What is the highest vocal note ever recorded on a pop song?
Not every pop song is meant to have a showstopping vocal performance whenever it comes on the radio.
There are plenty of artists who have managed to become borderline operatic whenever they get behind the microphone, but there’s no shame in someone singing a song and telling their audience a story rather than making them feel like they’re getting sprayed in the face with spit. But even by the scale that most people hold their pop idols at, there are often a few that tend to shatter everyone’s expectations.
Then again, hitting high notes isn’t anything new in the world of pop music. From the first second that Little Richard launched into that falsetto voice in between his rock and roll tunes, people were going to latch onto that kind of excitement that came when a singer reached for those notes. But for a brief time, it looked like a lot of the high singers were either relegated to both the heaviest and softest corners of music.
There were occasionally the twee pop singers that had a voice that sounded like they ingested helium, but it was impossible to look away from artists like Ian Gillan and Rob Halford whenever they opened their mouths to sing. They had clearly been competing to be in the vocal Olympics in many respects, but the true geniuses of the pop world knew how to balance the passion of their performance with pure muscle.
Take the biggest names in soul and R&B music, for instance. Stevie Wonder may have one of the strongest voices to come out of the Motown machine in the early days, but the power in his voice doesn’t only come from the impressive runs he’s able to do. It’s that you can feel the joy, sadness, and every other emotion in between whenever he sings his songs.
But right as the world of R&B was starting to become a mainstay in pop in the 1990s, nothing could have prepared us for what Mariah Carey had in store for her listeners. On her debut, she was already an impressive talent for singing soulful tunes like ‘Vision of Love’, but if that was the firm foundation, Emotions gave us a lead single with notes that felt superhuman for anyone else to reach.
For the first few sections of the song, though, you wouldn’t necessarily see the whistle notes coming. There had been a lot of belters before Carey that got through their high notes by pushing themselves as hard as they could, but once Carey reached that whistle register, the notes that she was hitting felt that they should only be heard by dogs whenever she sang them.
And even compared to the many artists that have followed in her footsteps, Carey has not been surpassed on the charts in terms of her vocal range. Because if there was anyone else on this planet who managed to get a hit that was higher than Carey’s high G#7, most likely that would have to be taken away and studied by scientists to judge how the human voice could be used in that way.
There might be a few more moments in Carey’s career that give everyone a glimpse of what she could do back in the day, but ‘Emotions’ is still the benchmark that she should be held to for the rest of her life. In only a few seconds, she was one of the greatest singers that had ever landed on the hit parade, and given how she can naturally reach that whistle register to this day, it remains to be seen whether the pop diva is actually part dolphin.
