The more I have to do with singing -- and I have more and more to do with it as my life progresses -- the clearer it is to me that the human voice precedes every instrumental sound, at least until the early 20th century moment when the voice became an instrument in the Sprechstimme which more prefigures electronic sound than develops the sound of the human voice.

The imposition of instrumental tone logic upon singers has been a destructive trend in their training: most singers recall ear-training and sight-singing with justifiable horror as these disciplines were piano-based, not voice-based.

I have found that only the most sophisticated instrumentalists have a clue how to deal with text, much less with an actual human voice singing a text.