O Holy Vibrato

One of the best things about the break between semesters is that it affords us the time to do things we enjoy that we don't always have time for during the school year, like watching movies, hanging out with friends and family, or analyzing the vibrato rate and extent of pop singers. 

OK, maybe I was the only one who did that last one. Let me give you some background. 

At one point during the holidays, I was listening to an all-Christmas music radio station and they played songs performed by Aaron Neville ("O Holy Night") and Josh Groban ("Believe") back to back. If you don't know who Aaron Neville is, this duet he sang with Linda Ronstadt in 1990 was one of the big pop love songs when I was growing up. Although, to hear his unique vibrato, you only need to listen to the first few seconds of his rendition of Schubert's "Ave Maria." 

Most of you are probably familiar with Josh Groban, given his stardom in both pop and Broadway spheres. His ever-present, quick vibrato is part of what I believe makes it difficult to categorize where he best fits, genre-wise. 

Regardless, hearing these two singers back to back, I was really struck by how different their vibrato rates are. So, I pulled out the spectrogram (VoceVista Video Pro) to see if I could measure the differences. Those of you who were in "Vocology Day" at Dem Lab (or who just had Voice Pedagogy with me) may remember a bit about VoceVista. As a research tool, it's tremendously useful for voice analysis. But, for my purposes, I kept it pretty simple and just gave it the eyeball test. 

I looked up recordings of both Neville and Groban singing their own versions of "O Holy Night." This first picture is from Neville singing the climactic note on the word "night." 

In the middle of the screen, the wiggly lines show his vibrato. The number of wiggles per second indicates his vibrato rate. How far above and below the pitch each wiggle travels indicates his vibrato extent. In the picture above, we can see that his rate is about 4.5 cycles per second and his extent is not that extensive. 

Earlier in the song, Neville sustained a less climactic note, which looks like this: 

Here, the rate is almost exactly the same as in the other example (about 4.5 cycles per second). But, looking again at the middle of the screen, you can see that the extent (the size of each bump) is much greater. This means that he is singing much further above and below the pitch. 

In Groban's rendition, his climactic note is on the second syllable of the word "Noel," which looks like this: 

His vibrato rate is roughly 5.5 cycles per second, which is an entire cycle faster per second than Neville's. We can also see that his extent seems to be somewhere between Neville's two examples—wider than Neville's climactic note but not as wide as his second example. Groban's extent also seems to be more consistent in this one-second selection than Neville's, especially in the second example where the peaks and valleys had more variability. 

So, what does all of this mean? For starters, it would seem to confirm what my ears had already told me, that these two singers use their vibrato quite differently from each other. But it also zeros in on how they are different. My suspicion was that Neville uses an unusually slow and wide vibrato. Though it is somewhat slow, it is sometimes wide in extent and sometimes quite narrow. My suspicion for Groban was that his vibrato is faster and wider than most other pop singers. We see in these selections that it is faster than Neville's, but in extent it's somewhere between Neville's two examples. 

I think there is a natural follow-up question to all of this analysis: Which vibrato is better? Well, it depends on what we mean by "better," I suppose. Both singers have made major careers singing the way they do. Neville, who is now 82 years old, has four platinum albums and four top-10 hits as an R&B and soul singer. Groban, who is now 42 years old, has four multi-platinum albums in styles that have been classified as everything from easy listening to pop rock to operatic rock (better known as "popera"). He's also played two leading roles on Broadway. Have these two singers been so successful because of their unique uses of vibrato or despite them? It's probably impossible to say. 

One thing we know about musical theatre singing is that a variety of vibrato rates and extents are used, depending on what era or style of musical theatre is being performed. That can range from a wide and fast vibrato to no vibrato at all to a note that starts with no vibrato and then ends with lots of it! What is "better" may depend on the style, the situation, the emotion of what is being expressed, and what works best in the voices of individual singers. 

How has your singing been this week? 

Now go practice.