eli5 can anyone technically be able to sing?

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If I practiced enough or got the right type of training, would I technically be able to sing well like some of our greatest singers? Is there an anatomical difference in their vocals cords that differentiates singers from people who cant sing?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Yes and no.

There are some fairly unproven claims from some virtuosic singers that they have some altered biology that gives their voice a unique quality (there was something Freddy Mercury claimed about his teeth or throat that I can’t quite remember, but he was at least seemingly convinced that something about the shape of his vocal cords, mouth, and/or other part of what makes singing happen was influencing his voice uniquely.) And there is *some* truth to that (necessarily, physically the shape of your resonance chamber [that is, the generic term for where sound bounces around as it forms, in humans this is inside your mouth] shapes some characteristics of the sound that comes out of it), but that mostly has to do with characteristics that are harder to quantify like tambre and tone.

The act of singing a song, keeping on beat and on tune and singing the correct words, is something that anyone with sufficient dedication can do to a degree of proficiency (there are some people who have legitimate tone deafness, I don’t know enough to comment on it beyond its existence and the fact that this will likely prove a very difficult obstacle). But it’s worth noting that it takes a lot of work to get even the queens of pop to sound like they do – studios built to optimize recording and technicians balancing their levels and using various post-processing techniques to remove some of the flaws that may have made it in, and even ignoring that just the ability to sing the song 100 times and choose the best take for any given section layered onto a constant beat will make most albums sound more clean than a live performance for all but the most skilled singers.

There is the topic of vocal range (that is, the notes between the highest and lowest note you can sing) which varies based on that and is trainable to a certain degree, but where I think you will be most limited or influenced by the structure of your vocal cords and whatnot – my vocal range is fairly high for a guy (or was: I was just about a semitone shy of the high note in Bohemian Rhapsody when I was still trying to sing regularly), and while I might be able to hit the deep tones of Barry White, I’d have to train specifically to do it and even then I might not succeed.

But generally, you can learn to sing in a way that won’t make dogs bark pleading you to stop, though you might not be able to sing a specific song without shifting the key or dropping (or raising) some lines by an octave.

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