A friend recently asked if you could surgically make someone sound better. My explanation was it’s not a testable thing (you can’t really test a voice to check if it’s good before you consider the operation complete). So it’d be tough to test unlike visible surgeries like a nose job. I was wondering if there’s a scientific way to check if someone sounds good when they sing rather than testing by hearing them.
In: Biology
You could check that someone sings properly on tune (basically how much auto-tune would need to correct it). That’s not telling you if it’s a pleasant voice per say, but it’s already a huge part of singing well. And it’s not just a binary thing where someone is either off-key, or right on. Every-one is going to be somewhere between perfection and horrible. Some people are just close enough to perfect that regular folks can’t tell the difference. In some cases, slight “imperfections” can also be a style effect.
But surgery is not going to give you that. It has more to do with your ears, training, and technique, than about your vocal chords.
Regarding if a voice itself sounds pleasant, regardless of if it’s on key, that’s definitely subjective. But subjective does not mean untestable. You can still have a large panel of judge give subjective ratings to a lot of voices. And then machine learning algorithm can use that to extract the key features that makes a voice generally liked. It’s going to vary a bit with cultures, and you will always have some people who loves someone’s voice, while other hates it. But that doesn’t mean there can be clear general trends. It’s just like for physical beauty. It’s a matter of taste, but there are still people who are wildly considered beautiful, and others who aren’t.
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