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Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2012-07-17 15:32
I'm thinking of that delightful moment in one of the Harry Potters where the Fat lady sings -- and fakes the glass shattering -- but I don't know where that guy who wrote to The Straight Dope got the "information" that there are no authenticated records of singers shattering glass with unamplified voices. That's ridiculous. Opera singers do it for fun.
I've seen it done on my grandparents' kitchen table. My aunt, Mary Wrany Van Ess, was a coloratura soprano. Once during a family reunion, her brother, who sang bass and played trumpet, dared her to break a glass.
My grandmother didn't hesitate to give her a water glass from the cupboard, in the belief nothing would happen. Aunt Mary, who must've been about 35 at the time, set the glass on a small block of wood, smaller than the diameter of the base of the glass. She tapped on the glass with a knife a few times, listened carefully to the ringing sound, then let fly with a note that was *not* exactly the same note, but just a shade sharp from it.
She sang mostly baroque oratorios and Gilbert & Sullivan, not the verissimo with the big vibrato, and she could sing a cold, white note when she wanted to, but she gave that note a bit of a fast, tight vibrato. The glass started to vibrate and audibly hum the same note. Then -- it didn't explode, really; it just fell on the table in shards. We all applauded as my father muttered, "The amplitude of a vibration increases over time."
Over the next few years when someone in the family would mention this feat, my grandmother would shake her index finger and say sternly before anybody could get another word in, "Not with my glassware you don't! And not on my kitchen table! Go outside to the barn!"
Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
To hear the audio, click on the "Scorch Plug-In" box above the score.
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Author: SteveG_CT
Date: 2012-07-17 16:36
Lelia Loban wrote:
> I don't know where that guy who wrote to The
> Straight Dope got the "information" that there are no
> authenticated records of singers shattering glass with
> unamplified voices. That's ridiculous. Opera singers do it
> for fun.
Indeed. It was even demonstrated on that show "Mythbusters" on the Discovery Channel a few years ago so I would say it's pretty common knowledge at this point that it is in fact possible to break a glass without amplification.
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