Dear Jenny,
Quote from: Jennygirl on November 29, 2013, 07:25:29 PM
I wonder what makes that chest/head transition more flowy? Perhaps from the shorter vocal cords?
Let me give you the explanation I once got from a voice teacher, and it made sense to me:
Imagine your throat as a variable acoustic filter, and consider two "settings" of it, Neutral (which we'd use in head voice) and Overdrive (which we'd use in chest voice). This is Sadolin's terminology, I'm just using it for convenience's sake. Below the break, we can use either (using the loose jaw, that is, the Neutral setting, below the break, is equal to extending the head voice down into the chest voice range), whereas above the break, for reasons of physics, only Neutral will speak, not Overdrive.
These two acoustic filters emphasize certain frequency bands in the acoustic spectrum, and cut others, much like an equalizer does on a mixing console or stereo system. Now we're basically dealing with two equalizer settings, one for Overdrive and one for Neutral. Overdrive is basically a very strong low-mid boost, whereas Neutral cuts the low mids, but emphasizes the high mids, but less so than Overdrive.
Now we're feeding two distinct input signals into this system, the sound of the male vocal cords and the sound of the shortened, female vocal cords. What happens?
The male signal concentrates a lot of power in the low midrange, but less so in the high mids. Run this through the Overdrive filter and presto: its natural strength on the low mids is further emphasized, and almost all of the signal's strength passes through. Run it through Neutral, and most its power is consumed by the low-mid cut, and the hi-mid boost doesn't compensate a lot, because the original signal didn't have a lot of power in this frequency band, anyway. So you wind up with very strong Overdrive, but very weak Neutral.
Now consider the female signal. It has less low-mid strength, but more hi-mids. So it hardly profits from the huge lo-mid boost Overdrive imparts, but also doesn't lose as much from Neutral's lo-mid cut. But as Neutral brings out its hi-mid strengths, the two filters produce signals of almost equal intensity and clarity. And so you get a nice balance between chest and head voice, and the two don't sound all that different at all.
And you can imagine it's easier to blend two signals of equal strength (to make it across the break, the female case) than a very strong and a very weak one (the male case).
Maybe it makes sense to you too.
Love,
Amy