A B.C.-based singer/songwriter is now officially a Guinness World Record holder.
Joy Chapman, who describes herself as a retro-modern country-fusion artist now holds the record for the lowest female vocal note.
Chapman’s record is now 33.57 Hz C1, beating the previous record of 57.9 Hz A#1.
She told Global News she knew when she was in Grade 2 that she could sing that low and mostly sang the male parts in choirs as she had a lower voice.
Chapman was giving her niece voice lessons when she discovered she could go lower than the current record holder.
“A world record seemed like a good idea to get some attention,” she said.
It’s not easy to even take part in the process of being tested for a Guinness World Record.
LISTEN: Joy Chapman joins Simi Sara and demonstrates her vocal range
“For mine, it’s the difficultly of finding a microphone, a sonogram and engineers that can read sonograms. Where I’m going is the sub-base level so it’s very hard for even recording equipment and sonograms to pick up all my notes so it takes a lot of fooling around,” Chapman said.
“Then you have to scale down from a minimum of an octave above where you’re thinking that your lowest note will be. And you have to do it acapella. And when you’re going that low, it becomes very difficult to hear the sound changes.”
She said they did about 2,400 takes over a year to make sure the accuracy of the notes was just right.
Chapman said you also had to be filmed an hour before the note performance to make sure no one ingests any substance or candy or anything like that.
She now wants to attempt again as she knows she can go even lower.
She is also releasing an album called Footprint In My Songs.
“My vocal teachers used to get freaked out as we were going down on the piano,” she added.