What Determines Your Voice Type?

Soprano, mezzo-soprano, contralto, tenor, baritone, bass? Huh…?

Voice type, Fach, vocal classification, or any other term that indicates what type of voice a singer has is determined by a combination of nature and nurture. The nature part is physiological. The body, brain, and pharynx you’re born with determine the hard limitations of what and how you’re capable of singing.

The nurture part is environmental and experiential, which is just a fancy way of saying how you learn to use your voice (i.e. training, social norms, pop culture influences, perceived expectations, etc.).

Short of saying the physiological component is not worth talking about, I’ll just say there’s not much you can do about it. There’s no efficacious “cosmetic” surgery for singers, so the voice you got when you were born is the one you have to work with for the most part.

That’s not a bad thing, and I’ll explain why, but if you just want the punchline, here it is: the weight of your voice is what determines your voice type. I’ll go into a little detail about what that means for you as a singer and what expectations the weight of your voice creates for other people.

First and Foremost: Embrace The Voice You Have

I’m a baritone. For a long time, I wanted to be a tenor because it was cool; it was rarer. I wanted to sing the high notes! I wanted to be the character who always got the girl, and in opera, that’s usually the tenor. I “grew up” listening to Usher, K-Ci & JoJo, Lloyd, Sam Smith, Michael Jackson, Prince, Al Green and all these great artists from different eras who I thought were awesome.

Being a baritone meant I was stuck in the middle between the electric energy created by the singers I just mentioned and the crooners like Luther Vandross, Barry White, Jamie Cullum, and Cesare Siepi (it’s okay if you don’t know who he is).

What I discovered over time and immersion in the worlds of music and vocal pedagogy was that my voice type does not define my usable range. My usable range also does not change the weight of my voice.

Usable is an important qualifier because there’s a difference between growling, screaming, and singing although the former two can be done artfully and healthily.

I had to overcome the obsession with wanting to be and/or sound like someone else in order to figure out who I was as a singer, and to some extent, as a person. That didn’t happen overnight, but I’m glad it happened because now I can embrace the voice I have and use it to the best of my ability.

With all that said, I am capable of singing just about anything because I know what this baritone is supposed to sound like singing whatever I choose to sing, and that’s not at all a flex. It’s just the reality of developing as a singer.

My voice type isn’t particularly relevant, and neither is yours unless you plan to exclusively sing classical or choral music, which we’ll talk a little about now.

Roles

Traditionally, operatic roles follow a formula:

Soprano — Heroines

Mezzo-Soprano/Contralto — Mothers, Villains, Goddesses, Villainesses, Other Supporting Roles

Tenor — Heros/Lover Boys

Baritone — Clowns, Wingmen, Tragic Protagonists, Villains

Bass — Villains/Obscure Wise Ones

Formula:

[Appropriate Role] = Looks + Vocal WEIGHT = “Voice Type”

Opera aficionados will probably cringe at that overgeneralization, but it’s largely accurate. In classical music, how you look is just as important as how you sound. I’m not talking about outliers like Pavarotti nor am I saying you need to be a Calvin Klein model.

I’m referring to the fact that conductors and directors expect you to look the part. For example, I’m 6 feet tall, I have a big baritone voice, and I’m not a Calvin Klein model, but I’m not too hard on the eyes (this is a direct quote from a prominent director).

If you fancy yourself a singer and you hang out with your kind, go on Facebook or Instagram and look at your singer friends’ profile pictures. I’m willing to bet you could pick out their voice types just by looking at the pictures. People in different professions have a certain look, right? So do singers of different voice types.

In any event, the reason these characteristics are so important is because of our conditioned perception of what [look + sound] communicates to an audience.

If we just take the weight or sound of a voice alone, tenors and sopranos express a certain vague romantic protagonism while baritones, basses, and mezzo-sopranos communicate authority, wisdom, and sometimes deviousness.

This whole [look + sound] idea is an example of the representativeness heuristic, which is where we consciously, unconsciously, or subconsciously lump things together (i.e. tall + handsome + higher voice + male = tenor). It’s not what some people want to hear, but it’s a basic socio-psychological reality.

Range

This is where people make huge mistakes concerning voice type. Huge. I cannot emphasize that enough. Your range does not exclusively determine your voice type. I’m begrudgingly going to provide the following guidelines, but remember these are not hard and fast rules.

Soprano — [C4 — C6]

Mezzo-soprano/Contralto — [F3-A5]

Tenor — [A2-C5]

Baritone — [G2 — A4]

Bass — [E2 — E4]

I purposely lumped mezzo-sopranos and contraltos together for simplicity, but those are ballpark low-high ranges for each voice type. If you know what the octave designations mean, then good for you. If you don’t know what an octave designation is, the information above is even more irrelevant to you than it is to those who do.

Now, as I mentioned, I am a baritone. I am capable of singing both higher and lower than the range I indicated, so again, there’s wiggle room in there. Just because you can sing a little lower or a little higher than the traditional ranges specify doesn’t mean your vocal classification has changed. I came to that erroneous conclusion more than once as a singer and as a teacher.

Tessitura

A super important consideration when looking at ranges is something called tessitura. This is the subrange in which you’re most comfortable singing within the range of notes you’re expected to be capable of singing. It’s also where modifiers like spinto, buffo, profundo, lyrico, and dramatico come into play. I am a full lyric baritone, which sounds really fancy, but it’s just how we describe baritones who sing stuff loud and pretty.

You may also come across specialty designations, like Verdi baritone or Heldentenor. My late voice teacher was often referred to as a Wagnerian tenor because, well, he sang a lot of Wagner and he was really good at it. Ben Hepner is another example of such a singer.

Questions about voice type are very difficult to answer because of so many variables. Most of what I mentioned about roles and range has zero impact on your singing outside of classical music. It’s superfluous information that just usually creates confusion and frustration for people who aren’t trying to build a career in chanson, lieder, opera, or art song.

That instrument you were born with — the one we agreed earlier isn’t likely to change — has a weight to it, and that weight is what largely determines your voice type. Everything else is environmental and experiential.

The best pieces of advice I ever received about singing with respect to “voice type”:

1. Get good training. Learn from the best teachers. Understand that good singers don’t always make good teachers and vice versa.
2. Approach singing with curiosity. You’re never going to know it all, but try to get a little better every day. Progress, not perfection.
3. If it hurts, don’t do it. If you’re trying to “expand your range” and it hurts, you’re doing something wrong.
4. Embrace the voice you were given. It’s a gift, and you only get one.
5. (Virtually) no one outside of classical music and voice science care what you call yourself. Open your mouth, tell a story, and connect to your audience with beautiful music.