[Magdalen] Basso Profundo?

[Cantor03 at aol.com]

I watched a TV interview of a local boy who plays football for a  college
out of state.  He was a sophomore in college, and therefore about  20
years of age.
 
He had a remarkably low speaking voice of the type society associates
with hyper-masculinity.
 
Then it struck me:  This young man may well have been on  anabolic
steroids at some point.  I think there is regular testing for these  drugs,
but where there is a will there is a way.
 
In any case, anabolic steroids are fully capable of lowering the  timbre
of the male and female voices as much as an octave, and the  literature
seems to corroborate that assumpton.
 
The same lowering effect is quite certainly the effect of cigarette  smoking
on vocal timbre.  This is only personal observation, but of the  hundreds of
patients I saw with extra deep male voices, I cannot remember one of  them
who was not a smoker, and often a heavy smoker.
 
It's just a little amusing, and at the same time tragic that the male  
possessors
of such voices are often just a bit proud of what they consider to be  their
enhanced masculinity from their low vocal timbre.  Further, in my  
experience,
they often seem to have no clue that their throat cancer risks are  
exponentially
increased with tobacco smoke.
 
Maybe as a singer I am more sensitive to this effect of tobacco on the  
larynx.
Some of these booming male voices seem rather to be crying out for  relief.
 
I hasten to add that their are obviously real male basso profundos, and  
marvelous
female contraltos (the "low ladies) such as Pennsylvania's own Marilyn  
Horne
and these are natural, God-given, and blissfully unrelated to  tobacco.
 
 
David Strang.