Register (music)

A register is the range within pitch space of some music or often musical speech. It may describe a given pitch or pitch class (or set of them),^[1] a human voice or musical instrument (or group of them), or both, as in a melody or part. It is also often related to timbre and musical form. In musical compositions, it may be fixed or "frozen".

Register is often understood in relation to other elements of music, sometimes called parameters.

A "higher" register may be said to indicate a "higher" pitch. For example, violins may be said to be in a "higher" register than cellos.^[a] This is often denoted concisely using subscripted numerals in scientific pitch notation.

The register in which an instrument plays, or in which a part is written, affects the quality of sound, or its timbre.

Register is also used structurally in musical form, with the climax of a piece usually being in the highest register of that piece.

Some modernist and especially twelve-tone or serial pieces have fixed register (sometimes called frozen register), allowing a pitch class to be expressed through only one pitch. This technique is often associated with or attributed to Anton Webern, and it later appears in the music of Arthur Berger, Pierre Boulez, Elliott Carter, and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

A "register" of the human voice, such as whistle register, is a series of tones of like quality originating through operation of the larynx. The constituent tones result from similar patterns of vibration in the vocal folds, which can generate several different such patterns, each resulting in characteristic sounds within a particular range of pitches.^[1] The term has wide application and can refer to any of several aspects of the human voice, including the following:

• A particular segment of the vocal range;
• A resonance area such as chest voice or head voice;
• A phonatory process;
• A certain vocal timbre; or
• A region of the voice set off by vocal breaks.^[3]

Speech pathologists and many vocal pedagogues recognize four vocal registers: the vocal fry, modal, falsetto, and whistle. To delineate these registers, pathologists specify vibratory pattern of the vocal folds, sequential pitches, and type of sound.^[3]

In the context of wind instruments, the word register usually distinguishes pitch ranges produced using different normal modes of the air column, with higher registers produced by overblowing. The timbres of different woodwind instrument registers tend to be markedly different.

The Western concert flute plays approximately three and a half octaves and generally has three complete registers and one partial register. The musical note C4 (corresponding to middle C on the piano) would be in that instrument's first register, whereas the second register — where overblowing is needed — begins at E5.

On the clarinet, the notes from (written) G4 or A4 to B♭4 sometimes are regarded as a separate "throat register", even though both they and the notes from F♯4 down are produced using the instrument's lowest normal mode. The timbre of the throat notes differs, and the throat register's fingerings also are distinctive, using special keys and not the standard tone holes used for other notes.

• Ambitus
• Chest register
• Head register
• Organ stop and organ registration
• Tessitura
• Vocal registration

• Zbikowski, Lawrence M. 2002. Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis. American Musicological Society Studies in Music Series, gen. ed. Lawrence F. Bernstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-514023-1 (hbk).

• "Hints on Singing". Manuel Garcia. New York: Joseph Patelson Music House (1894)
• "Singing the Mechanism and the Technic" by William Vennard (1967)