ok my turn.
first, is rafi better then lata ?
- your take on this one is , YES! and all this while i was trying to dodge this question simply coz , imo, a female singer cant be compared to a male. first i will focus on them as a singers and later will see and compare them as rivals.
> the reason - its unfair to compare two different gender singers as both have different body structure. even while singing the muscular activities that take place in both are different.
(includes brain, lungs, throat. you can google the articles and read for further details. i did go thru them., was an interesting read)
few differences are obvious and proven are-
> pitch: females have high pitch than males
>> dynamic range (diff between the highest highs and the lowest lows that a person uses while speaking) men use a very narow dynamic range while women use wider dynamic range, which is what gives their voices more of a "sing/song" effect.
>resonance - the quality imparted to voiced speech sounds by the action of the resonating chambers of the throat and mouth and nasal cavities.
(above is the excerpt from the articles that i read)
its also said that female voice folds are different from male and more complex.
that should bring us to a concrete conclusion as to why we see less pf female voice adaptibility. why a female fails to do variations as compare to male. or precisely lack of versatility?
like say,
if lata is good in melody , bhajans, she fails in other genres.
if shuba mugdhal excels in sufi, folkish style, she lacks in melody.
asha sounds great at ghazals or sensuous songs but she isnt good at bhajans.
so perhaps this should answer your nagging question about lata.
also i think this might be the reason we dont see female mimicry artists.. or we didnt see any one singer who can adapt to rekha, or madhuri or sridevi at the same time as we saw kishore kumar to great extent or even rafi to some extent.
hence lets not compare rafi to lata or hell! abhijeet to alka as singers.
