This is a chart that has never been seen before.
This one hasn’t either
nor has this one.
None of these have.
That because I made them, along with Matt here.
My name is Matt Daniels and I'm a journalist at the Pudding, which is a publication for
visually led storytelling.
Well, mainly Matt made them, I just sent him a bunch of emails.
These charts are the result of a year long obsession I’ve had over a very specific
trend I’ve noticed in music.
Men singing really high.
When I listen to the radio, I’ve come to expect one thing.
Male pop stars exploiting their upper register.
Bruno Mars, The Weekend, Shawn Mendes, Charlie Puth, Justin Bieber, Justin Timberlake, Adam
Lavine, the Jonas Brothers, Ed Sheeran, Khalid, Childish Gambino, Frank Ocean, all of One
Direction, BTS, Chris Martin, One Republic, and Sam Smith.
I’m not the first person to pick up on this.
In 2015 alone it seemed every guy was singing high.
There was Jason Derulo
“Just the thought of you, gets me so high (so high)”
Maroon 5
“I’m right here, cause I need a little love a little sympathy”
And Justin Bieber
“Yeah, I know that I let you down Is it too late to say I'm sorry now?”
But maybe this fact is best illustrated by this 10 week period on the Billboard Charts.
When The Weekend battled for the top spot against Justin Bieber
“And I know she'll be the death of me”
“What do you mean?”
And then Himself
“I only call you when it's half past five”
until finally his Michael Jackson inspired voice was was dethroned by Adele’s “Hello.”
“Hello, It’s Me”
Really the only way to know if this hypothesis holds up, though, is to crunch the numbers
and quantify it.
And that’s where Matt came in.
It kind of fits a really good mold of the questions that I really like, where we have
a cultural question about vocal ranges and usage of falsetto and music and there is no
perfect data set for that.
We wanted to make a chart that showed how prevalent the male falsetto was in pop music,
not just in the last 5 years, but as far back as we could go.
That meant looking at music streaming services.
Every streaming platform tags the millions of songs in their respective libraries with
metadata, but each one does it a little differently.
For example, Spotify has over 35 millions songs in their library, but their metadata
is algorithmically driven and pretty broad.
Matt: some of it was around the tempo of music and how danceable it was or its somber or
positive tone.
Pandora, on the other hand has a smaller library, but they are committed to very specific data.
In their case it wasn’t algorithmically driven.
They were actually having humans review songs and say what its DNA, or what its genome was.
The result is a library of 2 million songs with up to 450 individual identifying markers.
So that was interesting to me because falsetto and vocal range, while could be determined
by a computer, often lends itself to the human ear because there is some subjectivity to
it.
So, we asked Pandora if they had vocal data.
They did.
And they shared it with us.
So do you actually have available the original dataset that we received?
Oh yeah yeah I can.
Should I just bring that up?
It's forty two thousand rows.
The first entry is by George P. Watson from 1911
He was a Yodeler.
One hundred and eight years later and 42,948 rows down we have the iconic high voice of
Thom Yorke.
Sudden words
We’ll get to exactly how these are scored in a bit, but damn that’s a lot of songs.
So what we said was “OK this is great to see these forty three thousand songs but really
we only care about songs that charted.”
So we created a data set of the Billboard Hot 100, a 28,000 song list of the 100 most
popular songs in the US every week since 1958.
and we went back to Pandora.
And said we only really want the falsetto data for these songs, and not only do we want
the falsetto data, but we also need data about the register.
And a few other important things, like the gender of the person singing.
It’s not just a matter of like putting into their system and it spits out the falsetto
data.
We need to match the names of the songs and the artists names to whatever Pandora has.
Wait.
So you have to do that manually?
We write fancy programs to guess that there's a match and confirm that there's a match.
So with Matt’s fancy program we matched 20,075 songs.
So the biggest gap in the data is actually the missing songs that aren't on streaming
services, but were on the Billboard Hot 100 and did have very valid falsetto data behind
them.
So in 1958 we have data for 50% of the songs that charted.
In 2018 we have data for 95% of the songs that charted.
The good thing though is, you think of an average number one hit from 1958 - that's
more likely to appear on Pandora than a song that hit number 100 for one week.
When I first sat down with this giant spreadsheet, I immediately wanted to see how songs that
I thought had a lot of falsetto had actually been scored.
The first song that I looked for was Childish Gambino’s “Redbone.”
“If you want it, you can have it, ohhhhhh”
His voice is super high and very memorable.
Not only that, a lot of articles about this song mentioned it had a lot of falsetto.
To my astonishment, Pandora determined there was no falsetto in the song, instead they
said it was just sung in a high register
This trend was most stark in the hard rock and heavy metal genres.
Def Leppard’s “Rock of Ages” had a falsetto score of zero but register score of 9 out
of 10.
I don't care if it takes all night I gonna set this town alight, come on
Knowing this, let’s define what falsetto and vocal register actually are.
To do that I’ve brought in an actual opera singer.
Hi I'm Anthony Roth Costanzo and I'm a countertenor and opera singer.
Prove it.
Perfect, let’s talk about vocal range first.
The voices starting from the bottom in the classical tradition are bass, baritone, tenor,
contralto, countertenor, mezzo soprano, Soprano.
Countertenor is kind of a catch all term and it's a range that goes up and down.
Most male pop stars today are tenors.
That means their average range is somewhere between here and here.
Pandora’s data scores vocal register - which measures a singers ability to go up and down
their range consistently.
A super high register
Pandora rates songs from 0-10 from low to high.
“Rock of Ages” ranked super high with a 9 -
Pharrell’s voice in “Get Lucky” was given an 8
“I’m up all night to get some, she’s up all night for good fun, I’m up all night
to get lucky”
As was Elton John in “Crocodile Rock”
“I never knew me a better time and I guess I never will”
So I think it's safe to say that between a 7 and 8 is pretty high on the vocal register
range.
But it's not crazy.
So when these artists want to access even higher notes
they’ll likely switch to their falsetto
register.
Falsetto is an Italian word which means “false little voice.”
Falsetto is typically a technique ascribed to a male singer that switches from their
chest voice to their head voice.
Whenever you're going from chest voice - meaning the speaking register - to head voice, there's
often a little break because there are two different sets of muscles handing off to each
other, and that's how you yodel right.
[demonstrates yodeling] And that's what yodeling is.
George, you’re back!
It’s not just Yodeling.
It happens in pop all the time, though that transition is often more invisible.
Notice how Freddie Mercury goes from his chest voice to falsetto when he says the word “decline”
“A built-in remedy For Kruschev and Kennedy
At anytime an invitation You can't decline”
Okay so let me just pause for a second and say that
“falsetto,” as a term, has been around
forever, but its definition has changed and evolved.
Many vocal coaches would say that falsetto is that breathy, light sound you heard from
Freddie Mercury.
And they say the generic term “head voice” should describe crisper, reinforced high notes.
A perfect example of that is from this 90s classic.
“I knew I loved you before I met you.
I knew I loved you.”
That's amazing.
I mean you know that's like a really well integrated instrument.
For your average music listener, aka me, the technical distinction between head voice and
falsetto is less important than the fact that they both just sound impossibly high.
That brings us again to the scoring system.
A 10 on the Pandora scale is a song that’s sung entirely in Falsetto
“Staying alive”
That’s pretty extreme, and
according to our data set, it’s also pretty rare.
So here’s the tricky determination I’ve got to make.
What falsetto score is enough to really define a song.
I think a good place to start is a song literally called “Falsetto”
“Now I got her talking like this, in a falsetto.
She’s like oooh oooh baby ahh ah ah”
Pandora gave this song a 6 - in their ears, The-Dream only used the technique moderately.
This is where I could split hairs all day.
Because while, yeah, The-Dream doesn’t use a falsetto the whole time, the technique plays
does play a central role in the track.
The hook of the song, the most memorable part, is sung in falsetto.
Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me A River” also got a 6.
“Cry me a river (go on and just) Cry me a river (go on and just)
Cry me a river (baby, go on and just)”
So, I’m going to look at songs with a falsetto above a 5
If there’s one thing I can’t stress enough, it’s that this data can be addressed in
a 1,000 different ways.
To keep things simple, though we’ve separated falsetto and vocal register as two separate
data points.
I think this is probably the first chart I made that just was super simple and just said
all right “What is the average value of all the songs that charted in a year.”
First let's focus on vocal register.
I was not expecting to see this just a very clear like march to the top in the late 80s
The average vocal register for male singer in 1988 was a 7.1.
But as you can see across any time period, that average never really dropped below 5.4.
Because there were so many songs in 1988 that had a register of 7 or higher, we’re going
to make this a little bit tougher.
I’m going to boost the register to an 8 and only allow songs that made it in the top
10.
We’ve got a strong hard rock and heavy metal showing.
“She's got a smile it seems to me”
There’s my man Phil Collins
“I'm always right there beside her We're two hearts”
I’ve literally never heard this song
“I can rocket 2 u”
Okay, wow.
If we push the Falsetto score up to a 6, we’re left with just two songs from 1988.
“Smooth Criminal” “He came into her apartment
He left the bloodstains on the carpet”
and “Nite and Day” by Al B Sure!
“I can tell you how I feel about you night and day”
With Nite and Day just barely edging out to win.
The 1980s blew a high male vocal register out of the water.
So let’s see how this chart changes when we just focus on falsetto.
Things start to shift going back from the 1980s to the 1970s - the disco era.
1975 was the highest year for falsetto.
Where 18% of songs had a value over 4.
It also serves as a turning point for the Bee Gees.
This might be surprising to hear, but before 1975 the Bee Gees’s average falsetto was
around 0.8.
After 1975 it rose to a 5.5.
And that makes sense.
They had to compete with the likes of Earth, Wind, and Fire, Ohio Players, Eddie Kendricks,
Curtis Mayfield - all artists whose careers were defined by their high voices.
I can imagine a record executive in a room listening to a song and they're like “Yeah
that's great but you should put some falsetto in there somewhere”
It wasn’t until 1976 that their now trademark falsetto hit number one.
“You should be dancing, yeah”
Looking back at both of these charts, it’s obvious something shifted after the 1980s.
The thing that changed after the 80s is you have hip hop becoming massively popular.
And today it's the most popular genre.
If you look at the average song there just isn't as many opportunities for for a falsetto
because there's just less singing.
So how do we account for that?
So I created this toggle that basically said is there singing in this song which is also
from the Pandora data, they basically have a spoken variable.
So first let’s see what happens when we toggle the singing function for songs in the
top 10.
1996 and 2015 really shoot up.
Let’s focus on 1996 first.
This was the year Neo-Seoul went mainstream.
Artists like D’Angelo and Maxwell led the charge.
Their voices were a modern twist on the soul artists of the 1970s.
I mean just listen to D’Angelo next to Curtis Mayfield.
“When I first saw you baby I wanted to die
Me and those dreamin' eyes of mine”
“So In Love, every time we kiss”
2 1996 was a huge year for Falsetto, but so
was 2015.
And here are maybe your your your ears hearing the right thing, relative to other years,
2015 was the year of high voices.
Regardless of which toggle we select or which combination of falsetto and register we choose,
we did find this: if a song has falsetto, whether it’s a 1 or a 10, it’s going to
chart higher — and longer.
This is true across nearly every year.
Not only that, Top 10 Hits are more likely to use falsetto.
Take a look at that huge spike in 2015.
66% of songs that peaked in the top 10 had falsetto.
Regardless of the decade, high male voices are iconic.
From the Frankie Vallie belting Sherry
“Sherry baby”
To the 70s swagger of Bloodstone’s “Natural High”
“I'm trying to make something out of nothing And I don't even know you”
To the Weeknd’s hazy R&B
“None of these toys on lease too, ah Made your whole year in a week too, yah”
It feels like today is very good for the commercial viability of the high male voice.
And I think that's true if the window of time
is the millennials' lifetime.
But if you were to talk to your parents or your parents parents they'd be like Oh you
think today is good.
In nineteen seventy five it's not even comparable.
The reason why it might feel like a trend today is because this is all we've ever known.