Vocal knowledge

[j4]

Okay, this is a bit of a left-field question, but you lot are a fairly eclectic bunch, so some of you may be able to help...

If you wanted to teach someone to sing, how would you go about it?

No, I'm not entirely sure what I mean by "teach someone to sing", which is part of the problem... IME most people can sing (and when they say "I can't sing" what they usually mean is "someone told me when I was a child that I couldn't sing"); what they can't necessarily do is stay in tune (with others, or even with themselves). So let's say you want to get somebody to the point where they're able to do that well enough that they can join in confidently with 'community singing' (weddings, carol services, etc.), and eventually do simple part-singing. Where do you start? Am I asking the wrong questions?

Reading music is sort of orthogonal (and the sort of people I'm thinking of could probably teach themselves that fairly easily anyway, because they're bookish kind of people).

Comments

[mobbsy.livejournal.com]

I'm interested in the answers to this since I'm firmly in the "I can't sing" camp. By which I do mean that I can't stay in tune, or even start in tune, or produce a sequence of tones more than vaguely relating to anything else going on around me.

It doesn't stop me enjoying participating in 'community singing', but did cause some people at school to attempt not to stand next to me at assembly because they found my attempts at singing seriously distracting. These days I try to keep the volume down to minimise the damage.

[j4.livejournal.com]

I'm interested in how you experience hearing tunes, and hearing your own voice. Can you tell whether you're in tune or not (other than by people saying "you're out of tune", I mean)? Can you hear the difference between different notes/tunes? (Sorry if these are really patronising questions -- I don't mean them to be, I just can't visualise [auralise??] it.)

I suppose outside the context of singing there are phonemes that people find incredibly difficult to distinguish depending on what language/accent they're starting from (e.g. Japanese speakers distinguishing between 'r' and 'l', or people from Staffordshire/Cheshire distinguishing between the 'u' sounds in 'put' and 'bus'... ;-) ... is that a sensible analogy, d'you reckon? What's the musical equivalent of minimal pairs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair)?

Community singing is more about the community than the singing anyway so I'm glad you can still enjoy it!

Another non-singer, here via friendsfriends

[white_hart]

When I try to sing I can hear that what's coming out of my mouth is a tuneless drone, and that it's not the same as the music I'm singing along to or hearing in my head. However, although I can tell that two notes are different I have great difficulty in distinguishing whether the second is flat or sharp and by how much (I used to play the viola when I was at school, and could never manage to tune it), and I cannot work out how to change what I'm doing with my vocal chords to produce a note that's in tune.

I would love to be able to sing, but even my husband looks pained and asks me to stop :-(

[vinaigrettegirl.livejournal.com]

The musical equivalent of minimal pairs are singing semitones against one another.

[mobbsy.livejournal.com]

I'm not tone deaf, but don't have a very good sense of pitch. When changing pitch I usually know if the tune goes up or down at a given point, but don't feel I've a very good idea of how much to change the tone of what I'm singing, or really even how to make my voice change to a specific pitch rather than just going up or down a bit.

I don't think I can really tell that I'm out of tune while singing, but I'm sure I could tell if I listened back to a recording of my singing.

I certainly can't hum or sing a bit of a tune that's in my head and have people recognise it. The notes and so on seem fairly clear in my head, but I've no idea how to get my voice to reproduce them. At those times I can clearly tell that I'm utterly failing to reproduce the tune, but don't know what to do about it.

The phoneme thing is interesting. I've always suspected that my lack of musical talent might be related to why I never picked up a Scottish accent, despite living there from four years old until I was 18, and spending the first 6 years there in local state schools. I also can't mimic accents at all well. Again, it's not that I can't hear the differences, it's that I've no idea how to reproduce them.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

It sounds like you have a reasonable sense of hearing pitch but it could do with some finer calibration, and the same applies tone production. This is the case for a lot of people.

I can't imitate accents at all but my own speaking accent changes very quickly.

[caramel-betty.livejournal.com]

Can you tell whether you're in tune or not (other than by people saying "you're out of tune", I mean)?

For me, as a "can't carry a tune in a bucket" sort, I very often can't hear what I sound like in any useful sense. What it sounds like in my head and what it sounds like if you play back a piece of tape to me are COMPLETELY different. I'm told that professionals minimize this by doing things like having one ear listening to themselves through headphones, and one ear "open", or something like that.

Most often, it sounds like I'm not in tune and, even going by what I hear, I'm not hitting the notes I want but, since I don't know what I sound like properly anyway, it's very difficult to change it sensibly, or spontaneously. It's also very different when, say, singing along to music in the car, or attempting to sing something to yourself without any guidance at all.


Note that, until the age of 11 (my voice broke, and I went to secondary school, at about the same time), I was in the school choir because I could sing tolerably well.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

I was an OK singer at primary school, but then my voice broke and I completely lost the ability to get anywhere near the right note. Previously it had just happened magically, without my having to think about it - I'm not even sure I was ever conscious of hearing myself. I still sang to myself afterwards, and it apparently wasn't too hideous, but I couldn't pitch myself to any sort of accompaniment, be it vocal or instrumental.

This changed about a year ago, when I realised, mid-jam session, that if I vocalised into a microphone, I could hear myself properly. The physical separation from the speaker made it sound like my voice was outside my head, and I could evaluate its pitch as though I was listening to a record. Within a few minutes I was happily singing along with everyone else for the first time ever.

I'm still not a great, or even a good singer, but I can at least hold a tune against someone else now, sometimes even minus a mic.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

I explain it to students as a ruler that isn't marked; someone who does a lot of measurement will eventually be able to mark the centimeters on the ruler quite well or even nearly exactly, but someone who hardly ever does would be hard-pressed to do so.

Relative pitch skills are about how many millimeters you might be out on the intervals.

[juliet]

marnameow does seem to genuinely have very little sense of pitch. There was an online test thingy recently (Actual Proper Research, not internet-meme) in which the first 50% of the tests tested pitch perception & the second 50% tested rhythm perception. Each test involved playing 2 small snippets which were the same or differed slightly (in pitch or rhythm) & you had to say which. Marna got barely over chance on the first half & perfect score on the second. ("Normal" was 27 or 28 out of 30 on each.)

I have no idea on the actual question, sorry!