness or lowness of a voice that let us determine "male," or "female."

Merrill Garbus and Erika Wennerstrom from the Heartless Bastards are two female singers I think have "de-prettied" (technical term) their voices naturally that makes them somewhat distinguishable from other throaty female singers, and I'm curious how theirs would work using the same software. Anyway, here's the original post from 2011:



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.

Writing about Voices

"The first time I heard John Lennon or Donald Fagan sing, I thought the voices unimaginably strange. I didn't want to like them. Something kept me going back to listen, though."

Daniel J. Levitin from This is Your Brain on Music

I've read This is Your Brain on Music a handful of times, and I keep going back to that quote. I've never found Lennon's or Fagan's voices odd, and recently it hit me that by the time I'd heard The Beatles or Steely Dan, their influence had already filtered through the music I'd grown up with. Of course their voices wouldn't sound strange to me. But then, I listen to a lot of voices deemed strange or odd or "uncommercial," and none necessarily needed a warm-up period either:







A couple years ago, I wrote a much longer post about favorites -- why you like the music you life (inspired by an NPR post), and I came up a bit disappointed that it can't be pinned down to a formula. I mean, of course it can't, but I really wanted it to. It sure would take the pressure off, when in the company of rock snobs, if there were a bona fide, organic reason why you didn't like, say, Bob Dylan. Or the Beatles.

Most of the reasons given for liking a particular band or artist were pretty vague: "It moves me," or "It just is..." But there has to be more to that, right? I'm going with the reasoning in the book -- that you're instantly drawn to what's familiar. I heard a lot of soul, R&B and country before I ever heard rock, so I tend to gravitate to singers whose voices are expressive, "soulful" The flat drone of a lot of indie rock singers has never been my cup of tea (which makes music blogging about primarily "indie" artists a weird hobby), but if the songwriting is good, I can ignore it. And sometimes learn to love it.