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 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.