This Is The Most Important Instrument In The World

How voices work.

Many instruments have defined many musical movements over the years, but there's one that's played a pivotal role in almost every one: The human voice. The way a singer uses their voice is one of the clearest ways of shaping a musical identity. Despite its clear significance, though, or perhaps because of it, the voice is notoriously hard to analyze. There's so many factors that it's hard to know where to begin, but hey, let's give it a shot.

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[tone]

Some additional thoughts/corrections:

1) Thanks to Brian McManus and Laura Crone for lending me their voices here! Check out their channels:


3) On the Killer Mike verse, I should clarify what I meant about syncopation. it does have 8th-note pickups, which means it technically is syncopated, and he's also doing this metric displacement thing that's its own sort of rhythmic complexity, but if you quantized the whole performance, the emphases in his phrasing would mostly align with the beats. The reason they don't, and the reason it sounds so rhythmically intense, is primarily those microrhythmic adjustments.

4) An important thing to be clear about here is that this is a model, and all models make assumptions about priorities and values. For instance, rolling all those different kinds of motility into one parameter may underemphasize the importance of specific motilic behaviors in certain styles, so if you're working expressly within such a style, it may be worth separating that behavior out into its own parameter.

5) In retrospect, I maybe could've chosen a better example of clear, non-buzzy vocals than Taylor Swift. The problem is that some level of masky brightness is characteristic of most styles of popular music because it works really well in a microphone, so finding someone that has _none_ of it was difficult. Swift's soft head-voice tone in that passage does, I think, have relatively low buzziness, but there's definitely still some there.

6) I think it's worth noting that, while they're correlated, there's not a one-to-one relationship between register and pitch. Depending where you are in your range, you may have multiple register options for a single note. For example, later in All Of Me, Legend does go to some high notes with a fuller tone than that light falsetto he used earlier. In fact, he's singing the exact same notes (topping out around Ab) but the tone is still noticeably different from what he was doing down lower, with a more prominent masky brightness and overall louder volume as opposed to the thick, warm, gentle chest sound on the low notes.

7) When I said "Rob Zombie" you thought I was gonna play Dragula, didn't you? Come on, admit it. You did. You totally did. (Also I screwed up the notation there a bit, I got the rhythm from the wrong phrase. In that one he anticipates the word "rats" by an 8th before the downbeat of bar 2.)

8) I hope I don't have to clarify this, but just in case, the point of the example at the end wasn't to, like, make fun of Brian Aubert for sounding like a woman or whatever. I like his voice. The point was to demonstrate that vocal tones do not correlate one to one with gender, and male voices can have many of the qualities we've learned to associate with femininity without actually being female voices.

9) Also, I kinda danced around this a bit, but the discussion of how vocal characteristics are tied to culture is, of course, closely connected to the discussion of cultural appropriation. For instance, white artists in hip-hop will often adopt vocal characteristics associated with urban Black culture (Iggy Azalea is a commonly cited example of this) in order to sound more "legit" and connect their work to the primarily Black communities where hip-hop originated, often without having any real connection to those communities. It's an important thing to be aware of, so I wanted to at least acknowledge it, but I didn't want to get too deep into it in the video because I don't feel like I'm particularly well-qualified to speak on those issues.

10) One thing I worry about sometimes in videos like this is that it may all just seem obvious. Most of what I talked about here is stuff you could probably pretty quickly come up with if I asked you to describe distinguishing characteristics of voices, but that's kinda the point. A good theoretical model is a way to formalize your intuitions: That these feel obviously correct means the model is doing a good job and can meaningfully reflect listener experiences.

[sternnormal]

Its amazing how the voice can sound like a flute, a violin, a whistle, and a dying bird depending on how its used

[aclyte]

2 years ago I had used a "pop punk voice" for years. I blew out my voice after a performance and realized I needed vocal help. I felt it was impossible to learn vocals and keep up with my life until March 2020. As the world grinded to a stop, I decided to learn. I found Jeff Rolka on YouTube (who I believed saved my voice.) The beautiful thing about Jeff was he makes videos highlighting abilities of every vocal range. I soon learned I was a lyric baritone and instead of running away from that to try to sound like a pop punk tenor I finally embraced it. I realized that Chris Martin from Coldplay had my vocal range and started shaping my voice around those with similar ranges. John Mayer, Julian Casablancas, and Gary Lightbody had a similar voice. Learning how voice worked turned me around. No longer was voice "just talking, " but indeed my own instrument. I learned things I could do that nobody else could, and things other people could do that I could marvel at. The beautiful thing is if you compare your voice to anyone, chances are you can do a couple of things better than them (with training.) The voice is beautiful and every musican should learn thier own internal instrument.

[sarahp]

"That doesn't mean we can't try"
*shows Parker square* 😂

[chcknpie]

As a musical theater/opera singer turned Singer songwriter, and just in general person who is always singing to himself, I can honestly say that my voice is one of the most important aspects of my person. The few times where I’ve lost my voice have been brutal. It’s almost like losing a hand. I don’t realize how often and for how many different things I use my voice for, and the range of expression that I utilize with my voice until it’s not there anymore

[Zman]

I just want to say how I love how around 6:58 when you mentioned stylistic appropriateness you drew a more photorealistic elephant. Thing like that I feel are a lot of what I generally like these videos.

[chantoya]

Not only is the voice the most important instrument in the world, it's also kind of the most underrated because a lot of people don't really think of it as an instrument at first. Some singers even take that fact for granted and end up not taking care of their voices like they would a piano or guitar.

[s.kanessuperbiatv]

As someone with autism, visualizing the voice mechanisms through metaphors never helped me and I couldn't understand why. It wasn't until I saw x-rays and vocal diagrams that it all started to click. It's certainly a difficult instrument to learn (moreso to self-teach) because of exactly how you phrased it: "I can't show you how to do it properly or what you're doing wrong."

[dwc]

3:05 - "You can think of it like the resonance chamber of an acoustic guitar, but gross." I laughed way too hard at that!

[Reel-zuld]

As a singer with a very buzzy voice but a resonant lower range, this is the kind of viewpoint that fascinates me!

[kleinesfilmroellchen]

"Here's Angela Gossow"

Well, you couldn't get me with that one. 🤘

[AngelicDirt]

As someone who was often told I "couldn't" sing and then found artists like Sade and Macy Gray (which lead me to find out I'm just mezzo or tenor), this. This whole video. Thanks. <3

[Kiaulen]

Wow, this video is a masterpiece. The comics are on point, the examples are all over the place in a very good way (I wish I had half Cory's musical vocabulary), and there were several terms I'd never heard before (motility in particular).

My favorite singer (R.I.P.) was Chester Bennington of Linkin Park. He and Mike had a really great synergy, and he's one of the few who could do the scream voice without losing most of the pitch/clarity.

[ericvilas]

When you were talking about the different kinds of microphone and stuff I was reminded of how Gorillaz uses that old gritty radio mic for 2-D's voice sometimes (and the famous impactful switch to a smoother, cleaner mic for the chorus in Feel Good, Inc)

[thegreatgambeeno]

At 21:03, that is Arch Enemy, but it is Alyssa White-Gluz doing the vocals on the song War Eternal.

[Jessafur]

Dang, I kind of wish you would have mentioned resonance shifting in more detail. imo it's one of my most underdiscussed aspects of voice. Like how it changes based on laryngeal height or lip and tongue positioning and what kind of qualities it can be used to produce. Otherwise this was a great video!! Thoroughly enjoyed it 😊

[almadeltigre]

“But that doesn’t mean we can’t try”
Me: wait, is that..?? THE PARKER SQUARE!!!
This reference made my day. Thank you

[trashbug]

I often feel like singing isn't important enough, this is so inspirational 💖 Also I didn't expect that Dave drawing 😂🤣😂

[charleslegrand]

Small detail, but at 21:02 when you use the example of Angela Gossow, that particular song isn't her, it's actually Alyssa White-Gluz, Arch Enemy switched vocalists, and it is nitpicky, but great video overall.

[redstickviking]

This video is absolutely fantastic. It's a tall order explaining such complex and nuanced topics of musical anatomy and analysis in a such a basic and easy to digest format, and you're really good at it.

I refer all my friends who are less musically literate than myself to your videos, and I get really excited whenever you publish a new one.

I love your content and I just wanted to shout that into the ever expanding void that is YouTube. In regards to the "imagine a woman's voice" exercise towards the end, I politely nod to you in metalhead.