Joy Chapman of Surrey. BC, breaks Guinness World Record for Lowest Female Vocal Note at 33.57 Hertz C1 confirmed by Guinness on April Fool's Day.
Try convincing your manager and your social media peeps that you are not playing an April Fool's joke.
Joy decided to play the joke on her manager Dave Lopez by saying she got the news back from Guinness and they didn't make it. Then after him bemoaning the fact and asking what possibly we didn't do right, she broke the news that they did in fact achieve the world record. Now he didn't know what to believe so she forwarded the Guinness email to his relief.
It had been a long, hard year trying to achieve it. First try the videographer had hit the low-end limiter on the mic so they suddenly couldn't read Joy as low as normal. After the event, even though she did break the record, they found the issue. They decided it needed to be redone.
Check out her World Record performance on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdnN6_bxCzc&t=73s
The next attempt was 6 days later, as everybody is about to arrive, Joy gets the news her Mom has gone into a coma and is not likely to live long. Joy rushed to her Mom and sang all day to her, fixed her all up as she had done for her since a child and she passed away later that day with family around. That was at the very start of the pandemic and her Mom had the churches first live streamed funeral service.
Then the wait for things to open up enough to try yet again. A new spot was found, but the studio that was whisper quiet the night before, the next morning when everybody arrived, the pressing shop beside and sewing store above started their machines up for the first time since the shutdown making the noise level unacceptable. Summer was happening and people so tired of the shutdowns, no one was willing to work that they contacted.
Finally in the fall, another studio came available and another attempt. This time the videographer accidentally hit off the main camera and a second camera that would have caught the necessary footage said it's card was corrupted, so the attempt would have to be re-done yet again.
In February, just before Joy's year to accomplish this was about to end, one last attempt in Joy's own place. Everyone was nervous knowing all the previous problems, checking through everything in triplicate, Joy was so uptight with everything her vocals tightened up so she was not able to go as low and as easily as she does most everyday of her life. The engineers have recorded Joy accurately scaling every note to the end of the sonogram at 20 Hertz E0 as well as hitting a high of C10.
They figure she is going below what the sonogram can read, but special equipment is needed to read her. It's hard for even the special mics and sonograms to read at the end of the scale. Joy is now confirmed at a world record of 33.57 Hertz C1 but does plan to shortly break her own record as she hopes her nerves will be better knowing she's already achieved the current Guinness World Record.
Joy has released 14 singles of her 15-song album "Footprint In My Songs", a genre she refers to as Retro-Modern Country. Her lyrics reflect about your life in a comedic Far-Side comic strip or inspirational Chicken-Soup For Your Soul way giving you a complete emotional journey through the album.