Do you prefer music with male or female singers, or do you have no preference (or tendency, even if you don’t consciously prefer it)? For the purposes of this thread, I mean the dominant singer, if there are both a male and a female singer, although I guess bands like The Human League with mostly equal parts would fall under “no preference”.
As for me, at least 90% of the music I regularly listen to is sung either by girls only or girls with backing/supporting male vocals (think Aqua), so I have to go overwhelmingly for female. Many of the ones I like also have multiple women singing in harmony.
What do you like? (Or what does the majority of the music you listen to reflect?)
Although I like different kinds of music, I mostly listen to rock, and I wish that there were more female rockers. Most new female artists are either country, or rap/hip hop, R&B, folk, or something else, but I’d love to see a more 50/50 mix of male and female rock artists.
I’m a baritone and I like to sing along when I’m in the car. Doesn’t work well with female singers most of the time. Even if I drop an octave lower, it just sounds wrong.
I’m not a baritone, but I still can’t reach a lot of the notes in music I listen to. I just get over the desire to sing along in the car, at least around other people.
For rap, rock, and industrial music, I tend to prefer male singers. For bluegrass, folk, whatever genre “singer/songwriters” fall into nowadays, bubblegum pop, and dance genres, female singers. It’s about 50/50 for r&b.
Females, although, with a few bands, when there is some alternation, I prefer the male (e.g. Dead Can Dance and My Bloody Valentine), but in general, I like more female singers (Breeders, Tori, Kate Bush,Cocteaus, Le Mystere De Voix, Lush, Shelleyan Orphan, Jarboe, Diamanda, Natalie Merchant, Dido, Bjork…)
Female singers. And I’m a singer-alonger, as well. But I do like men, too–I adore Lyle Lovett’s voice, and my love for Springsteen is wide and deep. But a glance at my CD collection shows women dominating.
I had a similar discussion on another board and it surprised me to realise that I do have a preference, in that the majority of my favourite music is sung by females. Whilst I probably have about a 60/40 split when it comes to female/male lead artists in my album collection, if you look at all of my top rated songs they’re nearly all female sung.
Male singers, though there’s a caveat: I like weird voices. It just seems there are more male singers with unusual voices than there are female. I like voices you can hear one word from and know who’s singing.
I’m exactly the opposite in this. I overwhelmingly like high-pitched singers—the pitch and voice “tone” of Ace of Base, Engelina, or CASCADA is about as low as I’ll go. And since high-pitched men definitely do not sound good, that rules most male singers out unless I just particularly like the band. That’s probably also why I don’t like most black female singers, since they tend to have lower voices.
For ‘rock’ (my main music choice), it’s gotta be male, I’m not sure if it’s the fact female rock tends to be wishy washy Avril Lavigne type wankery, but I just don’t think they have enough (not sure how to explain this but) ‘impact’ with their voices.
I like female vocalists for ballad-y type music though, even prefer 'em over males for some stuff, but I would say, taking music as a whole, because i like to sing along, I prefer males.
On another note (pun intended, though it’s a crap one) I prefer female backing or second vocals.
I have no preference between the genders, but I like my women like I like my underwater earthquakes: deep and powerful (PJ Harvey, Diamanda Galas, Lisa Gerrard, etc.). Wispy, high-pitched girly voices irritate.
No preference. Though I sing low bass, I can sing along with almost all women; just adjust the octave. And I can sing along with most men, exept pop tenors . . . I can sing along with Pavarotti (an octave lower), but not Tony Bennett or Mel Torme.
Vox - you should check out the music of Delerium, most of their vocal works have very lyrical female voices on them (Kirsty Thirsk being a regular in their work and her range is very high).
For recorded music I usually go with male singers, but when visiting music festivals I make a point of seeing every female performer, even forgoing band I like for girl singers I don’t know….It is my experience that female performers just try harder then their male counterparts, I never had a female singer come on stage so stoned she could not perform*, or turn it into a ego show letting her hip side kicks do 90% of the show,
And I have a tendency to fall completely in love with live female performers
