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
There are a couple issues with these assumptions. Let’s start with the actual physical act of singing (I’ll touch on the concept of if someone “sings well” afterward). Singing uses a whole complex set of interrelated systems: your vocal chords in your larynx, the shape of your throat, how you shape your mouth, your nasal cavity, etc. Small changes (ie the shape of your lips, position of your tongue) in one part can have large effect on the sound that exits your mouth. Much of singing is about technique: muscular mastery of these systems to get the exact pitch(es) and timbre the singer is aiming for. It takes years and years to gain the command to have an actual “good voice”.
Because this system is so complex, your voice is constantly changing: hour by hour, from day to day, and even over the course of your entire adult life. Think about how much you voice changes when you get just the sniffles, not even a full-blown cold. Test results at one point in time would not match results from another point in time.
Lastly, what does it mean to “sing well”? That is a very subjective notion. Different cultures, and even different people within a culture, will define such a trait differently. Let’s pick American singing tradition. Listen to any top 40 song today and then go listen to a pop song from 100 years ago. [For example, try this one right here.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ao63TvxvPk) The singing techniques are wildly different and any scientific audio analysis would give different results. Edith Day is going for a different vocal sound than modern singers. Let’s pick Adele. Can you definitively say from this that Edith Day here sings better than Adele or vice versa? And we are just dealing with Western style music here. Other cultures don’t even use the same pitches and scales that America does.
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