Sunday, March 14, 2004

Hard to Understand High Notes

  • High Notes
  • are demonstrably harder to understand. Which may explain, why I don't get Mariah Carrey's success.

    "Hector Berlioz long ago warned composers not to put crucial words in the soprano's mouth at high notes." And if Hector Berlioz warns you...boy you better listen.

    "A recent study at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, lays most of the blame on an inescapable tradeoff dictated by the physical acoustics of vowel differentiation and singing very high notes. Acoustical physicists John Smith and Joe Wolfe, working with physics undergraduate Elodie Joliveau, have carried out an experiment that demonstrates why different vowel sounds are almost impossible to distinguish when sopranos are singing in the highest octave of their range"

    So there you are...

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