American singer Tim Storms holds the Guinness Records for the “world’s lowest note produced by a human”, as well as for the “widest vocal range”.
Tim Storms has always had a pretty deep voice. He was eight-year-old when he heard this Christian acapella group and found that he could sing the bass notes right along with it. But he never imagined that his voice would ever become the deepest ever measured, allowing him to hit notes lower than the frequency a human ear can detect. Storms himself says that he can’t hear the G-7 notes he is able to hit, but claims that he sort of feels it, and the special equipment used to test his deep voice have confirmed that he can indeed reach inaudible frequencies.
“I kind of hear them in my head as far as the sound my vocal chords are making but, as far as the frequencies, it’s something more or less that I feel,” Tim Storm said.
Storms has been a a bass (basso profondo) for a very long time, but he only learned that he was more special than other basses after encountering an ear, nose and throat specialist at a concert. He told the vocalist that his vocal chords were about twice as long as normal, and that the arytenoid muscles around his chords had a lot more movement than was considered normal.
In 2012, Tim Storms was acknowledged as having the world’s deepest voice, by Guinness Records, after reaching notes as low as G-7 (0.189Hz), a whopping eight octaves below the lowest G on the piano.
“They use a frequency analyzer, or vibration tester, as some engineers call it,” Storms told NPR. “It has a little microphone hooked up to it, and you just sing into it. And it has to be in a controlled studio environment to be free from any outside frequency interruptions. But you just sing into the little microphone, and it picks up every frequency that you’re giving it and tells you exactly how loud you’re singing each frequency.”
Interestingly, while Tim says that his voice never really deepened during his teenage years, it is becoming deeper as he is aging as an adult, so he may actually break his own record at some point. Think of Storms as the opposite of Xiao Lung Wang, the current record holder for the highest pitch note.
So what does having the world’s deepest voice mean for Tim Storms. Well, apart from the fame of it, and a successful singing career, his ability to reach incredibly low notes has made him very popular in the voice-over business, as Hollywood studios are always on the lookout for incredibly low voices to add a bit of drama to film trailers.
