Such progress - and all it took was one physicist and a whole lot of forced inactivity. Science/culture/science-culture magazine SEED posted a fantastic article which reveals Wagner may have added even more nuance to his operas than we knew about, particularly to Big Daddy the Ring cycle. But how un-Wagnerian of Wagner to leave undocumented all of the work that went into his genius compositions...

Anyway, the SEED articles kicks off with an exposition of the age-old - and I feel a tad immature for finding it so humorous - "soprano problem": When sopranos belt in their upper ranges, they are physically unable to pronounce words correctly. Hey, it's a trade-off; I'll take sonic over lyric. In 2004 physicist John Smith, and his colleague Joe Wolfe, actually published a study that pinned down the phenomenon, showing when a soprano projects in her higher range, she - consciously or not - "adjusts her vocal tract to make her voice resonate. In effect, she 'tunes' the resonance frequency of her vocal tract to match the frequency of the pitch at which she is singing." And when that tract is busy, some words just aren't coming out, folks.

Now to the Wagner: During a recent, boring, recovery from surgery - as he tells SEED magazine - the same physicist, John Smith, read through some Wagner, note by note, lyrics by lyric, and actually entered his recordings into a computer program which determined Wagner "used a vowel-pitch matching technique" to allow sopranos to sing all of his lyrics. And to think other composerse were just making soprano lines unimportant!

The article's a great read, as it also addresses Wagner's visions of his "total artwork," and poses Wagner is one of the most influential artists in the past 200 years.