Your Daddy's Son Synthesis Essay

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Contrasting to this, Your Daddy’s Son (McDonald, 1990) in fact proved that you don’t necessarily have to be of one particular background to be able to technically sing a song. My voice was well suited to this song and although I would never be cast as the role because of my appearance, in terms of vocal timbre this does not apply. Similarly it suggests the reverse of this; you don’t have to be of a specific appearance to sing classically as this song is classical in style but written for a black character, despite the white European history behind classical more legit singing. In fact historically it has been found that black sounds were previously frowned upon and in the Victorian era scores of African singers were ‘reformed to sound more …show more content…

Physically the female voice is higher as the vocal tract is overall smaller than that of a male (Zerffi, n.d.), but there are numerous more ways in which this can be altered unlike that of racial differences. There are also still exclusions to this rule however. Even In popular music there are clear examples of singers who are often mistaken for the opposite sex based on how they sound, such as Tracy Chapman who is known for her lower pitched voice which is commonly mistaken to be male. The reasoning I found behind why there is more ambiguity between male and female sounded voices is because of the pitches and vocal registers found within voices. There have always been overlap’s between difference registers such as soprano and alto and vocal techniques such as lowering the larynx make changes to the vocal timbre which creates more similarities. This particular vocal timbre created the most changes in my voice which added versatility because I uncovered entirely new ranges in my voice and reached notes I never knew I could hit. The song I chose was purposefully rocky and therefore I performed in yet another new style and instead of simply altering the key to sit comfortably in my voice I kept it as low as possible to keep with the lower registers of a male voice. The result was that the song only moved up the most minimal amount of 1 semitone, and was still in …show more content…

When people don’t hear what they expect to hear from a performer it, from my experience, made them uncomfortable to think that I didn’t sound how they expected, and that my perceived identity was in fact being warped through the use of my voice. Maybe the way to think about this is that the voice although, as Connors writes, it comes from us, it is not part of our body. It is separate once the sound comes away from us and into a space and therefore can assume an identity of its own. The counterproductive side of it is that the way I look will still always restrict how I am cast even if my voice is capable of more, however the results of project do continue to raise questions both ethically and culturally about if this should be the case and perhaps shows such as Hamilton (Miranda, 2015) with its colour blind casting and purposeful ethnic reversals, and Miscast (MCC Theater, 2016), the gender bending cabaret show could help change this within the musical theatre

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