My Honours project is about the musical self-efficacy of generalist primary teachers, and I was chatting with a friend, Connor, about this. In particular, the problems that we specialists encounter when trying to provide PD or resources, because our very nature as specialists makes us an "other" to people with low musical self-efficacy. Connor voiced the concept of making a resource for musical learning that can be played whilst driving. I think the most genius part of it is that in Sydney a lot of teachers do drive to school, and while you can't write reports while driving, you CAN learn a song! One challenge I set myself for this resource is to make it as hands-free as possible, which means a sequenced and slow enough pace for the user so they don't need to backtrack. Somehow though, I wanted to be able to include the further steps in at the same time - kind of how you would differentiate for kids in a class, except you can't see the kids in your class and they're all in their own little boxes. And they're also trying to drive safely and may not have had their morning coffee yet. Lots to juggle.
A quick search of Spotify shows me no current resources exist there, but there is a playlist that Connor found of warmups that gave me some ideas for presenting my resource:
The common style of presentation in this playlist is:
- trained female voice as the demo
- one repetition of the pattern with singer
- piano repeats pattern (top line doubles you - like karaoke)
- piano continues sequence up or down
This pattern is used to cover vowels, scales/common intervals, diction and articulation (legato vs staccato).
I would be curious to play this for a not-trained-musician and see how they fare as they require the user to be able to pitch-match chromatic modulations. To learn how to sing staccato I feel there would need to be an actual explanation about what parts of your body need to be active, but I suppose it's not harmful not to have it.
The other thing is as a low-register female myself, most of these activities are just out of my semi-trained range. Some consideration for untrained voices and teaching how to support high notes should probably also be included somewhere. Also, the vibrato of the female singers may be confusing for some users as it makes patterns with neighbour notes a bit difficult to follow.
The next exercises are more technical, focussing on breath control and controlled slides. I think both these things could benefit from a bit of instruction to begin, or at least to explain the goal of each exercise.
Exercise 1, diaphragm/breath control, could have benefitted from an extra bar of clicks between changes for differentiation: if you wanted to challenge yourself you could have kept going, and challenged yourself extra by having less time to take your in-breath for the next lot. The way it is now, once you've mastered it to that length there is no wiggle room for further improvement.
Then comes a whole lot of exercises from this dude called Sam West. I like his format for a couple reasons:
- his voice has less vibrato and sounds a bit more like a dude off the street. This, in my opinion, makes the end product feel more attainable for less confident users
- His patterns, while still following chromatic modulations, are sung all the way through. Some people find it easier pitching off voice, so I think this is great. Kudos to him for bothering to sing it all.
- There are also instrumental versions of every exercise so if you do want to get rid of his voice you can!
Some standout exercises:
- Legato study actually has several harmony parts low in the mix, with the "main" one you start with prominent. This allows you to use this track to learn how to sing against other parts, and for more advanced users, gives you an opportunity to learn harmony parts by ear! Amazing!
- Agility exercise is super because the line is doubled an octave above for either female singers or tenors. He does start super low in his range and since it's a fast and complex line it's nice that you don't have to think so hard about where to start singing if you aren't a bass.
- There also seems to be 2 CDs worth of Musicianship-style aural perception exercises. I appreciate their inclusion as it shows how important this skill is in developing your vocal skills!
Sam's collection does include a song, but other than these instructions there is no scaffolding for learning the parts. Curious to see how this would work if someone worked through all his exercises: is it enough to get them through?