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 can objectively measure specific characteristics of someone’s singing ability, like pitch, tempo, vibrato, timbre, range, phrasing, breathing, articulation.
But “sings well” is too vague for a scientific study. You first have to precisely define what “well” means, because I think you’ll find it’s more related to things like popularity, appearance, lyrics, backing music, cultural norms etc than any specific collection of objective data points. And probably also what “singing” is, given how much variety there is in music, such as the existence of skat and spoken-word songs.
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