What the heck am I looking at down there?

The "pictures" of voices down below were made using a program called PRAAT. PRAAT is a tool for speech therapy that shows the different over-tones in a voice. As I said before, almost any sound you hear is actually made up of many different sounds blended together. So when I hear a trumpet, I hear only a single note, but the sound is actually made of many different notes together. The different notes that go into a single sound are what give that sound it's character. This is why a trumpet and a clarinet sound different, even when they are playing the same note-- they are actually producing many pitches at the same time, the trumpet different ones than the clarinet.

And this is also the reason that a tenor like Pavarotti and a Bass like Hines sound different-- the pitches (or "partials" when we're talking about the notes in a complex sound) that make up a bass sound are different than in a tenor voice.

From the two pictures I posted below, you can see what I'm talking about. A dark bass voice has all of the sound energy concentrated on a couple of intense sound clusters. The first dark line is called the Fundamental-- its the pitch we actually hear. A bass voice has a lot of energy put into the actual pitch we think we hear. The line is very dark and thick because a big percentage of the voices energy is here (more intensity-- "santori time"). Then the line above that determines what vowel sound we hear-- this is also dark in a bass voice. Above that there is one more thick band of sound called the singers formant, which adds beauty to the voice and makes it cary over an orchestra. Actually in a bass voice, the "singers formant" is a combination of the third and fourth partial. But you can see that above the singers formant, there is a big drop off in energy. This drop-off makes the voice sound dark and bassy.

You can see a big contrast to this in the Pavarotti picture. The energy isn't concentrated so heavily in a few areas so the bands are thinner(less intense.) Instead, the energy is spread out over 8 strong bands. These additional bands at the top make the tenor sound beautiful and "bright." At the end of the recording of the Pav, I included a couple of high notes to demonstrate what these top partials add to the voice. The first time, you hear the normal note, then in the second, I've significantly weakened these bands at the top of the voice.