Author: Dutchy
Date: 2007-05-07 15:10
Quote:
Yeah, Whitney is one of them, but what are they doing? Anybody know?
:: waves hand in air ::
I do, I do! ![[grin]](http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/smileys/smilie5.gif)
She is singing in the style known as "Broadway Belting". It's where you sing "off your larynx"--that is, you're basically shouting in tune, you're not using any head voice (this is for women). It's sound forced straight through your vocal cords with tremendous wind pressure from the diaphragm and muscular pressure and control from the larynx and throat muscles. Virtually every female pop singer out there, except for Mariah Carey and Barbra Streisand, who as I understand it both had professional training, sings this way. The most egregious example besides Whitney Houston, is Celine Dion on the theme from Titanic--the "hook" where she belts out, "Iiiiiiiiiiii...will always love yoooooooo..." On that "Iiiiii", that's "Broadway Belting" at its finest.
When I was in choir in high school, our teacher hated it with a passion, and would single you out if he suspected you were singing "like a pop star on the radio". And this was back in the early 1970s, so it's been around for a while. But it's only recently that it has become codified, and indeed accepted in some circles, as "Broadway Belting".
Anyway, the point is that when you're learning to sing, you immediately realize that if you're not going to produce something that's merely an on-pitch sustained shout, you have to add some vibrato so it sounds like "singing". So you quickly learn that you can wiggle your throat and larynx and that whole assembly in there, to produce a "wobble" that is what we term "vibrato".
So, now, if you're singing using your head voice, and you're relying on the resonance of your head cavity for your sound production, then all your wiggling throat has to do is add some finesse to the sound that's coming out, a bit of frosting on the cake.
But if you're relying for your sound on how much air you can forcibly squeeze through your vocal cords--and by the way, your larynx functions exactly the same way as an oboe reed does, being composed of two membranes (i.e. reeds) that vibrate against each other when air is forced in between them--then your wiggling throat has to do a lot more heavy lifting, proportionately speaking. It's being asked to add finesse to the equivalent of a loud blast on a shawm reed, and it CAN do it, but it takes a lot of musclepower. And that musclepower, being expressed, is why Whitney & Co.'s throats and tongues vibrate so noticeably when they sing. A coloratura's throat vibrates noticeably, too, because all that muscular effort does show, but it's not as gonzo as Whitney, because she's not forcing as much air through quite so hard, in order to produce her big sound.
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