Hi, I’m Elizabeth Zharoff. I’m an opera singer. I’ve performed throughout major venues in Europe, Asia, Canada and the United States in over 18 languages, including leading lady roles such as Violetta, Pamina, Konstanze…
This is how I used to introduce myself.
How exactly does one go from opera to a leading expert in harsh vocals?
It all happened in such a short time frame – it’s hard for me to wrap my brain around it all- but I’ll give it my best shot.
The female cookie monster made me giggle. Let’s call her by her true name – Tatiana Schmalyuk – and also make note of the band she fronts – Jinjer. Tatiana both sings and growls and she is a beautifully terrifying performer that reminds of a boss monster from Dark Souls.
I was led to Jinjer through a series of recommendations by our audience on YouTube. I started creating reaction/analysis videos in February of 2020 with the primary goal of using a popular trend – reaction videos – to teach people about how the voice functions.
In order to have a successful YouTube channel, the creator MUST listen to their audience. So, I tracked all requests made in YouTube comments to determine which artists and songs I would analyze next. I began with an analysis of singers performing The Diva Dance from The Fifth Element. This led to a blast of requests to analyze Dimash Kudaibergen – who, in my opinion, has one of the greatest voices in the world today.
By May of 2020, we had made our way into metal via symphonic metal, which I think was requested so much due to my background in opera. Nightwish with Floor Jansen performing “Ghost Love Score” was my entry drug.
Not long after I entered the world of metalheads, I started receiving requests for Jinjer – specifically for a song called “Pisces”. I didn’t know at the time, but this request was often made to reactors because people wanted to see the shock when Tati goes full Cookie Monster. I believe the shock was quite real for me, as you can witness in the video below, but I don’t think our growing community expected this EPIC moment to launch my interest in how vocal distortion is created.
I giggled so much hearing Tatiana create these sounds – not because they were funny, but because I was so excited about what she was doing. Even though she sounds like a monster, Tatiana was able to go back into “clean” singing without missing a beat, and her voice sounded totally fine. I didn’t hear any sign of a hemorrhage or nodule – I just heard really beautiful singing alternating with terrifying gutterals. It presented an enigma to me, and quite nearly broke my brain.
After Jinjer, our community led me down a path of singers utilizing their vocal tracts in ways I’d previously not known possible. Some of these singers did things that I’d been told would wreck a voice – yet their voices remained inexplicably intact. Some early standouts include Ronnie Radke from Falling in Reverse, Mikael Akerfeldt from Opeth, Devin Townsend with his wicked screams in Kingdom, and Maria Franz from Heilung, who has a truly spine-chilling banshee cry.
All the while, I was digging into research. I wanted to understand how these sounds were made. I’ve always been curious about voice and I love imagining all of the ways we can make weird noises when unable to sleep at 2:00 AM.
I started to piece things together after encountering a vocal technique called subharmonics – which, of all the strange places, I first heard in acapella music. Yes, I was analyzing acapella at the same time as all of this metal and Dimash and I was guided to a group called VoicePlay, which features a mind-blowing bass named Geoff Castellucci.
Geoff Castellucci occasionally sings so low that it feels like the screws in your furniture will loosen and the walls of your house are likely to cave in. The lowest of the low rumbles are created when he sings a subharmonic. I had to read several papers and ask some smart people questions and now, I can tell you exactly how this happens.
Subharmonics occur when the true vocal folds and the false vocal folds coordinate. This is very rare. The true vocal folds create the fundamental frequency – the pitch we normally hear in singing. Then the false vocal folds vibrate at a particular fraction slower – in most cases, twice as slow as the true vocal folds. Note that this can occur as 1:3 or 1:4 ratios, but I’ve usually heard it accomplished with a 1:2 ratio.
The sound created in a 1:2 ratio shifts the pitch we hear to one octave lower. It’s super bassy – it feels like an earthquake rumble – and it works amazingly well in acapella music.
But what does acapella music have to do with screaming, metal and cookie monster growls?
They both can use structures in your throat that are above the true vocal folds – supraglottic structures.
Once I started to understand the role that the false vocal folds play in creating subharmonics, I started connecting comments I’d read describing metal screams as a false fold scream or a fry scream. The false folds and the true vocal folds don’t coordinate in the same way for a false fold scream as they do in subharmonics, but they do use the same structures – or sometimes just the false folds can be involved.
Above the false folds, many more structures exist that have occasionally been documented as helping in the creation of other types of growls/gutterals/screams/distortion, however, there is very little data actually available. Despite there being many more structures that can vocalize, we only have extensive studies on the true vocal folds.
As I started digging more and more into the research and hearing more singers creating extraordinary sounds, a growing, urgent desire struck me.
I wanted to see down someone’s throat while they made these sounds.
I’ve seen down my own throat plenty of times – so many that I’ve lost track. It’s kinda a requirement during an opera singer vocal check-up with the doc. However, I knew that this type of vocal distortion would look very different.
At first I looked online and there were a few examples that seemed pretty carefully staged or not broad enough in scope. It became clear that I needed to forge my own destiny… so I asked.
This was the start of a friendship that would revolutionize how I think about voice. Will Ramos, the lead singer of Lorna Shore, was almost as giddy as I was about the whole idea of looking down his throat. He didn’t know it, at the time, but his throat happened to be the throat of a unicorn.
We also didn’t know that our first journey into scoping a deathcore singer would lead to a lasting relationship with the team of researchers at The University of Utah, and that we would both become authors on multiple research papers with my vocal research idols.
We didn’t know that we’d go on to develop a course curriculum to teach aspiring singers how to safely create vocal distortion, or that we’d come back to Salt Lake City to launch the official pilot study and help design the groundwork for future research.
How could we have known?
It’s not every day that an opera singer evolves into a scream aficionado.
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