She recognized three registers, chest, falsetto, and head, with their subdivisions.
It will be noted that Madame Seiler spoke of the vocal bands (cords) proper as the "ligamentous glottis," and included in the "glottis" the arytenoid cartilages themselves, or, at all events, that part of them, their lower anterior angles, known as the vocal processes (or extensions), to which the vocal bands proper are attached.
The above tabular statement shows (1) that Madame Seiler recognized five registers for both male and female voices; (2) that she used the term "falsetto" in a sense different from its ordinary one. Usually this term is not applied at all to the female voice, but only to that special modification of the male voice seldom employed now, and almost never except by tenors. With this writer, "falsetto" as applied to female voices replaces "middle," in the commoner usage.
Fig. 50. Tabular representation of Madame Seiler's division of the register.
[Listen to woman's voice scale]
Garcia, also, recognized five registers. Behnke, a teacher of singing, who practised laryngoscopy and auto-laryngoscopy in the investigation of the registers, used "lower thick," "upper thick," "lower thin," "upper thin," and "small," as answering to the "first chest," "second chest," etc., of Madame Seiler and others.
Nearly all writers have used the term "break" to indicate the point at which a new register begins. Behnke held that the break between the thick and the thin register occurred in both sexes at about