Other sources like Wikipedia say ~6 octaves. This particular performance looks like lip-sync, especially in the finale where his throat doesn't appear to be doing any vibrato. Still, apparently he's an extremely skilled musician and singer, so at least it's not fraudulent.

I forgot about the range of octaves met at the last half of the performance. Sadly the band performance was quite a bit lacking.

Apparently, when the composer showed the sheet music to the soprano that performed the piece, she said that some of the notes written were not humanly possible to achieve because the human voice cannot change notes that fast.

Have a listen to the insane scale she sings around 4:18 and compare that to the same scale at 4:32 in the video @Sagemind linked.... to my untrained ear, they're not quite the same. The Fifth Element version sounds like it drops an octave in the middle.

I could be wrong about that, though.

Either way, it takes nothing away from what is an absolutely amazing performance.

From about 4:15 to 4:26 I am pretty sure she hits at least 5 octaves... cray cray.

this was oddly uninformative and misinformative. the names for white and pink noise are related to light but brown noise is named after robert brown.

white noise is equal power (amplitude/"volume") across frequencies (1/1), pink noise equal power per octave (1/frequency), and brown/red noise is -6dB/octave (1/frequency^2). there is also grey noise, blue noise, black noise, violet noise, and others. and no mention of the fletcher-munson curve (how sensitive our ears are across the frequency spectrum).

As a low brass player, I'd say a sousaphone is in the tuba family: the lowest common brass instruments, an octave below trombones and baritones/euphoniums.

A sousaphone in particular is a marching tuba (named after composer John Philip Sousa), constructed to wrap around the player and place the load on the shoulder, with the bell projecting the sound forward instead of up.

Another type of marching tuba is a contra, more common in drum and bugle corps. It looks like a normal concert tuba but with a 90-degree twist to the valves and mouthpiece pipe so that it also rests on the shoulder with the bell facing forward.

I always love covers that completely mix-up the feel / genre of a song, so this was great.

And I enjoy that guitar dude's stuff, in spite (or because?) of his ever-present shit-eating grin while he's playing! The vocalist has some nice chops too, really cool to hear him transition from the low note on the first "taaaake" to the octave-higher-than-usual peak of "twooooo" shortly later.

Nice cover, nice sift!

You are right, what i was saying is mostly about audio quality. You can not have a sharp fast complex attack on very low notes. No matter what the instrument is. B is about the lowest, after that you need to make drastic equalizations to get that sharpness back. Also the chord structure "widens" it's intervals the lower you go. With B tune, you can barely make fifths. Once octave higher and you get thirds. If you go 7 octaves higher, you can even use seconds... Allthou Bmin9 sounds AWESOME on B, not very pretty or even recognizable, it's just rumble..... But it sounds clearer around E, aka Breath on Floyds Dark Side of the Moon....

At 1:03 I'd have kicked my voice up a few octaves for a bonus laugh.

Interesting to see that compared to a guitar version of one of these, there's a lot more soul and funk.

BTW "Treat Her Right" was a Roy Head song, The Commitments were a fictional band and just did covers, and the very first song (Seven Nation Army) doesn't actually have a bass guitar in it (it's an electric guitar through a Digitech Whammy pedal down an octave).

Still the 4 string guys don't get nearly enough recognition, so *promote the low end!


edit: just finished watching.. no The Chain?!!?! WTF, dude!! give me back my promote, you couldnt-handle-six-strings bastard!

This sort of thing is just a function of knowing what components of vocal tone you can manipulate, how to manipulate them, and engaging in careful, recorded practice until you can routinely reproduce the correct mix. Some vocal strengthening also has to occur over time, much like a singer gradually extending his or her range. The average female voice is only an octave higher in pitch than the average male voice, i.e. a pitch which with practice can easily be reached and maintained by nearly all men. The bigger problem is that men's voices are far more resonant, i.e. rumbly and full, than women's voices. What a man would need to do to reproduce a "girl voice" would be to raise his pitch, and then partially pinch his upper throat and palate, while simultaneously keeping a relaxed throat through which breath can easily flow. If you just pinch the throat without raising pitch, you sound like a nasally drag queen. If you raise the pitch and overly pinch the throat, then you get an artificially thin voice. Merely raising the pitch would just sound like a guy whose voice didn't deepen terribly.

Finally, all of the above would just produce female tone. Much of what we identify as "female" about a voice, isn't tone, but cadence, word choice, and inflection.

And why does it usually start from C

And why are C# and Db the same?

And why not let B# exist and get rid of the notes we don't need.

Better yet, why not just have 11(12?) notes to match the number of tones in an octave.

(i only play tabs )

So who decided there were seven notes in an octave and why?

Give that man the Rob Halford award! Top of the octave and center of the vocal chords, memories of my own damaged through blows from a proper cunt-
*promote

Hooray! Can't stand her musak anymore much but I fell in love with her pimped-out crib on that one MTV show that one time and have always appreciated her style and wardrobe. Her cribs the bomb, btw-Oh, and the fact that I don't know her personally (loopy?) and she's weathered the storm ok so far and hasn't burnt-out!

OHH, and that she could hit those stellar Yma Sumac notes in five octaves+/- isn't too shabby a legacy , either!