My Current Relationship with Music

Wait, what is my vocal type again?

People without a background in singing (see: me a decade ago) sometimes think that voice types correspond to vocal ranges. Rather, you should use your best notes when trying to identify your type. You have to take into account that 1) the system describes parts in opera and choral music, not contemporary; 2) the vocal types overlap; and 3) each voice is unique.

Take me for example: I can squeak out notes between A2 and A5. However, I probably feel most comfortable singing E3 to F5. That range places me in the uncomfortable gray zone of contralto/alto**...but I lack that rich dark tone synonymous with contraltos. So, am I mezzo grieving over my missing high notes?

(Nevermind I have so many other points of confusion:

• Different sources assign different ranges to each vocal type?
• Should the vocal range include head voice? 
• Do women have falsetto?
• And etc.)

Why should I care? I only want to rock!

My personal heroes are Freddie Mercury and Josh Ramsay. They sing higher and lower than me. They kill it when they sing. They harmonize brilliantly with their bands.

Very little brings me as much joy as singing "Springtime Rendezvous" or watching Dungeon Meshi AMVs set to "The Killing Kind".

(I wrote a letter to the higher powers about how I lacked the range to sing all of Marianas Trench's "A Normal Life".

The higher powers wrote back with cryptic instructions on throat singing.)

Aside from vocal range and type, what else do I have to consider?

I can carry a tune and have very little to no formal training. Consequently, I have very little understanding of my own strengths and weaknesses. My vibrato is effortless. I can't growl. My head voice and chest voice still sound very distinct.

Furthermore, I have yet to sit down and learn to sight read sheet music. I should learn it. But you know what? Computers only care about doing a Fourier transform over a sound sample to find the base frequency. Human voices don't translate to pure sine waves. I apologize to my friend's son...but I should probably be taking ODEs rather than trying to learn the treble and base clefs. I want to accomplish my goal of understanding computational analysis of the human voice.

(This is how I speak to my dentist. I remind him of old movies and pseudoscientific theories about the periodic table of elements.)

I offer these parting thoughts:

"Never gonna give you up" (aka the Rick Roll song) is a great song to do in group karaoke.
 

**Contralto is a voice type. Alto is a choral part. The ranges are not necessarily identical.