Having a cold does not come without benefits.

One such benefits is, after 5 days of throat torture, as a miniature cheese grater gets continually rubbed against my vocal cords, I can finally speak a little bit - still with 50% the pain compared to before, and sneezing becomes the most indescribably painful thing ever for about 0.8 seconds, but hey.

But my voice has had a little temporary upgrade I tend to enjoy after one of my rare social nights out around loud music, or other sickness events.

I got friends in LOWWWWWWW places

I always find myself singing this Garth Brooks classic ever since I was a kid, and it springs into my head every time this upgrade happens: the ability to sing those extra lowwwwww notes. It's so fun!

Well, today may not be the most deep, bassy, resonant outcome, given I've spent most the day in silence, but I gave a pretty decent shot at getting to the lowest lows possible.

I am a bass singer (out of four main groups: Bass is lowest, Soprano highest), which, if you look at the standard range, are expected to be able to sing a low E, but you'll be frowned at generally if you can't get to the D a step below that.

However, I wouldn't say my voice is particularly LOW, when compared to, oh, so many others out there. I absolutely love the booming deep voice of some singers out there, but you can also hear it in a lot of people's regular speaking voice. Even some of my students have very naturally deep voices below mine, and in a choir class, that has a ton of potential.

There are also techniques you can use to get down far below the standard range; vocal fry, subharmonisation, and such.

But still, I managed on a good run to get to the E... BELOW the standard low E for bass, a whole octave lower! Though I didn't get it recorded. The following recording only gets down to an F#, which is only one step out.

It's a bit tricky because being sick and not having spoken all day until I decided to do this, my voice was wobbly all over the place, let alone those at these low notes where I'm no longer apply air in the same way for the technique to work - the more pressure you apply, the higher the note becomes.

Yeah, I'm never gonna be a legit super bass singer, a travesty I'll never get over, and while we're on the subject it's annoying I'll never be a powerful tenor, either. Nobody cares about the 'regular bass guy'. So unimpressive.

Anyway, Here's my efforts, with a wobbly unstable voice, of getting as low as possible:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wz3IiMdCshE

What's cool about those lowest notes is that their frequency is sub-50 hertz, meaning fewer than 50 oscillations per second, you can just about percieve the individual waves!