Category: General Music

A Five Step Model For Refining Technique

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Ask a bunch of brass teachers how to make changes in instrumental technique and you’ll get a lot of contrasting advice, but if there is a consensus of sorts it seems to favor developing a good sound concept and allowing the body to figure itself out. I’ve written many times about why I feel this approach is not ideal, including looking at research that investigates how we learn and develop motor skills. The trouble with utilizing that research to design teaching and practice strategies for musicians is that a large part of that research is tested using skills that are new to the test subjects. What is the best way to make changes or refine a skill that is already developed? I recently came across an article published in 2016 in the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology that takes a close look at that question and offers a five part model for making corrections to a skill already learned.

We do need to keep in mind that this article is specifically looking at athletics and not music performance and pedagogy, but I think that the psychology between instrumental technique and athletic skills is similar enough that we can use the same strategies. With that caveat in mind, here’s a look at the five part process for refining technique.

Step 1 – Analysis

Yes, the first step is to analyze the musician’s technique. Right off the bat some brass teachers are going to flinch when they read this. For many, analysis is seen as a bad thing and it leads to “paralysis by analysis.” I find this attitude silly, to be honest. If you or a student is freezing up when playing mechanics are getting a close look for how efficient it’s working then you’re doing the analysis wrong in the first place.

The analysis step is vital for a couple of reasons. First, we need to be able to assess if playing difficulties are due to a mechanical issue in the first place. Furthermore, the analysis process should identify the precise cause of a technique flaw in an objective manner. Too many brass teachers are too quick to assume that the issue is being caused by incorrect breath control or maybe a poor sound concept. Those things can result in inefficient technique, but there are other areas in brass mechanics that also need to be analyzed and addressed.

One point the article mentions that I think is important here is that the athlete’s (or musician’s) technique should be analyzed separately from an attempt at correction. In other words, the musician’s attention should not be on the playing mechanics being addressed while analyzing the technique. It’s best is the coach (teacher) is the one doing the analysis. It’s notoriously difficult to analyze your own issues, so if that’s necessary it’s probably best done by recording your playing and doing your analysis away from the act of playing your instrument.

Also addressed in the article in this stage is getting the athlete (musician) to buy into the process here and recognize that there is a technique flaw that needs to be dealt with. Since there is typically a drop off in performance that happens during the next stage due to the technical refinement being new it’s important that the musician understand why the change is necessary, what specifically to change, and how to make that change.

Step 2 – Awareness

The goal in this step is to deautomate the instinctive inefficient technique. When the habitual way of playing the instrument isn’t working properly it needs to be replaced by the correct technique and that requires the musician (or athlete) to be aware of the technique in the first place.

To deautomate the aspect of technique requiring refinement (hereafter termed the target variable), athletes are required to consciously apply a narrow and internal focus of attention (cf. Wulf, 2013), which enables access to the relevant movement component within the memory trace (Christina & Corcos, 1988). If control over the target variable remained largely subconscious, as is thought ideal for performance (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Swann, Crust, Keegan, Piggott, & Hemmings, 2015), it would be difficult to see how any long-term changes could be initiated. Indeed, Rendell, Farrow, Masters, and Plummer (2011) have demonstrated the limitations of implicit strategies in this particular context. More specifically, athletes counting the number of tones overlaid on music soundtracks (i.e., an effort not to think about the movement) during netball shooting practice to a higher than regulation ring led to an eventual lower ball flight trajectory instead of an intended higher trajectory, despite athletes not being aware of any change taking place. In short, a conscious focus seems to be an essential precursor of effective motoric change.

Implementing the Five-A Model of Technical Refinement: Key Roles of the Sport Psychologist – Howie J. Carson & Dave Collins

The bold emphasis in the above quote is mine in order to highlight the difference between this evidence based strategy compared to the approach many brass teachers take where they intentionally keep their students awareness off the specific mechanical skill. Traditional brass pedagogy skips this step.

One reason why I think many teachers intentionally avoid the process of helping a student become aware of their playing mechanics is that there is almost always a drop in performance when a change in motor skills is made. Where many brass pedagogues assume this decline is an indication that the awareness is making the problem worse, sports psychologists see this as a necessary step in the process. Music students need to be aware of what the purpose of this stage is and be realistic in their expectations.

The authors recommend contrast drills as providing good benefits in this stage of the process. Practicing this way involves spending some time alternating between the old and incorrect way of playing and the new and more efficient way.

Contrast drills challenge athletes for two main reasons. First, a movement component that has been under largely subconscious control must return to consciousness (i.e., executing an already existing technique under a different type of control); second, athletes must consciously manipulate their movement to achieve a new technique. As such, executions are performed with an imbalance of control and require a high degree of concentration and motivation. Using paradoxical training interventions (i.e., asking an athlete to purposefully make an error; see Bar-Eli, 1991) as one way to explain the intended outcome (see also Carson, Collins, & Richards, 2016), contrasts between techniques enable the coach to “reframe” the situation and the athlete to realize what is required to make the change, that is, to fully notice the difference.

Implementing the Five-A Model of Technical Refinement: Key Roles of the Sport Psychologist – Howie J. Carson & Dave Collins

Again, we can compare the emphasis on conscious manipulation of the technique recommended above to the more popular idea in brass pedagogy of discouraging any conscious manipulation of playing mechanics.

Step 3 – Adjustment

In this stage the goal is to make the specific change in technique. The musician (or athlete) becomes familiar with the new technique and how it feels and works when correct. The authors recommend feedback be provided to the student in the form of both recorded trials with the new technique as well as through questions, primes, and verbal instructions that guide the preferred technique.

Contrast training is adjusted in this stage so that the old versions of the playing technique are phased out in favor of the new and correct way of playing.

It has yet to be investigated, but we feel that attempts to unconsciously shape the new behavior, through solely implicit, constraints-based coaching, for example, are less likely to generate effective outcomes such as long-term permanency and robustness under stressful conditions. This may well necessitate a change of behavior by the coach if they are devoutly convinced by this approach, and the psychologist can help greatly by supporting the necessary approach.

Implementing the Five-A Model of Technical Refinement: Key Roles of the Sport Psychologist – Howie J. Carson & Dave Collins

The above quote notes that there are many athletes and coaches who favor an unconscious approach at this stage, but the author’s feel that this approach is less effective in the long term. I agree with their assessments here, but will reiterate their point that further research is needed in this area.

Step 4 – (Re)Automation

Only after the conscious adjustment is made to playing technique do the authors recommend working on making this change automatic. At this stage continuing to break up the playing technique or motor skill into individual steps becomes detrimental in situations of stress (i.e., a performance or audition). Instead, in this stage we finally begin to make the new way of playing internalized.

Music teachers frequently coach their students through mental imagery and analogy. I’ve often pointed out that this is a double edged sword. It’s not helpful in the earlier stages, but at this point it is a necessary step. It’s at this point where the teacher helps the student to perform the technique without conscious effort on playing correctly. This is the stage where the implicit approach takes over.

Step 5 – Assurance

In this final stage the goal is to generate complete confidence in the athlete (or musician) in the unconscious execution of the corrected technique. The student gets regular reassurance from the coach or teacher that new change is working correctly. Assessing the new technique through challenges involving physical fatigue or otherwise “pressure testing” the student is valuable in this stage. This is the point where the musician or athlete just concentrates on the end goal of making good music or putting the ball into the basket.

Final Thoughts

The authors note a specific pet peeve of mine in the typical strategy employed by most brass teachers, separation of the psychology of performing with an accurate understanding of motor skills.

First, there is a distinct need for sport psychology and motor control knowledge to be reconsidered in unison. Unfortunately, in our view, this separation has been driven by too narrow a focus in each case—emotion and cognition in the former and co-ordination dynamics in the latter. Bridging this gap, recent efforts have been made to examine the effects cognition over elements of the movement execution. Carson and Collins (2014, 2015) recently termed this study “psychomechanics” and have explored relative states of automaticity through use of intraindividual movement variability as an indicator of such control (e.g., when executing golf shots with a ball or as intentional practice swings; Carson, Collins, & Richards, 2014b). In short, planned training designs must address not only the development of task-specific cognitive strategies but also how the execution may be embedded with relative permanence and pressure resistance (cf. Carson & Collins, 2016).

Implementing the Five-A Model of Technical Refinement: Key Roles of the Sport Psychologist – Howie J. Carson & Dave Collins

Tip of the hat to Noa Kageyama of the Bulletproof Musician podcast and blog for posting about this article.

Remote Recording Sessions

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Like a lot of musicians right now, I’ve been participating in some different recording projects where all the musicians either video or audio record themselves from different locations and then put everything together to sync things up. It’s been a good way for me to keep excited and interested in playing music, even though we’re not able to make music in person right now.

There are many places people can go for advice on the technological aspects of putting together these recording projects, and most of those resources are probably more informed and experienced than I am. I did, however, want to share some of the things I’ve been working on recently and how those recordings were put together.

This first one my involvement was just as a player. The parts were sent out and assigned to everyone and we were given a click track and some basic instructions to help everyone get coordinated. I did maybe 3 or 3 takes, with a few false starts in there. The click track we used was modified from a recording of a quartet performing this piece. The starting tempo was plugged in and a metronome clicked it off. During a couple of moments where there was some silence a metronome click was dubbed in to help all the musicians stay at the same tempo without being able to breathe together and cue each other.

While recording for this project I found it a little tricky to cue up my camera, then the click track, and get into position to be ready to play quickly enough. In retrospect, having a longer count off or even just some extra silence at the beginning of the click track would have made it just a little bit easier to be ready to play from the beginning.

Once the parts were all recorded, the audio files were pulled out and synced with each other using GarageBand. The videos were compiled and synced up separately using Adobe Premier Pro and the mixed and edited audio was dropped into the video. Some of the audio and video aren’t perfectly lined up with each other, but you have to look for it and the final audio ended up pretty good.

I made this video for my elementary school music students, so it’s a bit on the silly side. I did this project completely on my own and took me a while, mostly because I don’t have the necessarily video editing software to do this split screen video technique, so I had to come up with a different solution. Again, I started with a click track that was just a bass line and a metronome click. In order to get the opening shtick to a line up with the timing I also recorded my lines and stuck them in before the bass line started in the click track. That way I was saying my lines about the same time as on the click track and would also be able to react on the other video parts at the right time.

I mentioned I don’t have video editing software to do the split screen technique, so my solution was to open up four QuickTime windows on my computer monitor and start each one at the correct time while recording my screen, also using QuickTime. In order to get them synced together I needed to find a way to start separate video window one at a time and at the correct time. My solution was to include at the beginning of each video a count off for each instrument as a point of reference.

So on each video at the very beginning I recorded myself saying, “One, two – one, two three four. Voice, two – one, two, three four” (in time with the metronome click in my headphones), then “Bone, two…” “Bass, two…” and “Keys, two…” On my computer I arranged the video windows where I wanted them and then watched each video until just before that instrument was counted in. In other words, starting the trombone video would start it right at the “Bone, two…” count off, etc. I then recorded my screen with QuickTime and started the voice window, starting the trombone window right as the voice recording got there, then started the other two video windows in the same way. There was a lot of hit-or-miss here where I ended up a a little bit off, but after a few tries I was able to get each video playing together being synced up pretty close.

The audio for this was done in GarageBand to make sure the audio was lined up. The QuickTime screen recording and the audio recording from GarageBand were lined up as close as I could get using iMovie. I wouldn’t want to try to use this technique for more than 4 videos, but it did the job for me.

Grandpa’s Spells

This last one is just an example of an audio recording project I made with two of my musician friends/colleagues. My friend Annie played both bass and guitar on this and James played the piano. The tune is a Jelly Roll Morton composition called “Grandpa’s Spells.” I sent out a click track to Annie and James ahead of time that included a metronome click and a bass and drum part.

To create the bass and piano click track, as well as to help me chart out the arrangement we were to use, I used Finale to input in simple parts, exported those parts as a MIDI file, and then dumped those into GarageBand. Once in GarageBand I could record my part over those and send out click tracks to the other musicians that had their part removed. That way James could play his piano part without having a MIDI piano getting in his way, etc. The musicians recorded their parts and sent them back to me, which I dumped back into GarageBand to edit and mix.

Even though the musicians I’ve worked with on these, and other similar projects, were not able to get together in person or go to the same studio to record, it’s pretty amazing what we are able to do today with fairly cheap and easy to use technology. In fact, I would say that the most difficult hurdle to completing these projects is that you need to rely on everyone to have the time, energy, and inclination to set up a device to record on and a device to listen to the click track on at the same time and record their part. For a variety of reasons, many of my current remote recording projects are in limbo because we’re still waiting for musicians to get around to doing their part. Hopefully I’ll have some more of these to share before too long.

How Contagious are Wind Instruments?

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Hopefully by the time you’re reading this post it will be out of date. Currently my area is still under a the 2020 pandemic lockdown and the only music performances going on are digital. But as we start to open things back up again there are questions about how soon we can get back to making music together again. One major question that I wondered about is how contagious are those of us playing wind instruments? If we’re carriers of covid-19 or flu are we putting our fellow musicians at risk by playing our instruments with them? There are some researchers who have been looking at this, including some from the Frieburg University of Music and the Bamberg Symphony. Dr. Sixto Montesinos helps us with translations from those publications.

To the best of our knowledge, there are no measurements of the viral load in the blowing air of wind instruments at present. It is known, however, that wind instrument playing requires an intensive exchange of air in the lungs and respiratory tract with sometimes high air pressures. To what extent the viral load is reduced by the airway in the instrument is unclear. It is to be assumed that the release of the breathing air into the environment during playing can lead to virus-containing aerosols. In addition, playing wind instruments causes condensation of the exhaled air in the instrument, which is to be regarded as another potentially virus-spreading material.

Risk Assessment Regarding Corona-Infections in Music Making

“We (The Bamberg Symphony) believe that playing a clarinet or a horn, for example, hardly releases any aerosols because the air flow in the instrument is slowed down where the sounds are generated.” said Marcus Axt, Director of the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra.

The Bamberg Symphony

So preliminarily, it looks like woodwind and brass instruments don’t increase the risk of spreading the covid-19 virus, although as far as I can tell they don’t address the need for emptying spit (I mean, water) from the water key. Joking aside, while it’s mostly condensation that we’re emptying out of the spit valve, there must be some spit getting in there and we already know that the inside of brass instruments aren’t always the most sterile environment to start with.

A number of the ensembles that I work with have members who are more at risk from covid-19. Some of these groups also cater to audiences that are older and in the high-risk population. Many of the venues where I play have smaller stages where musicians really need to squeeze together to all fit. Before we go back to playing together it would be nice to know for sure that we’re not inadvertently putting our fellow musicians and audiences at risk.

Then we also need to consider private lesson teaching. I fortunately have a larger room for my at-home music studio, but in the past I’ve used very small offices to teach private lessons where it’s not really possible to stand 6 feet apart. Many of my colleagues use very small rooms to teach their private lessons in.

I’m glad that there folks out there taking a science-based approach to what sort of risk playing a wind instrument will be as we start playing together again. So far it looks like the risk will be minimal based purely on playing your instrument near other musicians, but please keep in mind that the results are still preliminary and will require further research. I’ll post any updates that I learn about here, but please also pass along any information or articles if you happen to come across them in the comments below.

On Memorizing Music

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A while back I blogged about memorizing tunes you will improvise over. The consensus (which I agree with) is that it’s better to have the tunes memorized, because it helps free up your improvisations. I also pointed out that sight reading (or rather, “sight improvising”) skills are also important and so it’s worth being able to look at changes for the first time and improvise over them.

Organist Jonathan Dimmock discusses a similar topic in his article, The Folly of Memorization. In addition to discussing his thoughts on memorizing music he also brings in some historical context. Did you know that Clara Schumann was largely responsible for the trend for pianists to memorize their music? As a woman musician in the 1850s she struggled to be noticed, so she decided to do something that was unprecedented at the time – perform by memory.

The critics were outraged! That she, a woman!, would have the audacity to do something as bold as that was surely to be condemned. But the male pianists of the day saw it differently. They knew that their prowess, even their male virility, was at stake; they could not allow a female to show them up! And so the cult of piano memorization was born. In short order, this would also penetrate the world of concerto performances on every instrument.

According to Dimmock, the changing relationship of musicians to audience that occurred during the Industrial Revolution also made this trend go “viral.” It was during this time that the idea of a “genius artist” became mainstream. This concept is so pervasive today that it’s hard to imagine how musicians were perceived differently today. Prior to the Classical Period in music history musicians were seen more as skilled labor rather than artists. After Schumann’s influence, musicians strove to impress and communicate artistic goals, in part through performing demanding music by memory.

It’s after Dimmock’s description of the historical influences where I feel he goes off the rails. He appears to believe that either you’re going to be skilled at memorization or skilled at improvisation, but not both (or, for that matter, neither).

We now know that the brain is organized in a manner that performers are either adept at memorization or improvisation. Yes, these two things are hard-wired into brain functioning and almost mutually exclusive. Show me a brilliant improviser and I would be willing to bet that they struggle to memorize music. One is not better than the other; they are different and of equal merit.

Without going through and picking apart his evidence and logic, I feel Dimmock is missing some important information regarding how we learn and retain skills, including memorization and improvisation. Contrary to Dimmock’s opinion, I think it’s clear that with practice musicians can learn to excel at both. In fact, as my blog post from earlier discusses, I think skills like reading, memorization, and improvisation are all part of the overall big picture in what I’m interested in while performing music. Sure, some people will have more aptitude in one or another (or both or neither), but we’re not really “hard wired” to only be good in one and never become successful in another.

Why memorize your concert music? Personally, when I’ve gotten ready for a solo performance (particularly as a featured soloist on a concert with only one piece to perform) I tend to have the music mostly memorized merely out of the repetition from practicing the piece a lot. Taking the extra step to prepare to perform it by memory isn’t usually a lot of work beyond. Many soloists feel that not having to watch the music helps them to play more expressively.

The strongest argument I can think of for memorizing music is the it simply looks better on stage. We know that even highly experienced musicians will rate the exact same performance differently depending on the attire that the performer wears. It may not be “fair,” but it’s something that musicians use to their advantage (dress up for your gig and your audience will like your performance better). Performing on stage from memory is just one more thing that can push a good performance into a great on in the minds of your audience.

While your musical goals may not align with mine, when I perform I’m trying to make a connection with my audience. Getting rid of the sheet music while soloing may only be a subtle difference, but it’s the aggregate of the small details that make for the overall musical effect.

That said, I think Dimmock has some valid points.

I believe that the cult of memorization is now coming into its sunset, led on by the sunrise of the Technological Age. It’s computers that memorize! Humans give something else to art, we give soul. It’s time to stop insisting humans need to act like computers. Let’s let computers do the memorizing, and allow people to do the soulful communication. It is only through the latter that transformation of the listener is possible.

What do you think? Is memorizing music bad, good, or neither? Do you feel that you have the ability to improvise, memorize, but not do both well? What experiences have you had that are different from mine and Dimmock’s? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Music Literacy – Why it’s declining and how to improve your reading skills

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Having a certain degree of proficiency in reading music notation is considered an important skill for most musicians. If you’re going to perform classical music music literacy is essential. Many of the jazz performances I do require the musicians to sight read charts. If you want to play in a pit orchestra for a musical theater production you will need to know how to read music. In spite of this requirement for these musical endeavors, music literacy appears to be on the decline.

Writing in the Journal of Music Teacher Education, Edward P. Asmus wrote:

I have noticed a phenomenon that seems to be on the rise: an increasing number of applicants auditioning for entrance into undergraduate music programs are unable to read music. Colleagues across the nation, music recruiters, ensemble directors, and theory teachers are all reporting an increasing number of entering music majors who are unable to read music notation and produce music on their major instruments from it. Those auditioning are able to play or sing prepared pieces with performance levels sufficient for admission. However, when they are asked to sight-read musical notation, the results are dreadful.

I’ve noticed something similar, not just with undergraduate students but also even many professional musicians. The reasons for this decline are varied, but I believe that some of this trend comes from pressures placed on music educators at the high school level.

Consider a typical high school band program. During the fall semester, it’s much more likely that the only band experience the students will have will be marching band. While the music is usually initially learned through sheet music, there isn’t much emphasis placed on reading it. In fact, the goal is to have the music memorized as quickly as possible. Once the music has been learned, the show often emphasizes the drill over the music. While I don’t want to denigrate the hard work that great marching band programs put into their show, these bands typically work the same music for months. There’s not much opportunity for these students to spend time practicing their music reading skills.

High school chorus programs are often worse at teaching music literacy. It’s very easy to resort to teaching the music by rote imitation and vocal students often struggle with music notation. It takes some effort on the part of the choir director to help students improve their sight singing.

For both the band and choral programs at high school there are also the pressures of contests. Receiving a high rating on a contest is often one of the main ways that music educators will be judged on their teaching by administrators who likely have little to no music education themselves. It can be tempting for the music teacher to teach primarily for the contest and play the same music for a long time, rather than spend time learning new music through notation. When students don’t get much opportunity to practice their reading, they don’t improve.

Some of the professional musicians that I’m familiar with also struggle with sight reading. Often times these musicians are very talented players, with good technique and abilities, but they too may spend a lot of their time either performing music that is already learned, learned by rote, or never notated in the first place. It’s a shame, because I enjoy playing with many of these players but so many of the gigs I play and book require good sight reading ability.

What can individual musicians do to improve their music literacy? Of course one of the best ways to improve your sight reading is to practice sight reading, there are some other things that players can do to work on reading notation better.

  1. Learn scales and chord arpeggios – The trend is to get these memorized as quickly as possible, and while I agree that this is an important goal for all musicians, there’s some value in practicing scales and patterns while reading them. Most tonal music will be made up of scales and chords and it’s useful to be able to visually recognize these patterns. When you’re sight reading a piece of music that has a fragment of a scale you will recognize it faster and spend less time processing it and more time scanning ahead.
  2. Follow along with a score while listening to a recording – This is a similar idea to reading scales and chords. You want to make a connection between the visual schema (in this case, the schema is a notated “packet” of musical information) and the aural realization of it. Much like reading text, your eyes and brain quickly skim over words that you’ve read many times and no longer need to slow down to process it.
  3. Transcribe music – Jazz musicians use transcription all the time as a tool for learning improvisation. There’s something to be said for memorizing the a solo without resorting to notating it, but by writing it down you’re approaching it from the opposite direction of #2 above. It can be quite difficult to work out rhythmic notation for many musicians, but this process helps you assimilate what the visual representation of that sound looks like on paper.
  4. Learn lots of music from notation – I don’t mean to sight read lots of music here, I mean to really learn to play a piece of music. The trouble with practicing sight reading is that the goal is to get through the music, not fix mistakes. By spending time learning to play music from the written page and ensuring that it’s accurate you will learn to make the corrections in your reading that you have to skip over when you’re playing in real time.
  5. Learn to recover while reading – There are different ways to approach practicing a piece of music, and they all have some validity. If you’re performing or rehearsing with other players you don’t have the luxury to stop and go back, you need to recover and pick up with your part as quickly as you can. This is why I strongly encourage music students to always finish the phrase you’re playing before you stop and go back to practice a trouble area. If you always stop right after a mistake, you will not develop the ability to recover when a mistake happens in performance. This is sort of the opposite side of the coin from #4 above. You have to be able to continue playing past a mistake, but you also need to go back and learn how to not make the same mistake again.

There are other strategies that individual musicians can employ in their practice. There is also some pedagogical research I’ve recently looked at that investigates effective ways to teach music literacy in the classroom. There’s a lot more that can be said about music literacy, but I’d also like to hear your ideas. Do you feel your reading skills are strong enough? What have you done to practice your sight reading skills? What strategies do you employ with your students? Leave your comments below.

What Do J.S. Bach and Charlie Parker Have In Common?

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Rick Beato has a neat YouTube channel he calls Everything Music. I haven’t had the chance yet to watch more than this one, but it’s a really nice discussion about octave displacement.

In this episode of Everything Music we will explore what Bach and Charlie Parker had in common which was octave displacement. It is a way for you to make your melodies more interesting and more intervallic. It will also give your lines much more interesting shapes.

Virtually Hang Out On Carnegie Hall Stage with Philadelphia Orchestra

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This web site is pretty neat. The Google Cultural Institute set up a couple 360 degree cameras up on the stage of Carnegie Hall during a performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra. You can choose which camera you want to use and also drag around the angle to watch what you want to. Click here to visit.

I ‘ve watched this several times now. I tend to focus mostly on watching the conductor, Maestro Yannick Nézet-Séguin. I think that conducting is much like performing in that it’s necessary to watch and absorb how great conductors express themselves through their gestures and facial expressions. When you’re performing with an ensemble you have to watch the conductor closely, but my mind is always focused on performing rather than studying the conductor. With a video like this you can simply watch.

There are some other performances you can view too, including the Berlin Philharmonic in a rehearsal.

Tuvan Throat Singing and Harmonics

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I’ve been fascinated by harmonic singing for a long time, ever since I first heard that it was possible for singers to produce more than one pitch at a time. There are different musical traditions that make use of harmonic singing, but to me the most interesting is the traditional music of Tuva. While I’m no expert, my curiosity led me to explore the techniques and taught myself the basics.

Mike Ruiz is a former colleague of mine. In addition to being a fine classical pianist, Mike is a physics professor at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, where I used to teach in the music department. I’ve enjoyed picking his brain in the past about acoustics and recently Mike asked me to assist him with some physics education articles and videos he was producing. He was interested in trombone multiphonics, but in the course of our conversation I mentioned the harmonic singing. The resulting article is called Tuvan Throat Singing and Harmonics. The abstract can be read here. Here’s the video abstract.

At the same time that I demonstrated the Tuvan throat singing technique for Mike I also demonstrated trombone multiphonics as well, including some techniques that incorporated the throat constriction used for harmonic singing. When I put together trombone multiphonics with harmonic singing I have been able to come up with some interesting sounds that are similar to what you might hear on a didgeridoo. If and when that paper gets published, I will post about it here too.

In the mean time, here’s an older post on trombone multiphonics.

Singing in the MRI

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Here’s a neat video I came across by Tyley Ross, a voice teacher and vocologist from New York City. He demonstrates four distinct vocal styles while in an fMRI to show how his vocal tract changes for each style.

I am always excited when musicians and pedagogues investigate the science of how we create musical art. It’s easier to do with voice than with brass instruments, since there’s not external instrument that needs to go into the MRI. Because the voice is also an area that medical science specifically studies also, we happen to know more about how sound is produced when singing.

I was somewhat surprised by how open the soft palate was open on the operatic style compared to the rock style. It’s pretty cool to be able to look inside the body and see what’s going on.

The Greatest Baroque Composer You’ve Never Heard Of

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What do you think of the Missa Salisurgensis (Salzburg Mass)? I had never heard of this piece before coming across The Greatest Baroque Composer Never Known.

As a choirmaster in 1870s Salzburg, Innocenz Achleitner often saw sheet music treated in a less-than-reverent manner. It might be scattered across a composer’s desk, crammed into vocalists’ folios, or even marred with personal notes about bowings or breath marks. Never before, however, had he seen it wrapped around vegetables.

Only about 80% of men at the time were literate enough to sign their own name, so it’s possible Achleitner’s greengrocer didn’t recognize what the marks on his packing material meant, especially since each page stretched roughly 80 centimeters tall and resembled something more like newsprint rather than a standard sheet of music. The choirmaster knew better, of course, and quickly convinced his grocer to hand them over.

Read further through the article to learn more about this piece and how musicologists have tried to piece together who the composer of this piece of music really was.