What Really Makes Mariah Carey's Voice So Unique
Anyone with ears — including dolphins — is familiar with Mariah Carey's transcendent vocal range. Thanks to her equally expansive discography (one that includes 17 albums), Carey's mighty five octaves have graced radios and shopping malls for numerous decades. Only a handful of pop stars, including Ariana Grande and Mimi Riperton, have ever been able to match the "All I Want for Christmas" crooner's "whistle register," as per Mic.
Carey takes proud ownership over her voice. The Elusive Chanteuse revealed to NME in December 2021 that for the big-screen adaptation of her memoir, "The Meaning of Mariah Carey" (a collaboration with her "Precious" director Lee Daniels), she will be doing the singing for whichever actor tackles her role, thank you kindly. "Personally, I want a great actress," Carey stated. "I don't think she has to be a great singer because I can sing all my songs the way I would as a little girl... One of the things people don't know is that I do impressions. I can sound like me when I was younger. I've watched a lot of movies and adaptations of people's life stories and I'm like, 'Why wouldn't they just use that person's voice?' I don't wanna hear somebody else singing like The Great! I really don't!"
Perhaps Carey's self-professed mastery of impressions is all part of her vocal finesse as well. But what exactly is so unique about Carey's voice that other singers everywhere covet it so?
A health condition is to (partly) credit for Mariah Carey's voice
As it turns out, Mariah Carey's enviable vocals are the result of growths on her vocal cords. As Carey explained in a 2017 interview, her cords have nodules — non-cancerous calluses or lumps per Duke Health – on them "my whole life." Such growths can cause one's voice to develop raspiness or cracking, as the pressure exerted by them affects one's vocal cords' vibrations. Luckily for Carey, "I've learned to sing around them," she said, which grants her the ability to drop from a dolphin-like whistle note into a low alto in one second.
While a rare blessing-in-disguise from Mother Nature, Carey's voice is also one cultivated and carefully maintained over years of practice. To keep singing in her five-octave range, Carey continued, "It is all about timing, vocal rest, sleep, water... It's a different kind of thing." She further explained (via CBS News), "I've got to sleep 15 hours to sing the way I want to." She also stressed the importance of keeping "20 humidifiers around the bed" in an interview with V Magazine (per Yahoo! Movies), which creates a "steam room" effect.
In January 2021, Carey shared with the Questlove Supreme podcast how the forced rest the coronavirus pandemic inflicted on her did her cords and nodules good. "Taking off work has really helped my voice," the singer said, per Express. "When I'm under pressure... every part of my voice is screwed up."
Mariah Carey composes music in quite a unique way, too
Not only was Mariah Carey able to develop her rangy vocals around nodules in her throat, the hitmaker can even compose melodies — and write lyrics with them — without being able to read sheet music! In 1994's "Music Box" album promo material, Carey recalled, "I've always made up melodies in my head since I was a little girl — there's never been a time when I didn't have things going on in my head. They weren't songs that were already out there, but things that I was making up."
Frequent collaborator Walter Afanasieff (co-writer of Carey's ubiquitous "All I Want for Christmas Is You") also shared Carey's knack for parroting melodies, as well as inventing chord combos of her own... all off the top of her head. "I would hit a chord and play a little melody on the piano... and she would sing that melody and then she adds a little bit to it," Afanasieff told Soul Culture.
Carey further delved into her freewheeling songwriting style in the "Music Box" promo, explaining, "Sometimes I'll just be collaborating with someone and they'll have an idea for a chord structure or whatever and I'll start singing a melody over it or sometimes I'll be lying in bed and something will just come to me." With 19 chart-topping singles on the Billboard Hot 100, we'd expect nothing less from the legendary songbird.