Thanks for the elaboration, Don.

I know what nasality is! :)

You're an old-timer, with a ton of experience: Do you by chance know about Alan Lomax's (and others'!) "Cantometrics" project? It was an attempt to study vocal style in music-cultures around the world, to test a theory that there were correlations between vocal style and social features. Lomax and other (less famous researchers) assembled a database of singing examples recorded "everywhere", for comparison.

The argument about correlations were not widely accepted. However, one thing that came out of it was the sort of "rating" system for vocal quality. Voice quality was evaluated according to many dimensions, along scales (e.g. from 1 to 10 or whatever). One of the voice quality dimensions was "nasality."

My oblique point is that each type of voice could be rated as more or less nasal. As you can imagine, there was no judgment by the Lomax team on whether the degree of nasality was a good or bad thing! Indeed, this was not an assessment of how good individual singers were, but rather an assessment of the degree of nasality typical to the (presumably) preferred style of singing in a given genre or music-culture.

Suffice it to say, a large number of the hundred of vocal styles analyzed had some degree of nasality, and some preferred more of it than others, naturally. Degree of nasality is one dimension that makes the styles what they are.

As far as I'm concerned, "Nasality is bad" sounds like just one of the talking points of Western European art music voice teachers. I was fortunate enough to go to something of a "school of (Western) music" in college—although not as a vocalist—so I heard many voice instructors repeating their rules for training in *their* style of singing. Try telling *them* that vibrato is not good, ha! (Opera-style singing probably sounds ridiculous, if not hideous to most people in the world who could not sing with such a degree of vibrato.) Similarly, try getting a classical violinist to play without vibrato...or to accept the fact that all across Africa you find people deliberately adding "noise" making devices to their instruments. They want it to have a buzzing sound; indeed, without those buzzes, the musical sound is considered incomplete and bland. Likewise (in some cases) with a nasal timbre applied to the voice.

What I am confused about is whether you, Don, are mainly echoing the voice teacher or if you really find vocalists singing with a degree of nasality to be unpleasant and/or inferior...especially since that ban on nasality is typical of Western "classical" music, not really "folk" music... or if there is some other confusion (perhaps my own)!

Gibb