Male and female vocals, patience and the element of surprise

Also intrigued by the idea of "prettiness" as it relates to how vocals are enjoyed. Is preferring beautiful voices in music entirely analagous to wanting to see only beautiful faces & bodies onscreen?

Agree that there doesn't seem to be much room for non-pretty female voices in pop these days.

Jacqueline (my wife) often says that she has very little interest in movies where women characters don't have some prominence

Also, when I think of certain vocal styles, I tend to allow women to get away with a lot more than men. Not sure if I'm saying that right. There are certain types of male vocal styles--the post-Pearl Jam deep-throated belter (Hinder, Nickelback), the yowling indie vibrato (CYHSY, Rubie's Destoyers, et al.), the r&b slow jammer (Usher, Ne-Yo)--that I'm entirely prejudiced towards and automatically tune out (though I at least tend to give the yowling indie types a fair listen, and I've loved records by Usher and Ne-Yo in spite of the people singing them). With women, I do sometimes recoil, but mostly just from over-the-top melisma-style stuff (and even at that, though I loathe Christina Aguilera, I do love at least one song by her, and can listen to a few others and admire their "craft," despite not liking them much). I also enjoy certain female vocal styles, particularly in r&b, which others rightfully describe as bland or tuneless. There was an interesting thread somewhere about how technically bad Ciara was, and if I recall correctly, Beyoncé and Aguilera were cited as being much more proficient examples of "great" singers. Not only do I love Ciara's voice, I also love Cassie's and Rihanna's (I love them anyway in the context of their best songs). I would never describe any of them as great singers. I have far less, if any, patience for bored or bland or robotic-sounding guys--why, that is the question. (As with User and Ne-Yo, most of the male-centered rock I've gravitated towards in the last few years has been almost strictly for the beats and the guitars... I've never really cared much for the singers in the Strokes and Franz Ferdinand, but I do like those records.)

Well, I don't know that I (or my wife) would insist on seeing only beautiful faces onscreen--that would be kinda tedious--but "prettiness" is a word I use a lot (way too much probably) when describing the records I like. I'm not entirely sure what it means.

Agree that there doesn't seem to be much room for non-pretty female voices in pop these days.

I don't know --I don't hear the "pretty" in Christina Aguilera or Beyoncé's "Ring the Alarm," for instance. ISn't there a lot of harshness on the radio now?

(And, not that I'm a frequent filmgoer, but I too would like to see more women in movies. Not to say "women's movies" - I want ass-kicking women! Like the Thelmas and Louises, and the Jackie Browns and Marge Gundersons. It'd be a kick to see Angelina Jolie rescue a helpless, clueless male bimbo of a sidekick! Good luck finding the actor to take the part, tho.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/science/young-women-often-trendsetters-in-vocal-patterns.html?_r=4&=&%2359;pagewanted=all?src=tp&pagewanted=all

the professors said they had found evidence of a new trend among female college students: a guttural fluttering of the vocal cords they called “vocal fry.”

A classic example of vocal fry, best described as a raspy or croaking sound injected (usually) at the end of a sentence, can be heard when Mae West says, “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me,” or, more recently on television, when Maya Rudolph mimics Maya Angelou on “Saturday Night Live.”

Not surprisingly, gadflies in cyberspace were quick to pounce on the study — or, more specifically, on the girls and women who are frying their words. “Are they trying to sound like Kesha or Britney Spears?” teased The Huffington Post, naming two pop stars who employ vocal fry while singing, although the study made no mention of them. “Very interesteeeaaaaaaaaang,” said Gawker.com, mocking the lazy, drawn-out affect.

Do not scoff, says Nassima Abdelli-Beruh, a speech scientist at Long Island University and an author of the study. “They use this as a tool to convey something,” she said. “You quickly realize that for them, it is as a cue.”