轻松英语阅读：完美歌手

Want to know which of your favorite singers has the best set of pipes? The people at the site concerthotels.com (an online booking site for hotels near concert venues) have done the research and created a really cool interactive chart to show you just that. To create the chart, they examined the recordings of over 100 top vocal artists. From the recordings, they found the highest and lowest notes that the artist successfully hit to determine their full vocal range.

So what was the verdict? Well, according to their findings, the singer with the greatest vocal range was Axl Rose of Guns and Roses. The next three on the list were Mariah Carey, Prince, Steven Tyler and James Brown, respectively.

The list of singers for the test was drawn from various sources. One of the main sources was a 2008 article in ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine titled, “The 100 Greatest Singers of All Time.” For more current singers they added the nominees for top male and female artists at the Billboard Music Awards 2014.

While the chart is informative, it is by no means comprehensive as it is only limited to western pop music. Moreover, it only focuses on one aspect of a singer’s vocal talents. You may be surprised to find singers like Karen Carpenter and Smokey Robinson at bottom of their list. So it is important to remember that there are other factors that go into making a great voice, such as tone, expressiveness and the power of the voice to name a few.