Aretha Franklin: The science behind the world’s greatest vocalist
Music is an inherently emotional art form, and as a result of that, discussions surrounding the greatest vocalists of all time will inevitably conjure up a wide variety of answers. Seemingly, though, every discussion and debate surrounding music’s greatest vocalists tends to lead towards one figure: Aretha Franklin. Anybody who has ever heard the Queen of Soul surely cannot dispute her title or her position as one of the greatest singers in musical history, but it seems there are scientific angles to her success, too.
From the very beginning of her life as a performer, singing in Baptist churches around Detroit, Franklin’s voice has always been different. There have been countless gifted vocalists over the years, some with better technical ability than Franklin, but very few—if any—could convey the same emotion or feeling within their voice as the Tennessee-born singer. Inevitably, this emotional quality within her voice meant that Franklin was the ideal singer for the politically tumultuous era of the 1960s.
It was, after all, only when the singer signed to Atlantic Records in 1966 that she became known the world over for her incredible tones. Her voice was the perfect soundtrack to the period of the civil rights movement and women’s liberation movement, which she highlighted through tracks like the seminal ‘Respect’. However, decades later, Franklin is still hailed as among the greatest vocalists of all time, when you might assume that many of her efforts have since become outdated.
That is a colossal aspect of Franklin’s success; her voice is timeless, and the emotion of her performance is personal to everybody who listens to her. For years, these have been the opinions of fans, journalists, and music industry executives. Recently, though, the white lab coat world of science has weighed in to provide some hard evidence as to why Aretha Franklin is such an undeniable talent.
Back in 2018, musicologists at Stanford University got together to prove once and for all that Franklin was a musical genius. Led by Professor Charles Kronengold, the scientific report details how Aretha Franklin changed the ways in which listeners consumed music. Whereas, in previous times, the music spoke for itself, Franklin’s personality was a key aspect of her success. “People paid careful attention to what Aretha sang and played,” Kronengold shared, “What she said in interviews and onstage monologues, what they could read into her movements, facial expressions, clothes, hair and so on.”
In that way, Franklin was among the first figures in music to use her platform to address real-world issues, namely the fight for civil rights. Regularly, in interviews and live appearances, the singer discussed these themes with intelligent nuance, exposing many—particularly white—audience members to these ongoing struggles.
Kronengold continued: “She was not just a musical genius – which is something we normally imagine as bursting forth at inspired moments – but also someone who possessed a smartest-person-in-the-room capacity for grasping musical problems and possibilities.” These facts have been known in the music industry for some years, with the professor stating, “Her collaborators acknowledge that she heard more, felt more and understood more than the people around her, lots of whom were also super-smart.”
So, it seems even the emotionally void world of science can agree that Aretha Franklin is the greatest vocalist of all time. This is not only because of her technical ability and impressive range but also because of the ways in which she forever changed the landscape of music consumption and listening.
