What happens internally when we go from normal singing voice to falsetto?
In: Biology
To produce sound, your vocal folds vibrate. They’re kinda like two flaps mostly blocking your airway that *almosstt* touch each other. It turns out that they can vibrate in a couple different ways, that you are more or less in control of. How that works physically is a combination of things, like how much of the mass of the folds are actually vibrating, etc. Falsetto is *mostly* just using a different “mode” of vibration, although a couple other things might be different as well.
An important thing to consider is that a lot of our popular terminology around this stuff predates our understanding of what’s actually happening inside. A lot of it is based on what some people thought it sort of “felt like” was happening instead, like chest voice not having much if anything to do with the chest.
Singing with your chest voice vibrates the entire vocal chord, while singing in falsetto only vibrates the edges of the vocal chords. It’s kind of like guitar strings. Higher notes = thinner strings, lower notes = thicker strings.
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