This is a link to a chart at the Schillar Institute. It divides the human singing voice according to registers. There are basically three main male voices, bass, baritone, and tenor and that the female voice is divided into contralto, alto or mezzo soprano, and soprano. No matter how you are classified (and some can sing across the board) your voice is divided into three main categories, chest, middle and head voice. The chest voice is the voice you talk in and your lower voice. The head voice is the lighter voice you sing in when you are going for the high notes. The middle is a combination, the voice without breaks. I suppose it means you can sing the high note and yet have the resonance so the audience can hear you. A vocal instructor can tell you what they mean, I can't.
On the chart it shows alto and mezzo sopranos as the same. However it could be that many people classified as altos found they could sing a higher range than the limited accompaignment and could actually sing a melody. Thus, they had to be reclassified. .
By the way, anybody of any race and ethnic group can sing. Of course, if you turn on the television and see most of the singers are African American who have the advantage of larger mouths, which prevents placing the tone forward from sounding nasal. However, many Europeans, and I include Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, etc. whose ancestors came from Europe, have a different problem. They have smaller mouths and many have a nasal quantity. That nasal quantity is detrimental to classical singing, which requires one to reveberate the sound to the back of the throat and the singer has to make as if she's beginning a yawn. This takes concentration and one in which a vocal teacher and lessons are need to overcome the nasility. Now if you want to sing while you are playing the piano or keyboard or are trying to join the Church Choir, you had better do it properly.
If you are serious,there are online lessons and advice, designed to see whether you want to take lessons and whether you can take the time (which may depend on whether you get encouragement). Believe it or not, there are people who do not appreciate creativity. I have written some suggestions that I found are quite common on these online singing lessons.
There are some CD how to sing courses. I tried one out, but it emphasized singing forward which is rather bad advice for someone who talks nasal. Sometimes the courses are based on theories that have since been disproven, so save your money and when you get enough, sign up for voice lessons.
Drink plenty of water, and avoid eating anything that causes phelm (milk products are notorious for that, so if you are a yogurt lover like I am, have it after the concert or enough time previous so you don't start coughing in the middle.) Oh and have a water bottle handy. Some can sing right through without needing one, but I can't. Avoid bread and buns. It does not mean you should not eat them, but not when you are getting ready to do singing exercises or the Church choir starts in a couple of hours. Of course if you are allergic, you will avoid these products anyway.
Get plenty of sleep and plenty of exercise. Walk a lot. Breathe deeply. You have to sing from your diaphragm. That's another reason for the long walks (45 minutes a day minimum), you have to lose weight in the stomach area so ou don't look like a slob.
When you are practicing, record your voice to see how much you need to improve. Oh I'd recommend Audacity. By the way if you own a Mac it is much harder to find a program that can record your voice and what you can edit, but I am working on it. If you want to make a CD, you can get CDEX if you can't afford Nero yet unless you are buying yourself a new CD burner and it is included in the package. Making a Cd is handy if you want to practice away from your computer. Of course, unless you have an excellent memory, you have to copy the lyrics.
It's best to have a voice teacher or vocal coach or whatever you call them. For one thing, they will show you the correct way to form your mouth, how to reach your head voice, etc. They will also tell you if you singing out of pitch. By the way, good voice teachers are not cheap. I did find one and I did get a piano. So now I am almost perfect, but who would notice that? You see I am in my late sixties, and even though I could probably sing really good into my nineties, there are those in fact a majority who feel that once one reaches their seventies, their voice has been shot. Just a word to those who read this.
When I was a teen, I belonged to another Church Choir, but they classified me as an alto and even though I could recognize what a note sounded like, I lost much of that ability because it is hard to see what E4 and F4 sounds like when you are singing, "praise Him, praise Him, praise Him" all the time in C4 for most of the piece. but that was before I didn't know how to access my head voice. Anyway, I had taken piano lessons, along with music theory - how to read music and recognized how a note sounds just by looking it. So they had us all try out C6. If you reached C6, you got into the melody section where the sopranos sang "Oh praise to God, alleuia, and all that pretty stuff. " Yes, I could pick up notes. Rats!!!Now it wasn't as if I could only go as far as G5 or even A5. I was just
According to Gibbons Fall of the Roman Empire, Pope Gregory invented the Gregorian chant so that the rough voices of the people could not handle anything ornate. And on reading it, we assume Pope Gregory getting out his quill and explaining to a novice monk, why in this manner: "I want something so that our recent Frankish converts can use to praise God. Their voices do not have the melodic quality of us Romans. Now hand me that jar of ink" Well actually most of those rough voices were not the Germans but the actually Gauls who had lived in Gaul for centuries. There were more of them than the Franks, Visigoths and the Germanic tribes, so why would Pope Gregory write chants for just that small percentage of the population?