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Voice Styles: Classical, Jazz, Pop

This document discusses different common voice styles in classical & opera music, jazz music, and modern pop music. Classical & opera voices are characterized by a heavy vibrato and are muted in choirs but accentuated in solo parts. Jazz voices are more varied and laid back compared to classical voices, exemplified by Frank Sinatra. Modern pop voices are often emotional and "moaning" in style without amplification and span different voice types, with a trend of strong falsetto registers in male singers in the last decade.

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Tom Hart
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51 views1 page

Voice Styles: Classical, Jazz, Pop

This document discusses different common voice styles in classical & opera music, jazz music, and modern pop music. Classical & opera voices are characterized by a heavy vibrato and are muted in choirs but accentuated in solo parts. Jazz voices are more varied and laid back compared to classical voices, exemplified by Frank Sinatra. Modern pop voices are often emotional and "moaning" in style without amplification and span different voice types, with a trend of strong falsetto registers in male singers in the last decade.

Uploaded by

Tom Hart
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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composers demand.

Common choirs include the SSAA and TTBB (women’s and men’s choirs
respectively).

Common Voice Styles


Classical & opera
The majority of listeners’ experience of classical singing voices will be operatic voices. These
are similar in style across all broad-scale classical music, their distinguishing feature being a
fairly heavy vibrato. Classically-trained singers will be taught to sing in this style. The
characteristic vibrato is muted somewhat when in choirs, and accentuated in solo opera parts.

Jazz
The jazz voice is much more varied than the classical, and in general much more laid back. Big
band singers (such as Frank Sinatra27 and, more recently, Claire Teal28). Many jazz singers
follow mostly in this style, with some notable exceptions, namely the gravelly tones of Louis
Armstrong29. Many jazz singers will also improvise lines using a technique known as ‘scat’
singing. Ella Fitzgerald30 is the best-known example of a scat singer.

Modern pop
The modern popular voice range is far reaching, but is often characterised by the emotion
encapsulated within the voice. This can lead to a somewhat ‘moaning’ style, lacking the
strength of voices from the first half of the 20th century. Such voices can often be lost without
the assistance of amplification. There are, of course, exceptions to this, and the diversity of
modern pop voices will always span a great number of different voice types. A trend in the
last decade has been for male singers to have a very strong falsetto register.

23

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