Freddie Mercury's Freaky Mouth

Okay weirdest blog ever - even for me. With the recent release of the new movie about the band Queen, "Bohemian Rhapsody," there have been many social media features about frontman, Freddie Mercury. Moreover, I was scrolling through Facebook and stumbled upon a video by Goalcast about Mercury. The video was about three minutes long and went through a basic timeline of the singer's life. He grew up in India, and he was very self conscious about his prominent buck teeth. He was teased for his overbite and all of the kids called him "Bucky." 

Later in the video, I thought I had failed to read the subtitles correctly when I saw the sentence, "his opera-like voice was all thanks to his extra teeth in his mouth that added to his vibrato." Being around musicians and understanding basic concepts of vocal folds, I wondered how accurate this claim was. How could his teeth possibly affect the production of a fluctuation in pitch of a voice? 

I did a little bit of researching about both vibrato and extra teeth (called hyperdontia). Vibrato can be made in three different ways. It can be a result of the vibration of the vocalis muscle found in the throat or the vibration of the diaphragm or a combination of the vibrations of both. The frequencies of vibrato are typically lower than a vocal tremor, which has a very fast frequency. Some think that the frequencies of Mercury's iconic operatic voice may have reached the frequencies of a vocal tremor. Having extra, supernumerary, teeth can result in cysts and crowding, but not an increase of control or presence of vibrato or vocal tremors. 

I don't know who wrote this about Freddie Mercury or where they got this false information, but it seems that the only place that this information is presented online is in this post. The video also states Mercury refused to fix his smile he once hated because he realized it was what made his voice so unique. Although the singer did refuse to fix his smile, it seems more likely that Mercury found his smile didn't define him and that he still became one of the most successful musicians of his time with a few extra teeth. 

The look of Freddie's teeth has, nevertheless, become iconic. The actor who played Mercury in the new movie, Rami Malek, was given a set of fake fangs for the role, and the smile was perfectly replicated. Additionally, you can buy a set of fake Freddie teeth online if you have a (tooth)ache to dress up as the musician for Halloween. Although it is unlikely that the teeth had function, there is no doubt that they have become almost as famous as Freddie himself.