Farrokh Bulsara, best known as Freddie Mercury, took the world by storm with his incredible personality, amazing style, and his undeniably unique voice. His vocal ranges have mesmerized critics, musicians, and even scientists, who have wondered how on earth did he managed to produce such unique notes and reach such high ranges.
Many have been speculated about the shape of his mouth and how his teeth helped create an acoustic box that allowed frequencies to sound like that, but in fact, all the magic happened on his larynx, according to Christian Herbst, an Austrian biophysicist, and voice specialist.
In his study, Freddie Mercury—acoustic analysis of speaking fundamental frequency, vibrato, and subharmonics, Herbst explores the different features on Freddie Mercury’s voice. To do so, he analyzed interviews, a capella recording, voice recordings, and songs; he even analyzed a Freddie Mercury impersonator. The purpose of the study was to isolate the frequencies of his voice in different situations, that is when speaking and when singing. He also focused on the technique he used to hold notes while singing.
Freddie Mercury was considered to be a tenor; however, Herbst’s study concluded he was in fact a baritone, a tone below. Through the analysis of 240 sustained notes from Freddie’s recordings, he was able to understand the main essence of his voice, his iconic vibrato. The vibrato is the oscillation of voice tones that singers use when holding a note. In Freddie’s case, it was discovered that the median frequency of his vibrato (or modulation rate) was 7.0 Hz, the usual vibrato of opera singers like Luciano Pavarotti, for instance, ranges from 3.4 Hz to 6.9 Hz.
Now, the frequency of his voice when speaking was 117.3 Hz, which is what positions him among the baritone scale, but whenever he sang and used his throat, the range would reach up to 784 Hz in higher notes. These are impressive numbers of a unique peculiar voice like no other. To reach these ranges, Freddie Mercury’s vocal cords moved faster than the ones found in regular singers. This allowed him to have what experts know as vocal tremor or unstable voice.
Another great discovery in Herbst’s study is that Freddie sang using subharmonic vibrations when his voice notes were lower. These are not very common among singers and are a peculiar feature of traditional music in native people in Tibet. All these features in Freddie Mercury’s voice only prove what many already knew, Freddie was one of a kind, and his talent was something that we won’t probably see in a long time.
Photos from Wikimedia Commons
