well, I’ve been doing a lot of work since the last post so i’ll just briefly go over some of the things.
I’ve had some good meetings with my collaborator and voice-coach, Lucy Legg. I highly recommend her. I started off having lessons with Lucy after we met at a symposium on starting to sing as an older person. I wanted someone to help me sing without harming my throat, and it seems that the way to do this is to use lots and lots of air, engage all the muscles of the pelvic floor to support your voice, and sing with intent! of course there’s more to it than this but i seem to be making some progress. I discussd my a-n bursary proposal with Lucy when I knew I had the award and could start working.
We are doing two things together really. still practicing excercises to improve my singing and public “utterance” voice, and also working on ways to sing and speak in public in response to different sites, and different prerecorded sounds. We had a discussion of some sound files last time…a recording of an old organ which doesn’t play very well (recorded and played by me at Carousel Sound Lab, Milton Keynes), a plane and some geese landing on a lake at the London Wetlands Centre, and a creaky gate (also Wetlands centre). I told Lucy i’d been working on listening to the sound of the organ pedals and their lovely creaky groaning sound, accompanied occasionally by a few feeble notes on the organ. But i felt that the temptation to imitate the recorded sound with my voice was very strong, and i wanted to avoid that, and try something more interesting and more unexpected. Lucy suggested just listening to the recording some more, and allowing the sounds to suggest a mood, or some words, which could then be worked on to make something with speech or singing, or abstract voice sounds which don’t have any words. I have made a start to this but have not got all that far. Somehow my problem seems to be that the recorded sounds as so interesting that i feel my own voice can add little to them, but that’s why you need someone else to listen and talk to you about what they hear. When you are doing the voice accompaniment to the recording, you can’t always tell yourself how successful or not it is. and when you record it to listen back to, all the sounds are recorded and you don’t get the “play” of the living voice against the recorded (past) sounds.
My next lesson is tomorrow.
