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?
In: 290
A singer’s biological equipment mainly varies in the size of their voice box, which in turn decides how large their vocal folds are and which frequencies they can vibrate at. In other words, the singer’s vocal range – what notes they can hit with good technique and without harming themselves. We usually talk of a few standard vocal ranges – bass and tenor for males and alto and soprano for females, all in ascending order of frequencies hit – but these are generalizations.
Practicing singing regularly, warming up before a performance and knowing good technique can extend your range, but not without limit.
Obviously, there are other factors that have an influence – if you have respiratory tract illnesses, paralysis of the upper body etc. it can become mechanically impossible to sing.
Also, each human body has slightly differently shaped cavities, bone structure etc. which will interact with the same tone in different ways and produce different [timbres](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbre) even when two singers are hitting the same note.
So in general, yes, most anyone can learn to sing well, but singers aren’t necessarily equipped for the exact same jobs as one another even if similarly well trained.
Yes and no, Morgan Freeman has a voice that many people love and his vocal cords are different than mine which is why people don’t think that Morgan Freeman is talking when I speak.
Of course someone could impersonate Morgan Freeman in a way that most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference especially if put over a video of him with the lip movement synced.
As for singing there is a very large distance in terms of your ability to sing that would likely bring you into spitting distance of the greats but who are the greatest singers is a reasonably subjective determination. If you want to train your ability to sing focus more on the enjoyment of the art rather than the idea of being seen as the next Pavarotti (Opera singing is a totally different beast than pop music singing, I know). Anyone can sing but some people have a knack and the vocal cords that a majority of people find pleasant.
Tl;Dr: How your vocal cords are structured can help/limit your ability to excel in singing but that shouldn’t stop you from enjoying it
A singer’s biological equipment mainly varies in the size of their voice box, which in turn decides how large their vocal folds are and which frequencies they can vibrate at. In other words, the singer’s vocal range – what notes they can hit with good technique and without harming themselves. We usually talk of a few standard vocal ranges – bass and tenor for males and alto and soprano for females, all in ascending order of frequencies hit – but these are generalizations.
Practicing singing regularly, warming up before a performance and knowing good technique can extend your range, but not without limit.
Obviously, there are other factors that have an influence – if you have respiratory tract illnesses, paralysis of the upper body etc. it can become mechanically impossible to sing.
Also, each human body has slightly differently shaped cavities, bone structure etc. which will interact with the same tone in different ways and produce different [timbres](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbre) even when two singers are hitting the same note.
So in general, yes, most anyone can learn to sing well, but singers aren’t necessarily equipped for the exact same jobs as one another even if similarly well trained.
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.
I’m just going to say I can’t, because I’m tone deaf. A lot of people who have musical ability don’t understand that some of us just can’t tell the difference between notes and tune. Even time all sounds the same.
Yes and no, Morgan Freeman has a voice that many people love and his vocal cords are different than mine which is why people don’t think that Morgan Freeman is talking when I speak.
Of course someone could impersonate Morgan Freeman in a way that most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference especially if put over a video of him with the lip movement synced.
As for singing there is a very large distance in terms of your ability to sing that would likely bring you into spitting distance of the greats but who are the greatest singers is a reasonably subjective determination. If you want to train your ability to sing focus more on the enjoyment of the art rather than the idea of being seen as the next Pavarotti (Opera singing is a totally different beast than pop music singing, I know). Anyone can sing but some people have a knack and the vocal cords that a majority of people find pleasant.
Tl;Dr: How your vocal cords are structured can help/limit your ability to excel in singing but that shouldn’t stop you from enjoying it
A singer’s biological equipment mainly varies in the size of their voice box, which in turn decides how large their vocal folds are and which frequencies they can vibrate at. In other words, the singer’s vocal range – what notes they can hit with good technique and without harming themselves. We usually talk of a few standard vocal ranges – bass and tenor for males and alto and soprano for females, all in ascending order of frequencies hit – but these are generalizations.
Practicing singing regularly, warming up before a performance and knowing good technique can extend your range, but not without limit.
Obviously, there are other factors that have an influence – if you have respiratory tract illnesses, paralysis of the upper body etc. it can become mechanically impossible to sing.
Also, each human body has slightly differently shaped cavities, bone structure etc. which will interact with the same tone in different ways and produce different [timbres](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbre) even when two singers are hitting the same note.
So in general, yes, most anyone can learn to sing well, but singers aren’t necessarily equipped for the exact same jobs as one another even if similarly well trained.
Yes and no, Morgan Freeman has a voice that many people love and his vocal cords are different than mine which is why people don’t think that Morgan Freeman is talking when I speak.
Of course someone could impersonate Morgan Freeman in a way that most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference especially if put over a video of him with the lip movement synced.
As for singing there is a very large distance in terms of your ability to sing that would likely bring you into spitting distance of the greats but who are the greatest singers is a reasonably subjective determination. If you want to train your ability to sing focus more on the enjoyment of the art rather than the idea of being seen as the next Pavarotti (Opera singing is a totally different beast than pop music singing, I know). Anyone can sing but some people have a knack and the vocal cords that a majority of people find pleasant.
Tl;Dr: How your vocal cords are structured can help/limit your ability to excel in singing but that shouldn’t stop you from enjoying it
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.
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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