vox1:我们测量流行音乐的假声魅力 We measured pop music’s falsetto obsession

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This is a chart that has never been seen before.

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This one hasn’t either

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nor has this one.

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None of these have.

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That because I made them, along with Matt here.

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My name is Matt Daniels and I'm a journalist at the Pudding, which is a publication for

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visually led storytelling.

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Well, mainly Matt made them, I just sent him a bunch of emails.

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These charts are the result of a year long obsession I’ve had over a very specific

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trend I’ve noticed in music.

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Men singing really high.

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When I listen to the radio, I’ve come to expect one thing.

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Male pop stars exploiting their upper register.

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Bruno Mars, The Weekend, Shawn Mendes, Charlie Puth, Justin Bieber, Justin Timberlake, Adam

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Lavine, the Jonas Brothers, Ed Sheeran, Khalid, Childish Gambino, Frank Ocean, all of One

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Direction, BTS, Chris Martin, One Republic, and Sam Smith.

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I’m not the first person to pick up on this.

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In 2015 alone it seemed every guy was singing high.

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There was Jason Derulo

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“Just the thought of you, gets me so high (so high)”

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Maroon 5

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“I’m right here, cause I need a little love a little sympathy”

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And Justin Bieber

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“Yeah, I know that I let you down Is it too late to say I'm sorry now?”

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But maybe this fact is best illustrated by this 10 week period on the Billboard Charts.

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When The Weekend battled for the top spot against Justin Bieber

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“And I know she'll be the death of me”

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“What do you mean?”

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And then Himself

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“I only call you when it's half past five”

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until finally his Michael Jackson inspired voice was was dethroned by Adele’s “Hello.”

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“Hello, It’s Me”

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Really the only way to know if this hypothesis holds up, though, is to crunch the numbers

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and quantify it.

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And that’s where Matt came in.

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It kind of fits a really good mold of the questions that I really like, where we have

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a cultural question about vocal ranges and usage of falsetto and music and there is no

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perfect data set for that.

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We wanted to make a chart that showed how prevalent the male falsetto was in pop music,

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not just in the last 5 years, but as far back as we could go.

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That meant looking at music streaming services.

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Every streaming platform tags the millions of songs in their respective libraries with

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metadata, but each one does it a little differently.

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For example, Spotify has over 35 millions songs in their library, but their metadata

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is algorithmically driven and pretty broad.

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Matt: some of it was around the tempo of music and how danceable it was or its somber or

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positive tone.

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Pandora, on the other hand has a smaller library, but they are committed to very specific data.

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In their case it wasn’t algorithmically driven.

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They were actually having humans review songs and say what its DNA, or what its genome was.

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The result is a library of 2 million songs with up to 450 individual identifying markers.

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So that was interesting to me because falsetto and vocal range, while could be determined

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by a computer, often lends itself to the human ear because there is some subjectivity to

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it.

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So, we asked Pandora if they had vocal data.

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They did.

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And they shared it with us.

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So do you actually have available the original dataset that we received?

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Oh yeah yeah I can.

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Should I just bring that up?

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It's forty two thousand rows.

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The first entry is by George P. Watson from 1911

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He was a Yodeler.

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One hundred and eight years later and 42,948 rows down we have the iconic high voice of

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Thom Yorke.

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Sudden words

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We’ll get to exactly how these are scored in a bit, but damn that’s a lot of songs.

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So what we said was “OK this is great to see these forty three thousand songs but really

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we only care about songs that charted.”

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So we created a data set of the Billboard Hot 100, a 28,000 song list of the 100 most

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popular songs in the US every week since 1958.

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and we went back to Pandora.

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And said we only really want the falsetto data for these songs, and not only do we want

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the falsetto data, but we also need data about the register.

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And a few other important things, like the gender of the person singing.

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It’s not just a matter of like putting into their system and it spits out the falsetto

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data.

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We need to match the names of the songs and the artists names to whatever Pandora has.

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Wait.

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So you have to do that manually?

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We write fancy programs to guess that there's a match and confirm that there's a match.

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So with Matt’s fancy program we matched 20,075 songs.

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So the biggest gap in the data is actually the missing songs that aren't on streaming

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services, but were on the Billboard Hot 100 and did have very valid falsetto data behind

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them.

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So in 1958 we have data for 50% of the songs that charted.

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In 2018 we have data for 95% of the songs that charted.

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The good thing though is, you think of an average number one hit from 1958 - that's

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more likely to appear on Pandora than a song that hit number 100 for one week.

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When I first sat down with this giant spreadsheet, I immediately wanted to see how songs that

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I thought had a lot of falsetto had actually been scored.

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The first song that I looked for was Childish Gambino’s “Redbone.”

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“If you want it, you can have it, ohhhhhh”

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His voice is super high and very memorable.

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Not only that, a lot of articles about this song mentioned it had a lot of falsetto.

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To my astonishment, Pandora determined there was no falsetto in the song, instead they

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said it was just sung in a high register

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This trend was most stark in the hard rock and heavy metal genres.

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Def Leppard’s “Rock of Ages” had a falsetto score of zero but register score of 9 out

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of 10.

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I don't care if it takes all night I gonna set this town alight, come on

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Knowing this, let’s define what falsetto and vocal register actually are.

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To do that I’ve brought in an actual opera singer.

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Hi I'm Anthony Roth Costanzo and I'm a countertenor and opera singer.

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Prove it.

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Perfect, let’s talk about vocal range first.

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The voices starting from the bottom in the classical tradition are bass, baritone, tenor,

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contralto, countertenor, mezzo soprano, Soprano.

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Countertenor is kind of a catch all term and it's a range that goes up and down.

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Most male pop stars today are tenors.

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That means their average range is somewhere between here and here.

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Pandora’s data scores vocal register - which measures a singers ability to go up and down

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their range consistently.

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A super high register

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Pandora rates songs from 0-10 from low to high.

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“Rock of Ages” ranked super high with a 9 -

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Pharrell’s voice in “Get Lucky” was given an 8

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“I’m up all night to get some, she’s up all night for good fun, I’m up all night

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to get lucky”

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As was Elton John in “Crocodile Rock”

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“I never knew me a better time and I guess I never will”

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So I think it's safe to say that between a 7 and 8 is pretty high on the vocal register

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range.

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But it's not crazy.

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So when these artists want to access even higher notes

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they’ll likely switch to their falsetto

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register.

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Falsetto is an Italian word which means “false little voice.”

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Falsetto is typically a technique ascribed to a male singer that switches from their

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chest voice to their head voice.

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Whenever you're going from chest voice - meaning the speaking register - to head voice, there's

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often a little break because there are two different sets of muscles handing off to each

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other, and that's how you yodel right.

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[demonstrates yodeling] And that's what yodeling is.

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George, you’re back!

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It’s not just Yodeling.

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It happens in pop all the time, though that transition is often more invisible.

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Notice how Freddie Mercury goes from his chest voice to falsetto when he says the word “decline”

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“A built-in remedy For Kruschev and Kennedy

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At anytime an invitation You can't decline”

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Okay so let me just pause for a second and say that

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“falsetto,” as a term, has been around

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forever, but its definition has changed and evolved.

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Many vocal coaches would say that falsetto is that breathy, light sound you heard from

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Freddie Mercury.

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And they say the generic term “head voice” should describe crisper, reinforced high notes.

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A perfect example of that is from this 90s classic.

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“I knew I loved you before I met you.

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I knew I loved you.”

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That's amazing.

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I mean you know that's like a really well integrated instrument.

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For your average music listener, aka me, the technical distinction between head voice and

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falsetto is less important than the fact that they both just sound impossibly high.

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That brings us again to the scoring system.

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A 10 on the Pandora scale is a song that’s sung entirely in Falsetto

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“Staying alive”

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That’s pretty extreme, and

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according to our data set, it’s also pretty rare.

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So here’s the tricky determination I’ve got to make.

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What falsetto score is enough to really define a song.

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I think a good place to start is a song literally called “Falsetto”

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“Now I got her talking like this, in a falsetto.

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She’s like oooh oooh baby ahh ah ah”

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Pandora gave this song a 6 - in their ears, The-Dream only used the technique moderately.

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This is where I could split hairs all day.

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Because while, yeah, The-Dream doesn’t use a falsetto the whole time, the technique plays

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does play a central role in the track.

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The hook of the song, the most memorable part, is sung in falsetto.

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Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me A River” also got a 6.

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“Cry me a river (go on and just) Cry me a river (go on and just)

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Cry me a river (baby, go on and just)”

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So, I’m going to look at songs with a falsetto above a 5

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If there’s one thing I can’t stress enough, it’s that this data can be addressed in

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a 1,000 different ways.

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To keep things simple, though we’ve separated falsetto and vocal register as two separate

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data points.

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I think this is probably the first chart I made that just was super simple and just said

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all right “What is the average value of all the songs that charted in a year.”

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First let's focus on vocal register.

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I was not expecting to see this just a very clear like march to the top in the late 80s

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The average vocal register for male singer in 1988 was a 7.1.

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But as you can see across any time period, that average never really dropped below 5.4.

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Because there were so many songs in 1988 that had a register of 7 or higher, we’re going

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to make this a little bit tougher.

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I’m going to boost the register to an 8 and only allow songs that made it in the top

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10.

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We’ve got a strong hard rock and heavy metal showing.

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“She's got a smile it seems to me”

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There’s my man Phil Collins

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“I'm always right there beside her We're two hearts”

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I’ve literally never heard this song

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“I can rocket 2 u”

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Okay, wow.

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If we push the Falsetto score up to a 6, we’re left with just two songs from 1988.

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“Smooth Criminal” “He came into her apartment

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He left the bloodstains on the carpet”

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and “Nite and Day” by Al B Sure!

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“I can tell you how I feel about you night and day”

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With Nite and Day just barely edging out to win.

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The 1980s blew a high male vocal register out of the water.

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So let’s see how this chart changes when we just focus on falsetto.

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Things start to shift going back from the 1980s to the 1970s - the disco era.

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1975 was the highest year for falsetto.

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Where 18% of songs had a value over 4.

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It also serves as a turning point for the Bee Gees.

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This might be surprising to hear, but before 1975 the Bee Gees’s average falsetto was

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around 0.8.

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After 1975 it rose to a 5.5.

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And that makes sense.

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They had to compete with the likes of Earth, Wind, and Fire, Ohio Players, Eddie Kendricks,

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Curtis Mayfield - all artists whose careers were defined by their high voices.

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I can imagine a record executive in a room listening to a song and they're like “Yeah

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that's great but you should put some falsetto in there somewhere”

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It wasn’t until 1976 that their now trademark falsetto hit number one.

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“You should be dancing, yeah”

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Looking back at both of these charts, it’s obvious something shifted after the 1980s.

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The thing that changed after the 80s is you have hip hop becoming massively popular.

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And today it's the most popular genre.

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If you look at the average song there just isn't as many opportunities for for a falsetto

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because there's just less singing.

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So how do we account for that?

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So I created this toggle that basically said is there singing in this song which is also

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from the Pandora data, they basically have a spoken variable.

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So first let’s see what happens when we toggle the singing function for songs in the

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top 10.

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1996 and 2015 really shoot up.

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Let’s focus on 1996 first.

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This was the year Neo-Seoul went mainstream.

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Artists like D’Angelo and Maxwell led the charge.

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Their voices were a modern twist on the soul artists of the 1970s.

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I mean just listen to D’Angelo next to Curtis Mayfield.

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“When I first saw you baby I wanted to die

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Me and those dreamin' eyes of mine”

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“So In Love, every time we kiss”

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2 1996 was a huge year for Falsetto, but so

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was 2015.

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And here are maybe your your your ears hearing the right thing, relative to other years,

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2015 was the year of high voices.

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Regardless of which toggle we select or which combination of falsetto and register we choose,

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we did find this: if a song has falsetto, whether it’s a 1 or a 10, it’s going to

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chart higher — and longer.

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This is true across nearly every year.

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Not only that, Top 10 Hits are more likely to use falsetto.

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Take a look at that huge spike in 2015.

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66% of songs that peaked in the top 10 had falsetto.

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Regardless of the decade, high male voices are iconic.

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From the Frankie Vallie belting Sherry

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“Sherry baby”

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To the 70s swagger of Bloodstone’s “Natural High”

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“I'm trying to make something out of nothing And I don't even know you”

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To the Weeknd’s hazy R

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“None of these toys on lease too, ah Made your whole year in a week too, yah”

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It feels like today is very good for the commercial viability of the high male voice.

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And I think that's true if the window of time

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is the millennials' lifetime.

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But if you were to talk to your parents or your parents parents they'd be like Oh you

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think today is good.

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In nineteen seventy five it's not even comparable.

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The reason why it might feel like a trend today is because this is all we've ever known.