I was listening to kpop (don’t judge) and I was wondering what specifically made the singer’s voice sound so pleasant, even though they were singing in a language I don’t understand. Is it something you can practice or is it simply something that you are born with?
In: Biology
With speech. There is a LOT of soft rules people expect. Some frequencys just dont clash togeather, and some people have a voice in those frequencies. Also things like wrong intonation for the setting. Or your formants are to weak.. Things like up talking or down talking to much. Which gets into the gender expectation problem there. Along with general feminine, masculine voices. We expect men to have bass, lower fundemental tone then women. Also harsh nasally tones and having thin peaks in your voice. In a loud setting, everyone sounds worse because you only hear the peaks and thus the voice sounds thin and grating…. And this gets into a problem. Is there a universal bias for some vocal tones more then others. That can be sexist, racist, etc And like most things, does this lead to prejudice, say if you are being hired for a marketing position
The thing about studio recordings is that you are quite literally doing everything you can to make a tracked instrument sound as good as you can.
You asked about vocals so we’ll do vocals. In a studio you will track vocals in 1 of 2 places, either the live room or an isolation booth. Live rooms, as you’d imagine, are large rooms for tracking many people simultaneously but also for the *sound* of the room. It sounds “lively”. Usually A and B rooms have these.
Isolation booths are well…isolated. Theyre usually large enough for 1 or 2 people, and they’re treated to sound “dead”. Not much reverb or delay. So they’ll track in either of those rooms depending on the style of music, the sound they want and how they like to process the vocal next.
So now we have the room. Next we choose the microphone and preamp. These color the sound in a unique way that will match the style of performer and vocals etc. You’ll do a shootout with it and choose what you like best.
Sometimes in the vocal chain you’ll add a compressor or EQ, these also color the sound and you’ll set it to the style you’re tracking etc. If you’re starting out you’ll likely no have the budget for one, nor the knowledge on how to set it in a manner which you can’t undo.
So now that we have the room, vocal chain we need to push the signal (probably unless you are a real glutton for punishment) into the computer. Well you need some converters for that. Converters *also* color the sound in a particular way, however, what you’re really gunning for is accuracy.
Once you have all of this you can start tracking. You have many different kinds of producers and many different kinds of engineers that all take different approaches to tracking (recording) but in the end, it’s about getting the most out of the situation that sounds most pleasing. For the most part you want it to sound as good as possible before mixing – fixing it in post is not fun.
After the vocals are cut it’s time to mix. You may add reverb, delay, harmonizers, you may pitch correct if the vocal take is *really* awesome but they missed a note, you can EQ to change the tone of the vocal, you’ll compress to add color and/or texture. Anyway, it’s all to make it sound *awesome* and that’s how it’s done.
Good pitch and breath control are important, and being able to sing more than one octave or do tricks with your voice adds to it even more.
not related, but what song/singer?
When you figure out the answer let me know so I can fix this broken trombone of a voice I have.
Most of these comments have to do with pitch and vocal quality and production tricks but as a professional musician I want to note that we have to take into account the actual music/writing/arrangement/language. Kpop uses more musically dense writing (more chords, more elaborate progressions, more sonic candy in general) whole Western pop is usually pretty minimal. The lyrics of a song play a huge roll in it sounding pleasant as well – some consonant/vowel sounds just sound better than others. The producer Max Martin who’s worked with every major pop act since he broke Britney’s career calls this ‘Melodic Math’ – the amount of syllables and sound of the words being more important than the lyrical content. People relate to music for loads of different reasons, it sounds like you relate to Kpop specifically for its sonic qualities.
>pleasant / unpleasant
Intensely grounded in one’s cultural background.
Vocal tones / voices that people from one culture might find pleasant for one reason or another may be *highly* irritating to people from another. And that’s not considering the issue of individual preference.
The best example I can think of at the moment is the voices that some Japanese women affect. I find them grating and incredibly irritating, but some people find them exceptionally attractive and cute.
In short, outside of voices well outside the average human vocal range, it’s not really something you can pin down to a universal.
**Edit:** To stick with your example of k-pop, I really enjoy Psy, but his most frequently used voice isn’t what I would consider a great voice insofar as singing goes.
Similarly, I really don’t care for Justin Timberlake’s singing voice; I think it’s nasal and overly affected. But clearly I’m in the minority as far as that goes.
This is probably just for me but when I hear someone with a nasally voice/accent I can’t stand listening to them talk.
Sorry Americans. It’s not a nice sound.
Well. Musically, we have notes that are pleasent to our ears (C D E F G A B). And music transcends language.
Sorry this is not very helpful is it?
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