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AT A RECENT CONFERENCE OF VOICE TEACHERS, I attended a discussion on differences between choral and solo singing techniques led by a panel of widely respected university choir directors and voice professors. The panelists discussed how singing in ensembles affects vocal technique, especially with regard to nonvibrato singing. With the audience, they shared the opinion that choral singing should be "colorful and vibrant," and implied that singing without vibrato is harmful to the voice. None defended the idea that there may be value in different styles of voice production, or that voice teachers have a responsibility to equip their students to sing them. One of the panelists remarked that, as teachers, our primary motivation should be to give the students what is best for them, and it is at that point where I would like to begin this article.
What are the most important underlying issues of this controversy, and how will our responses to them best serve our students? The first issue is that of aesthetic preference; the second is that of vocal health. In this discussion, the latter shall be addressed first, as we can appeal to voice science to answer the question, "Does singing without vibrato ruin the voice?"
Vibrato shares certain characteristics with art and the weather, about which there have been witty comments throughout history. We may not know all the facts of the matter, but we do know what we like. Meribeth Bunch notes that "[c]onsiderable acoustic research has been directed toward vibrato, yet virtually nothing is known about the physiological mechanism that produces it."1 She and William Vennard adopt Seashore's 1938 definition of a good vibrato as a "pulsation of pitch usually accompanied with synchronous pulsations of loudness and timbre [that] give a pleasing flexibility, tenderness and richness to the tone."2 Most voice scientists agree that from five to eight pulsations per second constitute what today is considered a "pleasing" vibrato; fewer than five are usually considered a "wobble," whereas more than eight approach what we call a "tremolo."
Taste affects vibrato rates. Clifton Ware notes: "Aesthetic tastes for vibrato patterns tend to vary ... from the minimal vibrato of early choral singers to the fast vibrato patterns prevalent among opera singers in the early twentieth century."3
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