kris, that happened to me, too. I started hearing what I had never heard before, because I became aware of what singers could do and what many cannot do. To the point of folk singing brought up by Andrés - most folk songs we discuss here are not melodies that make great demand on range, but I think there is something to the idea that certain techniques of using the voice, Swiss yodeling for instance, may have come about within a culture because of the environment people sing in. I wonder. When you "holler", or belt out a work song, you can ruin your voice in no time if you don't do it with enough breath to support the volume and with relaxation of the mechanism. I wonder if some folk naturally developed techniques that we now see as part of the Italian bel canto. I know that history documents that development in Italy, but I am thinking of other cultures finding ways that are similar that kept people from losing their voices to laryngitis. Or was the life span so short that it didn't matter - death before your voice was shot. The Tibetan monks that tour the world doing their chants do amazing things with their voices. The voice problems from pop styles that came after the development of microphones - I think we discussed that in another thread.