Did non - vocal instrument characteristics influence modern singing ?

This paper proposes that styles of singing in which pitch is fixed, categorical and independent of loudness are a by-product of the development of artificial musical instruments capable of this loudness-pitch independence. The argument is based on the physical and consequent acoustic properties of the voice. The voice is well suited to producing a wide range of phonemes (comparable with a wide range of timbres), and to vocalisations in which pitch and loudness are correlated and not controlled independently. The singer must make compensations in the vocal mechanism to sing at fixed pitch while varying the loudness. However, the converse is true for artificial musical instruments such as flutes, cellos and trumpets, where fixed pitch production is easy, but large changes in timbre of sustained notes are usually difficult, without the aid of mutes. We therefore propose an explanation of how this kind of ‘unnatural’, albeit ubiquitous, singing emerged. We propose that musical instruments are likely to have developed and then to have influenced singing style more so than vice-versa. The sounding of the steady, categorical pitches would have been learned and transmitted and then become adopted into the culture. Some evidence from ethnomusicology supports this perspective. One of the pressures that may have allowed this pitch-loudness independence to survive is the advantage it has in teaching infants to analyse vocalisations in a reductionist manner, because the songs sung to children are typically simpler signals than speech.