The last few weeks have seen three courses from Vocal Process on very
different topics. Here are short reports on all three:
Computer Voice Training
took place on January 20th to a full house.
The course is part
of Integrated VoiceTM Module One, and the participants on
this year's Module were joined by a number of singers including one
keen client who flew in from Sweden for the occasion.
The group worked on different onsets and offsets, twang and control of
nasality. In fact it came as a surprise to some that twang and
nasality were two different things, governed by two different sets
of structures. With three computers in the building and a number of
laptops brought along on the day, the participants spent much of the
day experimenting with the free voice analysis programmes. For much
of the course we were using the excellent
Wavesurfer programme for Mac or PC, available to download from
the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
The day ended with everyone joining in to read a number of mystery
spectrograms of sung phrases compiled especially for the day by
Jeremy.
In May Jeremy will be working with the MA Voice Studies students at
CSSD on using computers for voice analysis and training.
Belting Explained
on February 10th was an extremely popular course, and we were
turning applicants away well before the day arrived. We began with a range
of recorded audio and visual examples from rock, pop, musical
theatre and film, and many of the participants commented on both the
differences and the similarities of belting in individual voices. In
addition to the plenary group sessions, everyone received individual
attention during two practice sessions on accessing the components
of belting and their application in sung notes and words.
See the article below - Staying together - movements of the vocal
folds - for some of the voice science information we used in
this course.
Successful Singing Auditions
on March 3rd proved to be an intense and stimulating day for both singers and
observers.
The day began with a mock audition, where the participants were able
to discover their strengths and weaknesses in a strict audition
situation. Not all auditions are alike, and in order to assess the
singers fairly, we asked them to identify their current level, and
what they might be auditioning for. They ranged from a young singer
auditioning for drama school to actors auditioning for West End and
international leads.
The concepts covered included where to focus, the landscape of the
song, acting and singing, taking the space, and giving clear
information to a pianist. Jeremy and Gillyanne worked with all the
singers individually on performance and technical issues. Observers
were able to ask about aspects of the process of change and relate
to their own work as performers or teachers.
As a direct result of the day, we are planning a rerun of the course
in Guildford in the near future.
Email Gunvor at Vocal Process for more details.
A reminder of our forthcoming courses
We have a number of courses coming up in the next few months. Some of
these courses can be booked directly on the Vocal Process website,
and some will require an email to Gunvor to find out more about
booking requirements. The links listed below will take you to the
booking page or to your email browser to send a message to Gunvor.
Vocal
Process has recently set up an online partnership with the Zone
Magazine website.
The purpose of the
Zone
website is to provide a one-stop shop online for music
educators. In fact, the site aims to be THE online reference source
for music education in the UK. The information covers the full
spectrum of the Music Education community, including individual
training providers, student class teachers, music specialists, local
authority staff and performers.
The Vocal Process section on the site contains
listings of courses, articles, free downloads and products, and is
updated as often as Jeremy remembers! The site is extremely easy to
use, and gives full access for web administrators to add text,
graphics and photographs. Jeremy had the first page of the Vocal
Process section online in less than 20 minutes. You can see from
these
Vocal Process pages on the Zonemag website that we have included
photographs, pdfs, event details, news items and live links to our
site. In fact, the Zone people
themselves currently use the Vocal Process page as an example to
their prospective online partners of how a company can use the site.
One particular favourite for Vocal Process is
the online Calendar. Courses and events are added to the online
partner's zone, and as a course date draws nearer, the course is
flagged on the home page (Latest Events Added) and in the Calendar
automatically. The site can also provide your RSS Feed page with the
latest news in the music education sector.
We have just renewed our online partnership with Zone,
and this month we have negotiated a special offer for Vocal Process
eZINE readers.
Click on this special
Vocal Process / Zone link and navigate through the orange
Sections box on the left to the Online Partnership section. Enter the code
VPZ
and you can get 15 months for the
price of 12 on either the Corporate or the Individual rates. The
Corporate rate for online partnership is normally £350+VAT for 12
months, and the Individual rate for 12 months is £99+VAT. But the
Vocal Process / Zone special offer works out at less than 26p per
day for Individuals and 91p per day for Corporate members.
And that's not all! Zone magazine are also
giving readers of the Vocal Process eZINE a special offer on the
magazine itself. Subscribe through the special
Vocal Process / Zone link
and get four issues for the price of three. Each issue normally
costs £4.95, but by paying the year's subscription price (three
issues at £14.85) you can get an extra issue free.
You can read about the
Vocal Process / Zone partnership here or you can
email Ian Clethero, head of business partnership and
development, for more information.
According to our own website stats, a growing
number of our online visitors are coming to us via the Zone website. We would be very interested to hear your
feedback on the Zone offer and website, and of course on the Vocal Process online
presence too. Keep us posted!
Article: Staying together - movements of the vocal folds
This edition's feature article focuses on the vocal folds
themselves, phonation and the Bernoulli Principle.
Jeremy writes: We usually include the science bits on every course we teach, and
I find them great fun to do. It's good to see clients who
don't understand the facts behind vocal function suddenly "get the picture". I have
had several requests to put some of the science into articles, so
here is the first of two explanations of the vocal folds and how
they move.
The
vocal folds
The vocal folds (a pair of muscle/tissue/ligament structures) are
able to open and close. They are fixed at the front, arising from
the same point on the inside of the thyroid cartilage. The back of
each vocal fold is attached to one of two arytenoid cartilages. Each arytenoid cartilage sits on top of the cricoid cartilage and can
slide and swivel apart and together. This means that the back of the
vocal folds are capable of swinging apart and coming together.
The vocal folds can be held in three main positions.
The first two are obvious: We hold our vocal folds wide open to
allow breath into and out of the lungs. No voiced sound is made
because the folds are too wide apart to vibrate together.
We hold our folds closed to stop anything going down into the
lungs - when swallowing or holding our breath, or when lifting heavy
weights (the internal pressure caused by holding the breath against
closed vocal folds enables us to access extra power in the legs and arms).
Again, no voiced sound is made because the vocal folds are held
tightly closed and do not vibrate.
The third is a little more unusual. The arytenoids swing towards
each other and the folds are held close together but not touching (approximated). This is a different
position from the closed folds in that air can pass through the
narrow gap between the folds. In fact, it is essential in this
position that air can travel between the folds.
It is the passing of air through the narrow gap that causes the
vocal folds to vibrate, with a little help from Bernoulli's
Principle.
Bernoulli's Principle
Bernoulli's Principle states that as the speed of a moving fluid
increases, the pressure within the fluid decreases.
In straightforward terms, Bernoulli's Principle governs the
behaviour of a moving medium (water or air) travelling through a
channel at certain rate. When the channel gets narrower, the medium
moves faster, and when the channel widens, the medium moves slower.
Think of a river moving slowly along a wide valley, then "speeding
up" through a narrow gulley (where would white-water rafting be
without Bernoulli's Principle?). In this case the medium is water,
and the channel is the river banks which widen and narrow. The same
amount of water is travelling through, but because the gap through
which it has to travel widens and narrows, the apparent speed of the
medium decreases and increases accordingly.
In the case of the vocal folds, the "walls" of the channel are
the vocal folds themselves, which are flexible and movable. In
phonation, the vocal folds are held closely together but not
touching, and air is passed between them. Coming from a wider tube
(the trachea) to a narrower tube (the narrower gap between the vocal
folds) causes the air to speed up. This reduces the outward pressure
within the airflow, which causes the vocal
folds to move towards each other. This in turn causes the air to
speed up, which causes the vocal folds to
close in, until they meet, stopping the air flow.
The airflow is now being blocked but still wants to move forward, so
it begins to push its way through, moving the vocal folds apart
from underneath. Due to their elastic nature (and partly due to a
pendulum-like motion), the walls of the vocal folds move apart, allowing the air
through. The further apart the walls move, the slower the air flows.
Finally, the pendulum movement reaches its furthest point apart and the
walls begin to move back together again. Since the gap is getting
narrower, this causes the air to move slightly faster, which in its
turn causes the gap between the walls to narrow, and the whole
process starts again.
I like to think of this as an equation, where the width and the
speed always add up to the same amount. So the faster the air (high
speed number), the narrower the gap (low width number), and the
wider the gap (high width number) the slower the air (low speed
number).
Therefore, phonation (voiced sound) is caused by airflow being
broken up into puffs of air (like Indian smoke signals).
The vocal folds are held constantly slightly apart, and air is
passed through the narrow gap. So although our vocal folds can be
moved at hundreds of times per second, we are not consciously
tensing and releasing the muscles that fast.
The actual closing and opening of the folds is caused by the action
of Bernoulli's Principle.
For an excellent interactive demonstration of Bernoulli's
Principle , visit
http://home.earthlink.net/~mmc1919/venturi.html
This website includes an online model diagram
(pictured above)
where you can change
the width of a tube to view the Principle in action.
In a later edition I will be talking about the Open and Closed Phases of
the Vocal Folds and their effect on breath and sound.
Auditions from the actor's point of view
Late last year Jeremy interviewed one of his clients on the realities of
auditioning. The client had recently graduated from a musical
theatre course and had
already had a number of auditions in the West End, including two
that day. Here is a short excerpt to whet your appetite:
Jeremy: We were talking a few days ago about
auditions.
Client: I’ve auditioned for most shows that
are in London at the moment from Phantom to We Will Rock You to the
UK Tour of Grease to Seven Brides for Seven Brothers to… I mean
there’s been a lot.
Jeremy: Just about every style going,
actually. When you get a recall and you’re given music to learn,
how much time do you have to learn it?
Client: 24 hours. And that’s being generous.
I got a recall for The Sound of Music, for Maria and they gave me
longer. But for Grease I had 24 hours. And, they fax it through
but I couldn’t get the fax from my agent and I was going to hotels
in London because I was working. So you’re trying to do a job,
you’re trying to find music and you can’t go to see your agent
because you’re working and so you’re waiting to get the music but
you can’t get the music because you don’t have a fax at home. So
you have to find someone in London that does have a fax on your
lunch break so they can pick up the music. And then you end up with
no time to learn the music.
There’s been a couple that have gone pretty badly. I
went along with my repertoire and they didn’t like either of the
songs I’d taken along. It was for panto so I took character songs.
My agent hadn’t told me that it was actually character plus
understudying, perhaps even Aladdin, perhaps the other leading
females, anything; it could be anything. And so stupidly I had my
whole rep file there. And he chose a song I hadn’t sung in about a
year and I had to do that.
And you had told me never to take the
songs unless I’m prepared to sing them! And I’d forgotten.
Jeremy: To empty your file of everything.
Client: Yeah.
Jeremy: The song that they chose, did
it go okay?
Client: It went okay; they don’t actually mind
if you screw up and have to start again. They don’t. I mean,
today, I think it was my first round of Grease, the pianist
completely got the tempo - actually it wasn’t even the tempo, it was
the count. It was a 4/4 and it was totally off, it was utterly
bizarre. And I could see Debbie O’Brien looking at me going - and
me stopping the pianist and going “I’m really sorry, can you start
that again because I think something’s gone wrong.” Trying to be all
diplomatic. And I knew that she knew that he was doing something
funny.
And like, today I think [for the second
audition], you know, I just
openly said, “Listen, I haven’t sung this in a while, but we’ll have
a crack and I apologize if I go wrong.” And I did have to stop and
start and remember a verse. But actually they were very nice. I
think it depends on what the audition is. I mean it depends if
they’re looking for a voice or they’re looking for an actress. And
they can tell a huge amount, I think more than you realize. And
they will stop you six bars in and you don’t know whether that’s a
good thing or a bad thing.
For a job I did before, I sang my lyric piece
and they literally stopped me after about 20 bars - not 20 bars,
like 20 seconds. And I was, “Oh, God, how embarrassing. Was it
really that bad?” And I got the job. That was when I thought,
“Hmm.” And it’s always the ones you don’t think have gone well that
do.
Jeremy: I have a lot of
clients who say that, too.
Client: Yeah, it’s truly bizarre.
For the fringe piece I got, I’d been dumped the night before, I just
felt grotty. And I went in and was pretty miserable, the
singing was pretty miserable. And I got the job.
Jeremy: It’s maybe not something I’d recommend
to my other clients, just get dumped the night before!
Client: That’s the other thing. All the girls
knew the dance routine, and I was like, “How the hell do you know
the dance routine already?” I just thought it was so unfair. And
they were saying, “Well, this has been like five years in a row.”
So there’s me now, trying to learn it all. But next year, I will
know it.
There was a guy at one of the We Will Rock You
auditions who had been down to the final round each time for about
five years.
Jeremy: To get that far each time means he is
definitely doing something right. He’s got the right style, he’s
got the right look, but there is something he’s not showing.
Tell him to come to me for
coaching."
The interviewee is currently working in the
West End. We are planning to publish more of this interview in
future editions of the eZINE.
If you have any questions on vocal or performance solutions, or
auditioning techniques, email us at
yqa@vocalprocess.co.uk
And finally,
Jeremy's blog
this month contains news of a karaoke record-breaker and the latest
technology for a singing search engine, an article on core tone, a
tribute to the director Stephen Pimlott, and reports on his first
(and second) ever professional auditions.
http://www.singingcoach.blogspot.com
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