Lessons in Singing - Exploring Your Vocal Range

What is Vocal Range?

Human voices may be classified according to their vocal range — the highest and lowest pitches that they can produce. Training your voice by taking singing lessons is a good way of learning how to extend your vocal range. A good singing teacher will give you specific exercises to help the training of the voice so that you can sing higher and lower over time. Singing lessons as well as a good vocal exercise CD are invaluable for this.

Vocal Range Defined

Despite its intuitive clarity, vocal range is not easy to define, nor is it easy to compare the vocal ranges of singers in different genres. The tonal quality of the voice is as important in determining voice type as the range of notes themselves.

The broadest definition of vocal range, given above, is simply the span from the highest to the lowest note a particular voice can produce. This broad definition, however, is quite often not the one meant when someone speaks of "vocal range." This is because some of the notes a voice can produce may not be considered "musically useful" for a particular purpose. For example, when speaking of the vocal range of a male opera singer, one usually excludes falsetto pitches, which are not used in most opera. A male doo-wop singer, on the other hand, might quite regularly deploy his falsetto pitches in performance and thus include them in determining his range.

For this reason, it is important to clearly define what is meant when discussing a vocal range. For example, one might say of a man that he has a two and one-half octave range in full voice and an additional one half octave in falsetto. Similarly, when discussing the range of a woman one might say that she has a "useful" two octave range with an additional major third on the bottom that is only audible with amplification. Unfortunately, there is no standardization in this nomenclature outside of classical, non-amplified singing.

Vocal Range in Popular Music

Vocal range in popular music is usually more generously defined than in classical. Because of the use of amplification it is possible for singers to produce musically useful pitches that are much lower than might be possible for classical singers. Similarly, consistency of timbre is much less important in popular music. Thus in many popular genres falsetto is acceptable for men, deep growling pitches can be deployed, and flageolet notes (commonly referred to as the whistle register in popular music) can be freely used by any female or male who can produce them.

The importance of vocal range varies in popular music. At one extreme, to choose a well known example, genres such as punk show little concern for technical proficiency of any sort and thus no particular concern for vocal range. Similarly, many roles in the musical theater, while requiring rather more skill, call for only vaguely determined voice types. At the other extreme, vocal range is considered extremely important by many singers and fans of some Heavy Metal music. There is often intense discussion among fans of precisely what a particular singer's vocal range is, and singers often show extremely wide ranges.