A moderator rained on my (classic hit) parade, so I’m following instructions and starting a new thread with the same question:
That people can sing as well as, say, Bob Marley or Bob Dylan (or any regular schmoe who sings “Happy Birthday” at a kid’s party) does not surprise me. But the ability to sing like Sam Cooke, Steve Perry, Sinead O-Connor, or Luciano Pavorotti…that, I find hard to understand. It’s clearly not an essential trait, or it wouldn’t be rare. So why, evolutionarily speaking, is it a trait that exists at all? Is this just a peacock thing? That is, a case of pure sexual selection run amok?
I would say it’s not selected for by evolution, it’s a learned skill that requires years of hard work and practice. Just like being a great tennis player or a great writer is not selected for by evolution, they are just skills that can be developed based on our more general skills that ARE adaptive, like fine motor control and endurance.
Okay, but what I mean is there’s no obvious (to me) reason why the human vocal tract should be capable of producing sounds like that. They are certainly not necessary for speech, or garden variety singing.
Also, count me as skeptical that your average person could sing like a virtuoso, no matter how much high quality training they receive, even if it is for years starting at a young age. Better than most people? Sure. But 99.9 percentile good? I don’t believe it.
You certainly can learn to make the best of your voice, but people have different vocal ranges (due to having different sized vocal cords, voice boxes, heads, etc.). What you are born with limits how far you can go.
It’s an odd myth that years of hard work and practice can turn you into a virtuoso in anything. Yes, those who rise to the top certainly practice, and practice hard, but there are many more who could practice their entire life and never master their chosen art.
I guess you’re asking if it’s possible to design a vocal system that enables speaking but not singing. I’m not sure, but it seems like it wouldn’t be easy.
It’s like asking why some people are great athletes of whatever sort and the rest of us aren’t - a combination of genetics, training, and a lot of hard work (and, for those who become really commercially successful, probably a good bit of luck.)
Because the essential trait of being able to speak can, with significant practice, be adapted to the unessential trait of being able to sing opera.
You might as well ask why has evolution selected for the ability to dance ballet. The answer is, it didn’t. But it did select for the ability to run, jump, etc., which can be adapted to the art form.
Regarding the question in your subject header: you have to define what you mean by “sing like a virtuoso”. Let’s define “sing like a virtuoso” as a classically trained singer in any of the following groups:
those studying at/have graduated from a BMus program at a university or equivalent at a conservatory - I’m guessing that would be in the low millions globally
those who can make a nice part-time living singing for fun and slight profit - I’m guessing that would be in the lower millions globally
those who can make a full-time living in the fourth and third quartiles - let’s call that in the 100,000s globally. Think chorus in an opera company; professional choir; etc.
those who can make a full-time living in the in the second and first quartiles - let’s call that 10,000 globally. Think soloist in a decent opera company; recitalist, etc.
those who can make millions signing - let’s say there’s two dozen of those
So, for the 10,000 hours thing, that would almost certainly get you into the first group and would probably get you into the second group. But there are probably millions of people who can “sing like a virtuoso” for the most broad, common-sense definition of virtuoso. So the simple answer is “hard work and decent training.” But when you start throwing names around like those in the OP, you’re talking singular talents, in which case you’re talking hard work, the best training, and the right genetics. Oh, and marketing. Great, marketing.
No, that’s not what I mean. As I said, it doesn’t surprise me that people can sing. It surprises me that anyone can sing on par with a very well designed musical instrument.
Okay, but there is no basketball player alive who can stand at half court and sink every shot (or 90%, or even 50%). To sing at the very highest level strikes me as being in that league, at least. I think most people don’t see it that way because they are used to the reality that, in fact, people can sing that way. It just seems like a very unlikely level of natural ability, unaided by tools, for a hairless ape to possess.
This is totally evolutionary. In fact, evolution wouldn’t work at all if it wasn’t for this.
It’s called “variation.” It’s why virtuosos exist.
Being able to sing “at the highest level” may not bestow a survival advantage today, but if it ever does, evolution is ready.
In the mean time, variation will keep on cranking out all sorts of people whose very existence defies logic. You should meet my cousin, “YoloBoi,” sometime.
It is possible that what our voices can manage in terms of “musical instrument” capability and what we consider “a musical instrument’s ability” are going to be linked to some extent in evolution.
If we assume a major part of evolution of voice is about speech, and a critical part of hearing is directed at speech, it should be no real surprise that some aspects of the technical parameters are going to co-evolve to some sort of useful stable capability. So (waving hands furiously here) it may not be unreasonable to expect that our musical instruments only need be good enough to meet the standards of our evolved hearing capabilities, and those aspects of sound for which our ears are insensitive musical instruments need not address. As our vocal ability is tied to this via speech intelligibility, our singing capabilities could be expected to be in the same ballpark.
Our ears are insensitive to a lot of things. Masking is the process by which the loudest frequencies of the sound wipe out perception of nearby frequencies of lower intensity. This phenomenon acts to remove a lot of nasties in the perceived harmony of music from real world instruments.
A really good voice is a mix of luck, birth, and training. Some people have naturally pure sounding voices, others have a lot of noise in their voices - purely as a result of the construction of their vocal cords. This can reach an extreme in very husky singing voices (say Rod Stewart) even though they have otherwise good technical ability. The basics of a great voice may be born, but the level of training, and technical musical ability needed to get to the heights is far greater then most imagine. Finally it comes down to artistry, just like playing any other musical instrument at the highest levels.
Who has claimed that anyone can sing like a virtuoso? I’ve never heard that, nor do I believe it’s true, even if they spend thousands of hours singing.
I think the original question was not “Why is it the case that all people, if they work hard enough, can sing like a virtuoso?” but “Why do there exist any people at all who can sing like a virtuoso?”. Different shades of “anyone”.
I think **Francis Vaughan **pretty well nailed it.
In one sense the question is a tautology: “How come the best singers in the world sing as well as the best singers in the world?”
The less tautological version is “How come the best singers in the world sing as well as they do according to the OP’s subjective definition of what ought to be humanly possible?”
In the second interpretation it’s pretty clear the issue isn’t virtuosos’ singing quality, but rather the basis for the OP’s assumptions about human singing capability.
We’ll always find extreme outliers able to vastly outperform the middle of the bell curve. It doesn’t matter what area of human endeavor we choose to look at. Trying to guess how evolution produced that much spare capacity in a few extraordinary individuals is a silly misapplication of the ideas of genetics & evolution.
Singing actually seems like it’s a pretty clear side-effect of our evolution. Obviously, our voices evolved for speech, but that’s not the only thing we use our voices for. Pre-language, we could still communicate to some extent with different sounds, pitches, and intensities, and it seems that language required a great deal of versatility in our vocal capabilities in order to evolve differentiable patterns in order to create speech. Similarly, humans learn by mimicking, and I’d imagine, particularly in our hunter-gatherer days, our mimicking also included some animal sounds to some extent.
And, really, as a singer, though probably not at the virtuoso level, it also seems to me that maintaining a pitch isn’t more difficult than some of the complex sounds involved in speech. Consider, we have countless hours of practice with the sounds of our native tongue, but it’s not uncommon that certain sounds that are differentiated in other languages are nearly indistinguishable to non-native speakers, and virtually impossible to recreate.
And, of course, I also think there’s a certain amount of selection towards what humans can do and what our culture decides sounds good. After all, a “perfect” sound would be a sine wave, but when you hear one, it sounds remarkably dull. In fact, all of music theory is based around certain ratios of frequencies that sound good to human ears, 2:1 is an octave, 3:2 for a fifth, etc. Sure, they’re relatively simple ratios, but maybe to a non-human ear, they’re not so pleasing. So, perhaps part of what makes a human virtuoso singer sound so good, is precisely because it’s the peak of what what humans can produce and, naturally, we’re going to have a preference for human sounds because we’ve evolved to produce and hear them.
