Not for me. I agree with Fudd. When they first hit the airwaves, I thought it was one singer doing all the verses of “I Got You Babe”. If the DJ hadn’t identified them as a duo, I wouldn’t have known there were two of them.
Nope. I’ve heard at least one vocal coach do an analysis of her voice sans music or autotune. She’s on key throughout. And the first song she used autotune in, it was only a couple of lines in the chorus, it wasn’t the whole song.
The reason Sonny and Cher sound alike is because he is a tenor and she’s a contralto, so they are singing in the exact same range. Cher has a dark, masculine color to her singing voice. In classical voice the amount of ‘color’ is one aspect. For example a coloratura soprano has, by definition, a lot of color to her voice. I used to sing with another soprano who had an unusually transparent tone, it was colorless like glass. Opposite of Cher.
Pop singers often don’t sing exactly on key.
Thanks. Back to my original question , is ‘colour’ - in that sort of technical signing sense - the word I’m looking for to describe her distinctive voice?
You might as well say Neil Young and Pavarotti sound alike, since they’re both tenors.
Did you have the same problem with Mouth & McNeil?
Not at all. Cher sings in a tenor range, and her voice at that time was similar to Sonny’s, not just in color but also in the untrained pop qualities, and I expect they also reached for that similarity some. But it couldn’t be so indistinguishable if they didn’t sing in the same range. There are tenors and then there are tenors, of course.
Well, it is one of them. Technically, I guess. As was earlier noted, the vocabulary that describes voices is sort of like that describing wine.
They sound reasonably different to me. Sonny’s voice sounds thinner, more nasally, less vibrato-y, and I swear the accent is different, too. He’s got a slight Dylanesque quality to his voice, too, that Cher doesn’t.
I can pick out Sonny from Cher easily now, but back then not so much.
I don’t have any theoretical knowledge of music, but I just chime in to say that I love Cher’s voice, she has great pipes. Her best singing I know is in “Strong Enough”, and I also like her cover of the “Shoop Shoop Song” very much. Shoot me. And yes, I can tell Cher from Sonny.
He points out places where her voice went sharp and was then corrected. Most vocals are pitch corrected with autotune, as few of us can hit every note every time. You just don’t hear it when it’s done well unless they’re trying for the weird effect.