K-Pop Demon Hunters, Wicked, and Vocal Range
The movie musical K-Pop Demon Hunters has exploded in popularity over the last few months. The song “Golden” hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and, as of the time of writing, has stayed in the top 10 for the past 18 weeks. The lead character, Rumi, even unseated Elsa from Frozen as the most popular Halloween costume in the U.S. The soundtrack is catchy and danceable, combining the tight lyricism of musical theatre with the best of K-pop songwriting, production, and performance.
As “Golden” has taken over TikTok, YouTube, and mainstream radio, attempts at covers have also flooded social media platforms, often with questionable performances. Maybe you yourself have sung along to the soundtrack, only to mumble your way through the chorus, unable to hit the high notes. This isn’t because you or these YouTube singers aren’t skilled vocalists. It’s all because of the range.
What Is “Range?”
Both songs and voices have ranges. When talking about a song, range is the distance between the highest and lowest notes. “Golden” from K-Pop Demon Hunters has a range of nearly three octaves. In comparison, the Star Spangled Banner, a notoriously rangy and difficult melody, has a distance of only one and a half octaves between the lowest and highest notes. Songs with wider ranges are usually more difficult to sing. They require the singer to transition between their chest voice, head voice or falsetto, mixed voice, or even belt.
Your vocal range is the distance between the highest and lowest notes you can accurately sing. Most men have a vocal range between one and a half and two octaves, while women, on average, have a range between two and three octaves. These are just averages. Some people will have smaller ranges while others will have much larger ranges, just like how some people are very short or very tall; it’s all part of the amazing diversity of human bodies.
These averages are also for adult singers. As we age, our voices change, especially during puberty. Our vocal range increases from under an octave in preschool to nearly an adult’s two-octave vocal range by middle school. Our voices will continue to change in different ways throughout our lives, but our ranges will remain relatively constant once we reach adulthood.
Can I Change My Vocal Range?
Sort of. Two major factors impact your vocal range: biology and skill. One is almost immutable, but the other you have a lot of control over.
Like height, your vocal range is largely determined by genetics. It’s a physical feature like your eye color or the shape of your nose. While you can potentially extend it by a note or two, there’s a built-in physical limit to your vocal range. But, without a lot of training and practice, most singers won’t have reached the physical limits of their voices. There’s a good chance that you haven’t yet sung the highest note you have the physical potential to reach. That’s where skill comes in.
When singing, we use different parts of our bodies to produce sound. Lower notes resonate in our chests, but higher notes have shorter wavelengths that resonate the best in the small spaces of our sinuses. These different parts of our range are called registers. The most commonly used vocal registers are your chest voice, head voice, and mixed voice (a combination of both head and chest voice), but men can also sing in falsetto, and some people have an additional range above their head voice called whistle tones, most famously demonstrated by Mariah Carey. These registers start on different notes for different people and make up a different percentage of their range. For example, some people’s head voice register will start much lower or higher than others and most people don’t have a whistle tone register at all.
If you don’t know how to sing in your head voice, you may feel like your vocal range ends where your head register starts. Learning to sing in different registers and transition between them can allow you to access parts of your vocal range that previously felt impossible.
It’s important to remember that, as vocalists, our bodies are our instruments, and changes to our bodies are also changes to our instruments. This means that, regardless of training, the highest and lowest note you're able to reach can vary slightly from day to day. If your nose is stuffy from a head cold, for example, singing in your head voice may be difficult or impossible. Warming up also affects how easily you can reach the extremities of your range.
Mismatched Ranges
If a song is too high or too low, you can change the key to make it fit your voice. But sometimes a song is both too high and too low. If the range of the song is bigger than your vocal range, changing the key won’t make it more singable.
The easiest (and usually best) solution to this is to pick a different song. Chances are, there’s a song with a similar vibe but a range that suits your vocals. Very high or very low notes can add a lot of drama, but there are lots of other ways to create interest and impact in music that are just as effective and might work better for your unique voice.
The other option is to adjust the melody of the song. If you watch hit artists live performances, you’ll notice they sometimes improvise the higher, more challenging melody notes; many will also perform their biggest crowd pleasers in lower keys, especially as they age. This requires strong musical and improvisational skills in addition to singing skills. And it might not feel like the same song if you’re making major changes to the melody. In general, this isn’t a great route to take if you’re still building your vocal and musical skills.
So, how do you know if a song has too big a range for your voice? The first step is to have your current vocal range measured by a voice teacher. They’ll be able to tell you your highest and lowest notes and can help you calculate the distance between them. As mentioned above, warming up properly makes it easier to hit very high and very low notes, so most teachers will help you warm up before taking the measurement.
The next step is to compare your range to that of the song. If you have a good ear, you can pick out the highest and lowest notes in a song. Sheet music allows you to visually see the range of a song. But even if you don’t read music or are still learning to pick out the notes in a melody, a quick internet search will usually provide the answer. The website singingcarrots.com has a database of songs with the ranges included, which you can even search based on your vocal range. The database is frequently updated and includes current hit songs (including the K-Pop Demon Hunters soundtrack).
Comparing your range to the song range isn’t as simple as it might seem at first. Remember, your range measurement is a snapshot of your range on one specific day, usually with a teacher helping you achieve your best possible performance. You won’t always be able to accurately hit your highest and lowest notes. This means that, if a song has exactly the same range as your voice, you will likely struggle to sing it. Let’s say for example, that you have a range of two octaves and are looking at a song that also has a range of two octaves. If you’re not perfectly warmed up or are a little tired or your nose is a little stuffy or the air is too dry - basically if conditions aren’t absolutely perfect - you are not going to be able to accurately sing that song, and even if you can, the highest and lowest notes probably won’t have the nicest tone.
The solution is to make sure you have some headroom above and below the highest and lowest notes in a song. A good rule of thumb is to warm up a fourth above and below the highest and lowest notes in a song, which means your vocal range should extend at least a fourth above and below the range of the song. Chances are, if your body is feeling alright and you’re properly warmed up, those notes will be within your reach, even without the stars perfectly aligning. This is a rule of thumb, not an immutable law of nature; depending on your voice, training, and confidence, you might be able to comfortably get away with less wiggle room or you may want a little more. Trained singers can confidently sing within one to one to one and a half whole steps of their lowest and highest notes. Once you know a song is in your range, you still may need to adjust the key to best suit your voice. Zelda recommends making sure the lowest note in the song is at least three whole steps or tones above the lowest note you can sing. This will make the majority of songs with a range of one and half octaves easier to sing.
Another factor to consider is where the different registers in your voice start and stop. If you’ve ever struggled to sing a song that should be comfortably in your range, the ranges of your various registers might be the source of the mismatch.
Let’s look at “Defying Gravity” from Wicked, a notoriously challenging song with a range just shy of two octaves. Both Idina Menzel, who originated the role of Elphaba on Broadway (and also performed as the voice of Elsa in Frozen), and Cynthia Erivo, who played the Elphaba in the movies, have vocal ranges of about three octaves - very impressive but not record breaking. What is exceptional about both of these singers is their control and their high belt ranges. Even if you have the same overall range as these vocalists, your belt register might be much smaller or your head voice may start much lower.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t sing “Defying Gravity” (or whatever song you're struggling with). It does mean that you’ll have to approach the high notes differently. You may have to use your mixed voice or your head voice to accurately sing the dramatic notes at the end of the song. Your performance is going to sound different than either Menzel’s or Erivo’s - but think of how different their performances sound from one another. Maybe you prefer one over the other, but they are both incredible! Your version of the song can be incredible as well; it just has to be yours, suited to your voice, not an imitation of another singer.
Who Is This Song For and Where Was It Sung?
When a song you love is out of your range, it can be really disappointing. It’s not uncommon to feel like you’re not a good enough singer, even though that’s far from the case. Before you start spiraling, take a moment to think about who the song was written for and what context the writers expected it to be performed in.
While a movie like K-Pop Demon Hunters might be made with younger audiences in mind, that doesn’t mean the songs are written for young voices or even most singers. Golden’s nearly three octave range is out of reach for most vocalists. Even EJAE, the vocalist who provided Rumi’s singing voice in the movie and co-wrote the song, doesn’t hit those high notes cleanly during live performances.
This isn’t to say that her live performances aren’t incredible; they are truly exceptional. Rather, it’s to highlight that even the singer who wrote the song and who has a larger-than-average, 3-octave-plus vocal range is challenged by those high notes. The fact that she’s hitting them live is more than most vocalists are physically able to do. That song was written for a magical cartoon K-Pop star who hunts demons as a side hustle, not your average 11-year-old or even your average adult. It was meant to be recorded with multiple takes, editing, and pitch correction, not performed live by a real human. “Golden” is as stylized and exaggerated as the animation of the film it was created for, which is part of what makes it so fun.
Songs from musicals are often challenging to sing. The vast majority are written with trained adult vocalists in mind. Even modern movie musicals made for kids are written to be sung by adult voices. And, unlike many stage musicals, movie musicals are sometimes written with a specific vocalist - and that vocalist’s unique voice and abilities - in mind. Rumi’s songs were written by and for the artist who would perform her songs in the movie. They didn’t have to be singable by the average musical theatre actress; the only person who absolutely needed to be able to sing them was EJAE.
Similarly, Idina Menzel, with her three octave range, is going to have few issues nailing a song like “Let It Go,” but a six-year-old’s voice likely hasn’t developed enough to easily sing a song with a range over an octave, let alone one that spans almost two (and, as with “Defying Gravity,” her belt range is exceptional even for an adult singer). The songwriters wrote Elsa’s songs with Menzel’s unique voice in mind, not the average singer. And, as with Rumi, Elsa is a cartoon character with magical powers. Even if a human sang the performance that you hear in the film, it went through a lot of editing to become that final product.
Regardless of whether a song was written for a real-life musician or a literal Disney princess, most of us are primarily experiencing music in the form of professional recordings, and that means the majority of the vocals we’re listening to have been edited in some way. Editing in a recording studio isn’t just about making singers sound “better” than they do in real life. It allows writers and artists to make creative choices that don’t make sense in a live performance, like overlapping vocal lines or notes that the singer can only hit once or twice on a good day. It’s ok if the vocalist can’t hit the note perfectly every time, because they can try over and over again until they get it right. But there are no “takes” during a live performance; you need to be confident that you can consistently hit the high notes.
During live concerts, many artists will perform their songs in a lower key than they recorded them in. This is sometimes to preserve their voices during a rigorous tour schedule, but sometimes it’s because they can’t consistently sing the highest note from the recording while simultaneously performing choreography. The same way we don’t expect to see the same type of stunts or special effects in a stage play that we do in a movie, live vocal performances are going to be different than the polished recordings we listen to at home. It’s unfair and unrealistic to compare your live rendition of a song to the edited and mastered recording. Heck, it’s not even fair to compare the original artist’s live performance to the recorded version of the same song.
Bigger Isn’t Better
At least in the U.S., we often act like bigger is better. But bigger isn’t the point when it comes to music. The point is to express or inspire an emotion, and neither a song nor a performer need to have a massive range to accomplish that. There are so many other aspects of performance that can be as impactful as very high or very low notes - if not more so.
You can convey emotion through dynamic changes, tone and timbre, or getting into the character of the song. Frankly, without these other elements, big dramatic high-notes are little more than a party trick.
What makes the high notes in “Golden” meaningful is the secret desperation behind them, and the contrast with the quieter bridge where Rumi admits to the insecurity she’s masking. The end of “Defying Gravity” is so powerful because of how it grows from the lower, softer performance at the beginning of the song, showing how Elphaba has finally embraced her power. The songwriters chose to use range to express these tense and triumphant moments, but there are so many other ways to get those feelings across, and those big notes were just part of what makes those songs special.
Whether your range is one octave or five, you can be a great singer, pulling at the heartstrings of listeners. It’s how you use your unique voice and the musicianship you bring to your performance that matters, not how many notes you can sing. And, even if you can’t hit all the notes in “Golden,” that doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy singing along. It doesn’t have to be perfect, especially if you’re just singing for fun. Chances are, most of your favorite artists can’t hit those notes either (unless, of course, your favorite artist is EJAE).
Ready to Make the Most of Your Range?
If you want to measure and make the most of your range, reach out to set up a lesson. Zelda can help discover your current range and develop the skills you need to unlock your full potential. Whether it’s high, low, both, or somewhere in the middle, always remember to love your voice.