The Voice: Its Production, Care and Preservation

by Frank E. Miller

are pressed tightly together at the rear and sometimes both at the rear and front. These portions thus cease to vibrate. Only the small free parts vibrate and these only at the edges. As the voice progresses up the scale the stop action ceases, the elliptical opening and the cup become smaller, and the entire vocal tract is, comparatively speaking, contracted. This register practically belongs only to sopranos and tenors. For example, although some baritones are capable of adjusting their vocal tracts to this register, their voices lose the baritone timbre, take on a feminine quality, and become male altos.

In other words, there are three registers, and they correspond for all voices, but certain voices sing more in one register than in the others. Thus, the lowest register is the special province of the alto and the bass; soprano and tenor can come down only a few notes into it. The middle and the highest registers are the special province of soprano and tenor. The ordinary alto and bass can come up only part way into the middle register and cannot follow soprano and tenor at all into the highest.

The division of the registers which I have made is subject to many practical exceptions, which so far

I have avoided mentioning, because I wanted to fix in the reader's mind the fact that the registers are the same for all voices and are determined by the special adjustment of the vocal apparatus required for their production, and not by voice-quality. Now and then in a generation there may appear upon the scene a singer, usually tenor, who for his high notes is not obliged to adopt the somewhat artificial adjustment required by the highest register, but can sing all his tones in the easier adjustments of the lowest or middle register. But he is a phenomenon, the exception that proves the rule. Another practical exception to my rigid division of the registers is furnished by the overlapping of registers, the capacity of a singer to produce the lower notes of one register with the vocal adjustment employed for the higher notes of the register below, and vice versa; so that where the registers meet there are possibly some half a dozen optional notes. Most basses and baritones, for example, sing only in one register, that is, they carry the vocal adjustment for the lowest register into the notes they are able to sing in the register above. These exceptions will be considered later. At present, in order to treat this difficult subject in something that at least approaches an elementary manner,

it is necessary to make the division of the vocal scale into registers a somewhat rigid one.

It is, then, the three different adjustments of the vocal tract which determine the three divisions of the vocal scale and likewise the positions or registers for each division. The basis, therefore, for the division of voice-production into registers is not haphazard, but rests on the science of physiology. That there are not separate registers for men and women is due to the fact that men's voices run parallel to those of women at an interval of an octave below, and that, note for note, the adjustment of the male vocal tract is the same as that of the female vocal tract an octave above. For this reason basses and baritones, although singing an octave below contraltos and altos, sing in the same registers; for this reason also, tenors, although singing an octave below sopranos, employ the same registers. I am, of course, speaking of average voices, not of phenomenal ones.

Mackenzie has defined a register as a series of tones of like quality producible by a particular adjustment of the vocal cords. Mills defines register as a series of tones of a characteristic clang, timbre, color or quality due to the employment of a special mechanism of the larynx in a particular manner. Both

definitions practically mean the same thing. What I object to in them is their use of the word "quality," and Mackenzie's limitation of the adjustment to the vocal cords and Mills' to the larynx. The adjustment takes place throughout the entire vocal tract. Indeed, one of the claims I make for this book is, that it does not limit the voice-producing factor to the vibrations of the vocal cords, but while recognizing the importance of these, also considers the importance of the rest of the vocal tract in relation to them. Other writers hold that voice is produced solely by the vibrations of the vocal cords, and that the rest of the vocal tract is concerned merely with determining the timbre of the voice. But I do not limit the function of the vocal tract below and above the cords simply to voice quality. To produce a given tone requires not only vibration of the cords but an adjustment along the entire tract and especially a change in the size and shape of the cup space. If one wished to be exasperatingly accurate one might say that each adjustment constituted a register, and that in every voice there were as many registers as there are tones. But surveying the progress of the voice up the vocal scale, and as a whole, it is found that up to a certain point the general character of adjustment

within the vocal tract is the same, that beyond that point there is a change to another adjustment of a general character, and further beyond still another—in other words, that there are three registers.

Some writers recognize only two physical changes in the mechanism of the vocal tract and consequently only two registers instead of three. They dispense entirely with the middle register because the general change there in the adjustment within the vocal tract is not, in their opinion, sufficient to determine a new register. In point of fact, however, while the lower vocal range calls the vocal cords into vibration along their entire length, and while for the highest range only a portion of the edges of the vocal cords vibrate, the adjustment for the medium tones shows a gradual change from the first condition to the third. It is a bridge by which the voice crosses in safety from the lowest to the highest register—a register of transition, but a register withal.