To hear the falsetto voice at its most natural, take a seat in the stand of an average sports match on a Saturday afternoon and wait for the home team to score. At that moment, high above the usual throaty cheers, around you in the crowd you will hear some men whooping with delight. What you are hearing may not be singing, nor is it a thing of beauty, but it is falsetto. The irony of this scenario is that even in the most macho and uninhibited of environments can be found a naturally produced voice which, at various times in the last eight hundred years, has been deemed both effeminate and false.

The excited sports fan offers one example of falsetto being used naturally. Perhaps a more telling one, from a singing perspective, is the response many men show if they find themselves alone in a cavernous space. Particularly if the space is dark – a cave, for instance – the temptation will be to probe the acoustic with a loud falsetto hoot.