DailyDirt: Incredible Skills

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Tue, May 27th 2014 5:00pm — Leigh Beadon

They say that to master a particular skill or discipline takes about 10,000 hours of practice. Talent bred in the bone plays a role as well, whether it's physical build or one of those strange genetic quirks like absolute pitch, and there's a long list of other factors that shape a person's abilities. But there's one distinct commonality: when a person is truly great at something, we love to watch them do it (even if their talent occasionally makes us burn with jealousy, too). Here are a few links about people who can do incredible things:

A Japanese TV show pitted three master Olympic fencers against a mob of 50 amateurs, and filmed the results. Surprisingly, it's not entirely unlike how such scenes are choreographed in movies. [url]
Axl Rose, Mariah Carey and Prince top out the list of popular singers ranked by vocal range. The Guns N' Roses singer's voice goes down to the contra F and has reached nearly a full octave above the soprano C. [url]
A 17-year-old student has accomplished the almost-unprecedented feat of being accepted at all eight Ivy League schools. Kwasi Enin eventually chose Yale, admitting he had favored it all along. [url]

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Filed Under: axl rose, fencing, ivy league, kwasi enin, mariah carey, prince, singing, skill, talent, yale

8 Comments

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Rich Kulawiec, 27 May 2014 @ 5:52pm

Notably missing from that list of vocalists
Annie Haslam (of Renaissance) who not only STILL has incredible range, but -- unlike Mariah Carey, for example -- knows what to do with it.

And the late Minnie Riperton (of Rotary Connection and others) also had an amazing range; unfortunately she never got the chance to fully explore that talent.
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- JoeCool (profile), 27 May 2014 @ 7:40pm
  
  Re: Notably missing from that list of vocalists
  Where the hell is Brad Delp - perhaps the greastest male rock voice EVER??
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- Anonymous Coward, 28 May 2014 @ 5:44am
  
  Re: Notably missing from that list of vocalists
  Pretty silly that Joni Mitchell isn't included, during her early career she was known for having an unusually wide vocal range.
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Anonymous Coward, 27 May 2014 @ 9:20pm

surprising
I wouldn't have thought that David Bowie's range was wider than Robert Plant's or Freddie Mercury's.
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Mike Masnick (profile), 28 May 2014 @ 5:10am

10000 hours.
Slightly off-topic, but the 10000 hours thing is greatly exaggered. The "they" in "they say" is simply Malcolm Gladwell, who misinterpreted a very narrowly focused study on violin players (which not only had a small sample size, but also had tremendous variability, showing both that some people needed many fewer hours and some people had 10,000 hours to no real greatness).

There was a great debunking of it here: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/09/david_epstein_o.html
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FauxReal (profile), 28 May 2014 @ 6:18pm

The list has been amended to include other singers. Mike Patton comes out on top. Please ignore the hyperbolic title of greatest singer of all time as this is just a ranking of vocal ranges. It was taken from released recordings. Some of these singers may have larger ranges and there are likely really bad singers that have great vocal ranges that we will never know about. Still no Minnie Riperton.
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- FauxReal (profile), 28 May 2014 @ 6:18pm
  
  Re:
  Woops, forgot the link http://consequenceofsound.net/2014/05/turns-out-mike-patton-and-not-axl-rose-is-the-greatest-singer- of-all-time/
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  - JoeCool (profile), 29 May 2014 @ 1:06pm
    
    Re: Re:
    Still no Brad Delp, which is too bad since he could actually hit those high notes with his normal voice, not singing through his nose in a falsetto like most of the male singers on the list (Axel in particular).
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