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“The sound stops when you run out of air, or when the cords are separated.” If the folds don’t join properly, or if a nodule interferes with their even vibration, then air leaks through. “As pressure builds up, it pushes the cords aside and makes them vibrate,” explains Milan Amin, director of the NYU Voice Center. When people sing or speak, the lungs expel a column of air that travels up through the windpipe, where it is obstructed by the vocal cords. Nothing else in the body moves with that precision or speed,” says Steven Zeitels, a Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital Voice Center laryngeal surgeon and throat doctor to the stars. “All the vocal muscles would fit into one corner of one facial muscle. The mechanism responsible for that cartoonish variety - and for the ability to utter a monosyllable in tragic, comic, or ironic mode - rests in a dense bundle of musculature and nerves. Try speaking a short sentence, switching every few syllables from a Don Corleone rasp to a hooting falsetto, then to a nasal honk, finishing on a guttural, drill-sergeant bark. The modernist composer Luciano Berio pushed that versatility almost to the breaking point more than 50 years ago in his “Sequenza III,” but even the untrained voice is capable of astonishing acrobatics. But a voice can swoop in milliseconds through a dizzying range of timbres and techniques. A piano produces the same sound, in the same way, no matter whether it’s playing “Chopsticks” or a Brahms concerto. The voice is the most primal of instruments it’s also among the most technologically advanced.
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Paul Simon has kept his voice in remarkably good shape, but when he found himself in vocal distress singing “Bridge Over Troubled Water” at the Democratic National Convention in July - a song Art Garfunkel originally sang, in his higher range, though Simon’s been performing it for years - Twitter reacted with a hailstorm of condescension and scorn. Singers don’t want to retire, and fans don’t want to lose them, but the price of longevity can be steep. There is almost always a trade-off between agility and age. At 74, he can still usually hit the high note on “night” in the opening line of “Blackbird,” but the lightness has been scrubbed away, replaced by an uncertain warble. In his youth, Paul McCartney produced a wondrously pure schoolboy tenor, with a touch of sandpapery sexiness. You can hear that inexorable process play itself out in singers who keep at it long past their prime. If you want to get a feeling for what it’s like to sing through that level of damage, try plucking a few notes on an ancient rubber band. Over the course of a singer’s career, millions of collisions can leave the vocal cords scarred and stiff. If she’s a soprano and she sings an A above middle C (the note that orchestras tune to), the number of impacts rises to 440 Hz, or 440 impacts each second, so fast the human eye can detect that movement only in slo-mo. Every time a woman speaks, those tough little folds go slamming against each other around 200 times each second. But that description doesn’t get across the repeated violence to which humans subject their vocal cords, even humans who don’t sing for a living. Within the throat’s protective enclosure, two supple bands of tissue flutter over an opening the size of a penny like a pair of doll’s-house curtains. Like everything else in the body, that agile apparatus tends to lose its powers over time. But the singer’s most delicate and irreplaceable apparatus is the larynx, the object of immense care and constant torture. Oldchella - truckloads of cables, computers, instruments, lights, and audio gear follow along. When a global pop star hits the road - as a conclave of elder rockers will do on October 7 at the Desert Trip festival in Indio, California, a.k.a.