[Magdalen] Basso Profundo?

[Jay Weigel]

One of the politicians of the early Russian post-Cold War era, whose name I
now forget but he was a general, had a marvelous deep bass speaking voice.
My friend Sheila and I both thought he must be descended from a long line
of choral singers, because with a voice like that, in Russia, he would
almost have to sing. You could tell from the way he spoke that he could not
possibly be a monotone.

On Tuesday, May 26, 2015, Cantor03--- via Magdalen <
magdalen at herberthouse.org> wrot
>
>
>
> 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.
>