Yes, tried to do a little Fermi estimation. I didn’t pull any numbers up to do it, but here’s a refinement.
Let’s start with some figures I pulled up for the USA:
population: 320 million
percentage with a university degree: 33%, so 105 million
percentage with a humanities degree: 17% of those with university degree, so 17.89 million
Now I’m guessing:
percentage of those humanities degrees that are music: 10%, so 1.8 million
percentage of those music degrees that are vocal: 33%, so .6 million
So, since the definition of “virtuoso” is “one who excels in the technique of an art, especially a highly skilled musical performer”, we can very broadly say that anyone with a university degree in vocal musical meets that criterion. So there are 600,000 vocal virtuosi in the US alone. Let’s add add 10% for Canada, so 660,000. The population of the EU is 500 million. so we can add another 500/350 (population of US and Canada)*660,000, for 943,000. That probably underestimates it a bit because I would guess there are more classically trained vocalists in Europe than in Canada and the US. Russia has another 143 million people, so that should get us over a million.
I don’t know what to do with the rest of the world, because I don’t have a sense of how extensive classical vocal training is there.
So there you have it. I estimate there are just over one million people globally who can be credibly described as vocal virtuosi.
It’s a bell curve sort of thing. For just about every human attribute, there are people a few standard deviations away from the mean. Obviously, we condition “virtuoso” based on what’s physically capable for those people on the right side of the bell curve.
Anyway, there’s a pretty strong tradition in nature correlating ability to sing with reproductive success, as anyone who’s ever been awake at 5:00 in the morning in the spring can testify. If it works for birds, why not people?
Why do you think that? The vocal range of the virtuoso is not more than a couple of times that of the average trained singer, and the volume is not more than a few fold greater than a normal singer, but there doesn’t seem to be anything superhuman about it, any more than the ability to run a marathon in under 2.5 hours, or throw a 100 mile an hour fast ball.
Now if virtuosos could break glass with their unamplified voice, or could sing in to the supersonic ranges, then it would be different.
It’s not the range or the volume that surprises me, but the “smoothness” I guess (I am not a musician, so the terminology eludes me). Especially since most people cannot sing that way, and to do so strikes me as not like running faster than others, but more like flying or something completely on a different level.
P.S. I think if certain people could sing in the supersonic ranges, a thread like this might still exist, and the responses would be pretty much the same.
Most people also can’t juggle six balls in the air, but with enough practice very dexterous people can learn to do so, similarly having a very smooth tone is simply a question of practice and talent. With my comments about supersonic singing I was trying to distinguish between true differences in capabilities in which they can do things that non-virtuosos can’t even approach even approach, versus a difference in degree which seems to be the case with virtuosic singing. They just do the same things we do but do it a whole lot better.
I am impressed by pavarotti in exactly the same way I am impressed with Tiger Woods or Gary Kasporov.
Some people have better “tones” in their voices (not sure if that’s the right word) that makes them pleasant to listen to. You don’t even have to sing to have “a good voice” (talk to the ladies about Benedict Cumberbatch).
It’s an interesting question of whether this has an evolutionary advantage and, if so, why it isn’t more common. I would just guess that there are so many factors figuring into reproduction and survival that while gifts like that can give you an advantage with potential mates, it hardly cuts everyone else out of the gene pool.
Yeah, this is along the lines of inquiry I was thinking of. The problem with making a comparison to birds is that it strikes me that it does cut you out of the bird gene pool if you don’t “sing” pretty well. Humans, OTOH, can have gravelly voices and no vocal range and still reproduce if they have other gifts. (Heck, they can even get record contracts, as proven by the example of Tom Waits! LOL)
I really think people are underestimating the notion of virtuoso. It doesn’t just mean competent in your field. It means you excel in your field, and more even than that, that you have some special stand-out capabilities. Just getting a university degree and getting a job doesn’t mean you are virtuoso. We would all be virtuosos.
Vocally, I had the pleasure of seeing Andrew Foster Williams in concert twice a few years ago, once with full orchestra, and later singing lieder (with simple piano). This guy is a virtuoso. Sitting a few rows back when he sang a long and wide ranging lieder programme was breathtaking. Recordings don’t begin to do him justice. This is top tail of bell curve.
Birds sang before they “talked”, perhaps hominids did too. Music attracts mates, and then when lyrics developed later you’re got sexual attraction + communication: it’s an evolutionary win/win.
For all we know, with Homo erectus out there in the African Savanna a million years ago, it could have sounded like a performance of Pagliacci.
