The electronic music foundation is presenting a series of FREE concerts titled “The Human Voice In A New World“. (The New York Times has a review of the first one.) The strand tying the various concerts together is the way the voice can be altered, processed, modified etc. When I first found out about the series I immediately began thinking about the many ways it could serve as a springboard for lessons and forms of musical engagement in both general music classes and ensembles. The easiest ways to enter into this world would probably be through listening to and performing a variety of music that uses vocal processing and/or expanded vocal techniques. Our students, if they listen to the radio, are surely aware of vocal processing (for those of you scratching your heads – listen to some recent T-Pain to get an idea of how autotune processing and vocoders are being used in Hip Hop and R &B )
Cant Believe It featuring Lil Wayne – T-Pain
Why not bridge their experiences with autotune with other expansions and processing of voice?
One helpful resource is “The inner or deep part of an animal or plant structure” the making of Bjork’s Medulla album – an album created almost entirely with voice (of course processed and manipulated and a wide variety of ways). The documentary is fascinating in both tracing Bjork’s thinking through the creation of the music on the album and also the myriad number of ways the collaborating artists used their voices in addition to the way the voices were treated.
From there an endless variety of extensions are available, whether exploring other artists/composers who use their voices in unique ways (Meredith Monk or Theo Bleckmann come to mind) or world cultures that use voice differently than that in traditional Western classical music
(Tuvan Throat singing perhaps?)
Again, there are hundreds of directions one may go.
Whether you work with students in a chorus or general music classroom why not get out a Kaoss Pad or favorite digital effects processor and have students explore the endless possibilities of sound and music they can create with their voices?
Great video! I should let my students watch it so they might also explore what sound they could do with their voices. Maybe I should also think of an activity related to this.
Thanks for sharing these resources in music teaching.
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This is a great way to bridge the gap to the 21st century learner. The students are getting exposured to various digital and processed vocal threads in all forms of media. So to compare and explore this to Truvan and others is a good way to expand the students mind to vocal manipulation.(which they seem to do anyway in my class anyway) Education is every evolving and still can’t quite keep up with technological advances occuring every day.