ce, especially in the lowest tones of the chest register, that
these altos are known as female baritones. In fact there is no voice in
which register affects tone-quality as plainly as in alto. For in alto
voices the chest register is apt to give tones that are heavy without
corresponding vibrance and sonority, while tones produced in the
adjustment of the head register are apt to be too thin. The middle
register, however, produces in the alto voice a tone that is rich
without being too heavy, so that it avoids undue heaviness on the one
hand and on the other a thinness that is in no way comparable with the
light tones of soprano, but simply a thin and unsatisfactory alto. Alto
tone in the middle register therefore gives the standard tone-quality
for alto voice; and when singing in chest or head register, an alto
should endeavor to relieve the chest notes of their heaviness and the
head notes of their thinness by giving them as much as she can the
quality of tones in the middle register. This can be accomplished by
bringing head tones down to middle and by carrying the middle register
adjustment down into the chest register. But all this is as much a
matter of correct ear and trained will power to make the voice reproduce
the mental audition as it is of physical adjustment.

The great prizes of the operatic stage and concert hall go to the higher
voices--to sopranos, for example, instead of to altos. Yet the proper
training of an alto voice is a most difficult matter because, while the
chest register is the natural singing register of alto, it produces too
"big" a tone--a tone so big as to be heavy and unwieldy. The middle
register in alto really is an assumed position, yet it is the register
in which the standard alto tone is produced. Teachers who either are
ignorant of these facts or disregard them are apt to carry up the
cumbersome chest register until it meets the thin head register,
producing a voice whose low notes are too heavy and tend toward the
uncanny and by no means agreeable female baritone quality, while the
higher notes are thin and undecided in character.

The male voice-range is the same as the female, save that it lies an
octave lower; its mechanism is the same; and its registers are the
result of identical physical functions. Thus, allowing for the octave
difference, the tenor voice and the laws that govern it correspond for
all practical purposes with soprano.

Tenors are lyric and dramatic, a dis