Singing: Ups, downs, and weirdness
Oct. 26th, 2023 10:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lyornA lot of "up" in recent weeks and I even managed to resolve one of my drama points by sitting still and thinking about it.
New (second) choir is fun because we sing LOUD and high, and quite often both at the same time.
Of course, sometimes I run into stuff from other universes that is incomprehensible to me and would take me months of intensive training to learn at all, let alone to do it while singing. Like solfeggio, which is, as far as I understand, kind of like the Nashville Number system plus a set of gestures, plus a set of names, and both the names and the gestures have a grammar (which seems to differ by school or conductor). So you need to learn three types of symbols for one note and perform them simultaneously, and then you are expected to determine the note from it and still have enough focus to sing it by ear. I'm sure I'm looking at it very wrong, because the goal of that seem to be to teach children sight-reading of music (I can sight-read, although most singers are better at it than I) and while children do learn fast, this seems an extremely roundabout way to do it. So, being too old to learn it quickly, I ape the movements and skip the rest.
Another strange thing (that I have encountered before) is humming through a hose into a bottle half-filled with water to relax the voice. I know that it does exactly that for me (if I manage not to faint doing it, that is), because afterwards I can sing a very, very soft baritone with no effort at all. Getting back to soprano range and a sound that carries more than 2 feet (in an empty room at 2 a.m.) takes about 20 minutes. As nearly everyone else finds it useful, I must be doing it wrong, but I do not know in which way.
Today we sang something where the conductor wanted dark vocals. Fine, I can do that, especially as most of the section was solidly in mezzo, if not alto range. However, the conductor needed us to shape the mouth like carp sucking scum from the bottom of a pond. I can do that. However, while doing it, I cannot move my tongue, I cannot control my diaphragm, and breathing becomes very tricky. My rule for choir singing is, "the audience can see better than they can hear": If I can either move in a certain way, or sing, but not both, I do the movement. So that's what I did, and I was dizzy and completely exhausted after that piece.
My firmware is buggy.
Fortunately I also have a completely normal and solvable challenge, which is how to sing a soft H5 for a single voice descant. I already managed once or twice, I only need to learn to do it reliably, and then it will be glorious. :-D
New (second) choir is fun because we sing LOUD and high, and quite often both at the same time.
Of course, sometimes I run into stuff from other universes that is incomprehensible to me and would take me months of intensive training to learn at all, let alone to do it while singing. Like solfeggio, which is, as far as I understand, kind of like the Nashville Number system plus a set of gestures, plus a set of names, and both the names and the gestures have a grammar (which seems to differ by school or conductor). So you need to learn three types of symbols for one note and perform them simultaneously, and then you are expected to determine the note from it and still have enough focus to sing it by ear. I'm sure I'm looking at it very wrong, because the goal of that seem to be to teach children sight-reading of music (I can sight-read, although most singers are better at it than I) and while children do learn fast, this seems an extremely roundabout way to do it. So, being too old to learn it quickly, I ape the movements and skip the rest.
Another strange thing (that I have encountered before) is humming through a hose into a bottle half-filled with water to relax the voice. I know that it does exactly that for me (if I manage not to faint doing it, that is), because afterwards I can sing a very, very soft baritone with no effort at all. Getting back to soprano range and a sound that carries more than 2 feet (in an empty room at 2 a.m.) takes about 20 minutes. As nearly everyone else finds it useful, I must be doing it wrong, but I do not know in which way.
Today we sang something where the conductor wanted dark vocals. Fine, I can do that, especially as most of the section was solidly in mezzo, if not alto range. However, the conductor needed us to shape the mouth like carp sucking scum from the bottom of a pond. I can do that. However, while doing it, I cannot move my tongue, I cannot control my diaphragm, and breathing becomes very tricky. My rule for choir singing is, "the audience can see better than they can hear": If I can either move in a certain way, or sing, but not both, I do the movement. So that's what I did, and I was dizzy and completely exhausted after that piece.
My firmware is buggy.
Fortunately I also have a completely normal and solvable challenge, which is how to sing a soft H5 for a single voice descant. I already managed once or twice, I only need to learn to do it reliably, and then it will be glorious. :-D
