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Bad intonationDate: July 30, 2010
What Vocal-technical reasons are there for bad intonation and recommend remedies for each problem with reference to the tuning ot the scale.
Replies (20): Threaded | Chronological
John Howell on July 30, 2010 9:09pm
That's a rather broad question, Nicol! But I'd say that the primary reason is improper breath support, leading to muscular tension and fatigue, and the secondary reason a lack of ear training or the ability to hear poor intonation.
But for those interested in really fine tuning, perhaps the worst thing is the use of a piano at all times, leading to the use of equal tempered intervals rather than pure intervals.
All the best,
John
on July 30, 2010 11:23pm
1)
Play a note in speaking range on piano, and ask a person to sing that pitch. If the person produces a pitch that is so off, he might have either no / very undeveloped pitch recognition ability, or no / very undeveloped vocal ability (the ability to produce the pitch he imagined). If he have undeveloped ability, he can train them. If he have no ability, it would be cognitive or physical disorder and it is very difficult or impossible to get better.
2)
For normal and healthy people, so-called bad intonation occurs most likely because they don't have ability to fully control their instruments (body). It is same reason, why beginning instrumentalist has shaky notes and wrong notes.
3)
For more trained singers, bad intonationoccurs in rather higher or lower ranges where relaxing, breath support, vowel modification, open-throat, raised-soft pallet, and ability sing passagiowellwould be issues. So, check these.
4)
For advanced singers, it is always beneficial to learn when pure, equal, and Pythagorean tuning are appropriate, and to learn how to adjust to most appropriate pitch considering usual singers tendency (going flat).
In general, our ear prefer Pythagorean scale in melody. In harmony, we prefer pure temperament. Music is dynamic, and advanced musicians must be able to produce fine-tuned pitch.
on July 31, 2010 5:57am
In my experience, poor intonation in a choir has two principle causes:
1. The choir is insecure about the notes. If this is so, they tend to sing tentatively and therefore out of tune. The first step to good intonation is being able to mentate the line accurately. If your brain knows what pitch is supposed to be sounding, your larynx will produce it accurately. Unless No. 2 is operating.
2. There is vocal tension. Any tension in the mechanism prevents the larynx from moving freely into the position it needs to produce the pitch that the singer is mentating. John Howell mentions one common cause of vocal tension: improper breath pressure--either too great or too little will cause issues. Other common sources of tension are keeping the tongue too far back (very common in choral singers, because they can hear their individual voice better if their tongue is back), jaw tension, tension in the neck, or lip tension. Releasing any of these is likely to improve intonation.
Because poor intonation usually arises from vocal tension, it needs to be addressed with care in rehearsal. It's almost easier to make it worse, because you start focusing them on the issue, they become concerned, buckle down to work--and create more tension. I will therefore frequently deal with the underlying cause without mentioning the intonation problem:
"Sopranos, let's sing that line again. When you make the leap from D to the G, remember to get louder on the D [getting louder on the bottom note of a leap often helps the larynx shift more cleanly] and move a little more air through an open space on the G." (Space and vowels are obviously also contributors to good intonation.) If this corrects the problem, I might say something like, "Good! And notice that it was more in tune!" This makes the goal healthy, correct singing, with good intonation as a natural outgrowth of that.
If group intonation is poor--the pitch slides and the whole group ends up flat or sharp--it is often a combination of factors. Usually, there's tension and breath issues involved, but there's probably also an issue of the vowels being mismatched. Choosing good ones with good, balanced overtones and making sure they match from singer to singer and from section to section will do a lot to improve group intonation--not to mention what it does for balance and blend. Group sharping usually results from tension: I find it often happens when I take a piece faster or try to give it more vitality. The singers will try to accomplish this through vocal tension--you'll see everyone tip forward a bit and raise their eyebrows.
One last observation: avoid treating poor intonation as though it's the result of the singers' laziness. They're not going flat because they're people of weak character or because they're not working hard enough. If you say that or even suggest it through your language ("Come on, people, let's WORK at this! Just sing higher!"), all you do is create more tension, which will only make the problem worse. The more you go after it, the more tension, the worse it gets. By now, everyone--including you--is convinced that the choir can't ever sing that passage in tune--so they won't. We've all been in situations where the conductor worked repeatedly on intonation in a particular part of a work, only to have it go more and more out of tune. When you realize that tension is an underlying cause, it becomes clear why getting the whole group frustrated about it isn't likely to improve the situation.
Keep getting your singers to sing with a healthy, balanced tone, and you will find that you have relatively few intonation problems to address. Healthy singing is, by its nature, usually in tune.
David Schildkret
Professor of Choral Music
Arizona State University
on July 31, 2010 10:34pm
If you have not considered that a major force in good intonation is tuning vowels to the sung pitch, you are missing perhaps an easy fix to bad intonation.
Shirlee Emmons (of blessed memory) in her book with Constance Chase, Prescriptions for Choral Excellence, provides a clear and easily taught/learned way of developing the skill of establishing the best resonance via vowel/pitch tuning. One of the tools is the IPA.
I recommend that every chorale director read this remarkable text, which I consider Ms. Emmons' most important book, because more than any other, its prescriptions can help the largest number of singers.
If I can be of help, please feel free to contact me.
Here is a link to Oxford University Press, which gives a good synopsis and several reviews.
Erik Johanson
Tenor
Associate Professor of Music
University of Toledo
ejohans(a)utoledo.edu
on January 11, 2011 4:25am
Emmon's thesis that a lack of good vowel tuning or vocal production in general is the root cause of poor intonation is typical among vocal pedagogues, of which I am one. However, I'm also a string player. Emmon's position is always true if we bend our tolerance for pitch errors far enough. Attention to correct adjustment for vowels at every combination of pitch, dynamic level, and vowel is indeed fundamental to vocal technique, but is secondary to pitch accuracy in my sometimes not quite so humble opinion. Proper vowel adjustment involves attention to some of the very same, subtle acoustic phenomena that provide the feedback musicians intuitively respond to in tuning accurately. Anything that draws closer attention to the sound the voice generates will improve intonation if the singer is at all musical. That's a necessary but insufficient condition.
Very unfortunately, pitch standards in the singing world are notoriously low compared to fine string players in a major orchestra, for example. No string player or teacher of orchestral string instruments will fail to be "shocked", as Emmon puts it, by her thesis. Rightly so, since string players know that an ear for music is not a black and white issue, but a very wide-ranging gray scale, metaphorically speaking. Most of us have been through string classes that demonstrated very palpably the poverty of pitch sensitivity that can exist in music students who are otherwise considered very competent musically. Worse, some singers reach very high places on the world stage, yet either sing off pitch or with such an intense wobble that they cover a range that would utterly obscure what is going on harmonically if they weren't accompanied by an orchestra. You could never perceive from their voices alone the half-step shifts that cue modulations, for example. I can't count the times I've observed this in performances in major opera houses, including the Met.
I believe this false idea among vocal pedagogues and the lack of high standards for pitch accuracy among them is responsible for this musical tragedy, a totally unnecessary tragedy, since it is so easily remedied with the right approach. I've deliberately worked extensively with musically challenged students who initially could not match pitches even remotely at first. Within a relatively short time they could sing a scale more accurately than most experienced choir members with substantial musical backgrounds and vocal training. This means they could sing against an octave drone and a middle fifth a perfectly just scale with pure chord tones as well as dissonances, which also have "sweet spots" that they clearly learn to detect. With the right training, virtually anyone with sufficient motivation to do so can achieve this. Without this training, no amount of good vocal technique is going to cut the mustard, because the basic attention to the subtle cues that define accurate pitch will go unnoticed in these singers. The basic musicality that most talented singers possess must be developed and refined just as it is with fine string players or any other fine musician.
The failure to recognize the immense, objective acoustic value that precise intonation lends to a beautiful blend and superb choral sonority is responsible for this oversight among choral directors and voice teachers, in my opinion, after a lifetime of observation from the perspective of an instrumentalist, vocalist, voice teacher, and choral director. This aesthetic value is virtually independent of the listeners' ability to judge intonation. It is an objective acoustic and psychoacoustic phenomenon. Everything, including common harmonics and combinatorial products, align perfectly with precise intonation. I use just intervals in my training because it develops the first principles in the singer on the basis of which all historical temperaments have evolved. Once they have solidly established this reliable internal standard based on the perception of pure, untempered intervals in harmonic relationship, when they sing with tempered instruments they are not going to violate unisons to tune a pure third. They will intuitively adjust to whatever the temperament requires. If the thirds are not present in the instrumental parts, they will sing them pure and they will sound wonderful. When singing a cappella, they will sound better than any temperament.
Very importantly, any listener perceptive enough with respect to intonation to notice knows the very best string quartets in the world generally do NOT demonstrate tempered intervals in their harmonic relationships to each other. They tend to structure very just, purely tuned harmonies. Strings grate when they play equal-tempered thirds together without other kinds of instruments to obscure this. So they naturally tune them more purely just as the very best choirs do when singing a cappella. They do this even with Schubert, etc., music loaded with enharmonic modulations that assume equal temperament. How? Their de facto standard for intonation, whether consciously or not, is an adaptive just intonation that uses an equal tempered template for the harmonic roots and tunes the vertical harmonic structures purely. This takes extremely perceptive and close attention to pitch as a habitual mindset that is so ingrained in these musicians that it has become second nature. So they are free attend to all other musical parameters that demand their attention. If it weren't important, why would this happen and why would this be a striking feature of the very best as opposed to the second rate?
I believe most choral directors badly need to wake up to this simple truth. Even the relatively small improvement needed in already good choirs contributes enormously to the overall quality of blend and sonority and is very frequently the major obstacle between mediocrity and superb performance quality. This is exactly why so many famous directors of world class choral ensembles almost invariably place substantial emphasis on pitch training during their choral warm-ups, with the late Robert Shaw as a prime example. On the other hand, many are the directors of vastly inferior choirs who fail to perceive any need whatsoever for such training.
The fundamental factor underlying good intonation is an intense love of a precise harmonic fit and a strong distaste for anything less. Some have this naturally from an early age. This provides a strong incentive to sing or play on pitch and further refine the ability to do so right from the outset. Others find no aesthetic difference at all, and so have no internal incentive to sing in tune or even sing the right note. Both of these extremes are powerfully self-reinforcing situations.
Fortunately, the ones at the negative end of this spectrum are relatively rare. Most are somewhere between and need training to develop a sufficiently strong, genuine, fully internalized aesthetic incentive to sing or play with highly accurate intonation. Even more fortunately, the perceptual apparatus for achieving superb intonation is already built into the human nervous system and brain. With the exception of extreme and very rare neurological deficiencies, this is virtually true universally.
The human brain is exquisitely tuned to hear harmonic overtones along with their fundamental as individual parts of a single gestalt, a holistic perception we conceive quite naturally and simply as the tone quality of a single source among the various instruments, the timbre that lets us distinguish between a violin and a clarinet. If there is a sound that comes from a separate source that closely duplicates a harmonic overtone, but is the slightest bit different, the human ear automatically and spontaneously recognizes it as a second source even if all other audible parameters of location, etc. are identical, even when both sounds emanate from a single speaker in a monaural recording, for example. This innate ability clearly establishes from a scientific point of view a potential with well conceived training in virtually anyone to resurrect this from its burial in unconscious reflexive interpretation and employ it consciously in the production of music with superbly accurate intonation.
What we put our attention on naturally flourishes and what we ignore just as naturally wilts and dies. The single most important reason for lack of precise intonation is a simple lack of adequate attention to the specific quality of sound we perceive as pitch. The value of the pitch precision required for genuinely high quality musical performance consequently remains unappreciated in this case. It is extremely important for musicians to appreciate the following, very simple musical truth. The aesthetic value of precise intonation in harmonic music is relatively independent of the ability of the listeners in an audience to perceive the accuracy of intonation or its lack in a performance. Its value lies in the objective acoustic and psychoacoustic phenomena that result from the coherent relationships intrinsic to precisely tuned harmony. Accurate intonation is fundamentally an objective coherence phenomenon that allows all the components of sounds from multiple sources to mutually reinforce and form the harmonic unity so essential to a truly lovely blend. To put the money where my mouth is, here is a link that will take you to a streaming audio demonstration of the results of the kind of training discussed here:
Please note the purity of harmonic structure and the stability of the tonality after over two minutes of a cappella singing. To notice this latter point, please go back to the beginning to witness how precise the ending tonality is aligned with the beginning.
on January 11, 2011 5:38pm
Robert et al.
While I don't agree that poor intonation is as huge a problem as presented here, I do have one suggestion. Have all of your singers practice fairly simple barbershop singing IN QUARTETS, not in chorus, and sensitize them to listen for the "ring" of chords that indicates matched overtones and difference tones without actually having to learn about them and think about them.
But beware, the results might not match your definition of "in tune" if your definition is to remain absolutely stable with reference to some reference pitch. Really good barbershop quartets do tend to drift a little, since the singers are CONSTANTLY making microtonal adjustments to their intervals to make the chords "ring," and over time that can result in a little bit of inadvertent modulation.
Robert Shaw's warmups, dividing halfsteps into smaller and smaller intervals, were wonderful ear training, and would also be well worth using. No singer can make those microtonal adjustments if they have never been made aware of them, or experienced making them.
All the best,
John
on January 12, 2011 3:46am
Hi, John Howell. How huge a problem intonation is depends on how strongly you react to poor intonation and how bad it has to get before it undermines your aesthetic response to the music. One of the central tenets of my teaching is that to create beautiful music you have to love what's coming out of your instrument, whether voice or otherwise. You have to tenderly caress and carefully nurture every note and react deeply to the product of your love as a mother to her child.
All you have to do is watch Itzhak Perlman or Yo Yo Ma to see this in practice, written clearly all over their faces. It is what allows the intense natural focus that music at such an elevated level requires. Without this natural internal incentive to produce ethereally beautiful music the focus cannot be sustained for the length of most musical performance. Will power alone flags quickly. It has little stamina, and even if it had plenty, it would produce relatively soulless results.
No one is perfect. None of us are a crystal controlled watch that is accurate to within a second a year or whatever. Just as a driver who habitually maintains position right in the middle of the lane reacts earlier to being off center than less skilled drivers who tend to wander back and forth more, developing pitch accuracy involves an alarm going off with smaller and smaller moves off pitch. Ideally, this process never stops. It just gets finer and finer.
Now add to this the natural human tendency to feel that anything too subtle for US PERSONALLY to notice is too small to be very important. Let's also recognize that this remains true even for people with miserably inadequate pitch perception for any reasonably musical purpose. (Believe me, I've done enough choir directing in houses of worship that insist on unauditioned choirs to know this beyond any shadow of a doubt!) However, those who demand of themselves highly precise tuning naturally develop a strong aversion to being even slightly off pitch. This early alarm and the pleasure we take in nailing pitches precisely, the love of the aesthetically superior sonority you call "ring", is what provides the internal incentive and the natural habitual focus required for pitch precision.
Another key element in my training approach is what I call melodic pitch memory precision. This means remembering accurate pitch relations within pitch sequences such as a scale with such precision that we can nail pitches accurately without searching for the ring in the harmony. This is never as accurate as the ear's ability to detect the ring, which I call harmonic sensitivity, the ability to recognize that narrow little sweet spot that is a precise fit within a harmonic structure. However, this ability perpetually informs sequential pitch memory to refine its accuracy over time. For the same reasons we need to temper fixed-pitch instruments such as keyboards, we need to fudge sequentially to compensate the fine discrepancies that just intervals introduce. The good news is that the slight adjustments we need to make in sequentially sounded intervals to do this are much less noticeable than they are in either pitch errors or tempered intervals sounding simultaneously in harmonic structures.
Regarding drift, pure intervals will cause it unless there is also a strong and precise sense of a longer term pitch reference. This is simply an extension in time of sequential pitch memory precision. When this is well developed it lends tonal stability to the work. Common practice music virtually always leaves and returns to a pitch center. If this drifts, to anyone with a precise, longer term pitch sense it damages the overarching tonality of the piece as a whole. I do NOT have absolute pitch. (But I know people who do who do NOT have even good, let alone precise intonation. I find essentially zero correlation between these aspects of musicality.) I'm simply referring to the ability to notice when overall pitch is drifting. People with weak pitch perception and a short pitch memory can let a piece drift (generally downward) by a full semitone in just a phrase or two and fail to notice it. This is very unmusical to anyone with a strong sense of musicality that is not confined exclusively to expressive qualities, but includes a strong sense of overarching tonality, of architectonic structure.
I already mentioned in the post to which you refer that the de facto standard in the finest world class string quartets is an adaptive just intonation based on an equal tempered template for the harmonic roots with pure tuning of the harmonic structures. I use this approach in my training. It's very practical given an electronic keyboard in equal temperament with the thirds filled in by the singers. The fifths and fourths are only two cents from just, and so virtually pure for practical purpose in choral training. Choir members don't have to understand very much of this at all to learn how to do it. It is a matter of truly effective warm-up routines specifically aimed at developing it. The process can be purely intuitive on the part of the choir members while producing astoundingly superior results.
Please remember my earlier comparison of intonation standards in fine string ensembles with those of typical professional choirs. They are hugely disparate. Why? It doesn't have to be. In this regard, please recall also my statement that the potential for aesthetic improvement resulting from the relatively small tweaking needed in already very good choirs is enormous. Why? Because even if you don't miss or detect at all the minor lack of precision in tuning, the OBJECTIVE ACOUSTIC RESULT is very obvious. If you were to put the same choir side by side with itself before and after such an improvement, ANY but the most musically insensitive will notice the vastly more beautiful choral blend and astoundingly more gorgeous choral sonority. Unfortunately, most choral directors I've run across (quite a few in my 66 years) have no clue about this.
First, when they hear such marvelous intonation, they usually attribute the resulting sonority to anything but pitch precision. They utterly fail to recognize the source of their aesthetic response. They will bear this out by vociferously arguing that since the audience can't hear the difference in intonation, why bother? This tells us in no uncertain terms that THEY don't hear the difference in intonation and so remain clueless concerning the value of its contribution to the gorgeous sonority they DO hear, just as the audiences for THEIR performances would if they were to heed a word to the wise, train themselves first, then train their choirs. Sadly, I've witnessed deafness to this simple reality at the highest levels of musical academia. Maybe that's why they're academics. I DON'T find the same attitude AT ALL in orchestral string professionals who are sometimes obligated to accompany choirs and famous singers who don't sing on pitch.
Here's another very key point. No audience of musical performance needs to understand scale structure or harmonic theory to appreciate the beauty of a fine musical performance. They grasp the musical meaning of the performers' communication without necessarily any technical understanding at all of what is actually involved. Is this also true of the performers? I don't think so. For precisely this reason, WE need to understand the immense value-added contribution of highly precise intonation and how to achieve it in performance. We don't have to care one whit whether the audience notices that intonation has anything to do with it or not. But we can rest assured that even if they would not have noticed its lack if the precision in intonation had been less, they will absolutely notice how wonderful it SOUNDS when it's there!!!
Footnote: If your reference to pitch stability had anything to do with a reaction to the pitch stability of my choir at the link I provided in my last post, that was a side issue added to demonstrate the possibility for pure harmony without drift. The main issue is the purely tuned harmony in high renaissance music that is highly contrapuntal and virtually purely triadic in its essential harmonic underpinnings. Did you even notice how pure the harmonies were? I notice, however, that the sopranos sound very excited and go somewhat sharp in the opening phrase, which I mentioned earlier as a possibility given one of various possible causal factors, including overexcitement and crescendos, both of which I detect in this sharping.
However, the rest of the piece exhibits extremely precise intonation even on relatively fast scale passages. When the attention to pitch is strongly stabilized, these factors will not pull you off the road. You notice you're not in the center of the lane way before you start hearing gravel on the shoulder under your tires. (This choir had some turnover that year and some members were not beneficiaries of very much training yet.) That is what all who point to factors such as vocal production and vowel adjustment as a root cause and cure are missing. These factors pull you off only if you're not noticing pitch. Tuning is not an explicit focus for such singers. It's far too dependent on a subconscious, intuitive response and so any little factor such as a simple crescendo can pull them away from the center of their lane. String players can NEVER afford to quit paying explicit attention to pitch. Sure, it becomes totally reflexive after a while, just like driving a car does, but just because it has become second nature doesn't mean it has become vague and intuitive and we have to run off the road whenever it curves or when we converse with a passenger. Pitch training is really about nothing more than the growing clarity and explicit awareness of our musical imagination with regard to pitch.
on January 13, 2011 6:18pm
Brief addendum to 'the choir link information previously posted and reposted for you convenience here:
Most upon hearing this choir get the impression that it is significantly larger then the 17 singers actually there. I have observed over the years that part of what cues us to larger choirs is that intonation problems tend to average out so that the overall choral intonation sounds subjectively better. Small choirs are the most difficult to help achieve purity of intonation, since every voice weighs heavily in the overall results. As in sports, it only takes one player to lose the game for the whole team.
On the other hand, with 150 singers one person can be off and no one will notice. When there are clean unisons within each part in a small choir and they also align harmonically to produce very pure intonation it sounds like a much larger choir to most people. This is simply a conditioned perception from having heard so many very typical small choirs with individual voices failing to blend well harmonically in contrast with larger choirs where individual errors wash out statistically in the high number of singers. A good test of a director's training ability is to get in front of a small choir of average auditioned church choir members and train them to sound like this within a year or two.
on September 9, 2010 7:32am
Are you asking about tuning with individual singers or a choir? I've worked with many young singers on improving their pitch. Many people just haven't really worked with the whole mind to ear to voice connection because they haven't ever REALLY listened to their singing with a critical ear for pitch. Also, matching to an instrument is much harder than matching a voice. One thing that I've found helpful for helping people improve their pitch is to work with a visual tuner such as Vocal Lab from Rustykat.com http://www.rustykat.com/store/index.html. This shows people on a horizontal plane where there pitch is in relationship to the actual pitch. Many people are actually surprised to see that what they thought was in tune singing really isn't.
With reguard to scales, I've found that many people tend to go flat on descending lines because their half steps on the fourth and seventh scale degrees are too large which causes them to go flat. Many times, a descending vocal line can be fixed by just focusing on taking smaller steps from Sol to Fa and Do to Ti.
Hope this is helpful!
Amy Gould
Soprano
on January 13, 2011 7:06pm
"Many people just haven't really worked with the whole mind to ear to voice connection because they haven't ever REALLY listened to their singing with a critical ear for pitch."
Amy Gould, you have it nailed! It's so refreshing to hear this from another voice teacher. So many think it's strictly a matter of vocal production, especially the aspect of vowel adjustment. I have had a number of students who would automatically go flat from a perfectly beautiful pitch whenever they opened up to an Ah (Italian a) from a closed vowel (Italian u or i). There was absolutely NOTHING wrong with their vowel adjustments. They simply were confusing timbre with pitch. Even with what we perceive as a consistent underlying timbre, technically vowel change is actually a change in timbre as well, since the overtone structure is what cues us to what vowel it is.
This is why matching pitch with an instrument other than a human voice is difficult for most at first. This is just a very naive stage of musical perception. Part of becoming a musician is the ability to easily differentiate the various parameters of the sounds we produce. I work on the vowel/pitch change problem by having the student match a straight keyboard pitch so it's beatless on ooh (Italian u) and SLOWLY open through that whole side of the vowel triangle to an ah (Italian a) while consciously maintaining the match beatless. The very fact that so few directors and voice teachers recognize these things is that they haven't paid much attention to them themselves. Let the readers judge for themselves the truth of this from their own history.
on May 25, 2011 9:20am
Hello Robert,
I agree that the problem with poor intonation is that "Many people just haven't really worked with the whole mind to ear to voice connection because they haven't ever REALLY listened to their singing with a critical ear for pitch." Today, the musical sound that most people are exposed to (Country, Popular and Rock Music) is always out of tune. In fact these musical styles ignore vocal production and intonation and focus on dissonance, and sliding pitches. It is no wonder that singers are pitch challenged today since their earliest musical training is what they hear on the radio and TV. If you haven't learned to perceive accurate pitch and "hear" pitch relationships in your mind, you will be unable to sing on pitch, and in tune. Accurate pitch production requires the skill (vocal muscle memory) of reproducing sound that you have first "thought." Since most singers haven't learned to "think" sound and use what I call "Pitch Imaging", they can't expect to be able to move their voice to sing in tune with the rest of the choir. Most singers are followers and depend on what they hear around them instead of what they "see" and "hear" in their minds. I believe this stems from the practice of teaching young singers to sing by rote instead of teaching them to read and respond to music notation. A strong music reader will use the notation as a memory Que to trigger vocal muscle memory that will aid in accurate pitch production. Since a child's "musical ear" is trained to respond to the sounds around him (like learning to speak), if the sounds they are exposed to are out of tune, then the child will tend to be pitch challenged. Many children become "non-singers" simply because they don't develop an oral point of reference. They don't learn to compare pitch because matching pitch with your voice by listening to a pitch model is an abstract activity. All musicians have to be taught that tones are high or low. Even piano students have to be taught that the keys on the right end of the piano are "high" and those on the left end are "low". Children don't just understand pitch intuitively. They have to be taught just like you have to teach color variations. I think it is much easier to make a visual comparison of color than an oral comparison of sound because it is much easier to "see" the color in your memory than to "hear" pitch in your mind. Pitch is relative and infinitely variable making an oral point of reference an abstraction. For the "non-singer", learning to match pitch is like learning to shoot hoops in the dark. You have to listen for the swish to know if you are shooting the ball in the right direction. It is for this reason that I developed MusAPP, a software product that uses musical, audio/visual biofeedback to teach singers to visualize or "see" pitch relationships. With the aid of the computer, we can listen to the singer via a microphone and instantly represent his pitch visually. We use music notation and a pitch pointer to show the singer how close he is to the target pitch (within a few cents). Through repetition, the student will develop musical skill (vocal muscle memory) and learn how it feels to sing on pitch and in tune. MusAPP is still under development, but you can learn more about our project at www.MusAPP.com. If you would like to help test MusAPP, you may contact me through the my website and I will add you to the Beta Test list. Clarence Prudhoe MusAPP.com
on May 27, 2011 12:55pm
Clarence et al. I find it interesting that a thread that started almost a year ago and was revived for a while 5 months ago still seems to be generating posts.
However, I have to question your statement that, "the musical sound that most people are exposed to (Country, Popular and Rock Music) is always out of tune. In fact these musical styles ignore vocal production and intonation and focus on dissonance, and sliding pitches." That is so patently untrue and prejudiced that it cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged. The word "always" means always, and even a single exception disproves your thesis.
Many of us work daily with amateur and untrained singers, and while they MIGHT be able to imitate the pop singers you seem to hate, they certainly do NOT do so on a regular basis.
But I also note that you are promoting a product on ChoralNet, and that the moderators have allowed you to do so. Fair enough. But while your rhetoric may make good advertising copy, it won't endear you to professionals who might be interested in your product. Anything good in what you wish to offer is brought into question by your rhetoric. You are putting down particular vocal STYLES, which is your privilege, but you cannot logically reason from that premise to your conclusions.
All the best,
John
on September 9, 2010 12:42pm
Hi, Nicol.
The ear is most likely the challenge.
Remind that the voice is like a siren in this regard: pitches cannot be fixed as in a valved instrument.
They can change minutely or maximally with no effort. We are entirely reliant on the ear for tuning.
The "siren" has no glitches and so the voice. (Some would drag into 'registers") Don't go there, please!
It may seem silly, but gliding up and down can help to maintain flexibility.
You do not specify whether you are talking about individuals or a choir.
INDIVIDUAL - Have the singer glide from a higher and a lower pitch than the one you play , preferably on a
keyboard where the sound is continuous. have the subject glide until matching the pitch. Once they can come
close to duplicating the pitch, move more quickly from one pitch to another. Awareness of the scales is helpful
as soon aspossible. Eventually, heve the singer sing short notes so that there is not time to correct.
Some are tone deaf, we must accept.
GROUP - Have them do the glide thing, as well.
Have them sing a scale, Db for instance and try to sharp little by little so as to arrive on D natural.
Do the reverse. Descending, from D arrive at D#. I suggest that you not allow straight singing, it is too fixed and inflexible.
You need to keep the "siren" loose so that the ear can send the signal with success.
Sometimes improvement may be achieved by raising the key a half or whole step of a given composition.
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EdwardPalmerMusic.com
on January 11, 2011 12:24am
I have a master's in choral directing and decades of experience in training choirs for highly accurate intonation. The choral training workshop that I've delivered professionally for a number of years emphasizes this aspect of choral performance. The following is from a handout from this workshop that summarizes what this experience has indicated with regard to sources of intonation problems. I only request that you respect the copyright by crediting its source if you distribute this to your choir or share it with other music professionals.
Important Note: In otherwise well-trained choral ensembles, the last remaining barrier separating them from true excellence in performance is virtually always intonation. This is true of all but the rarest choirs, and remains true even among most professional ensembles, including many very famous ones. Of the notable exceptions, most by far are in Europe. This situation is completely unnecessary, since it is relatively easy, given the right tools, to train choirs to an intonation standard that is virtually on a par with that of fine professional string ensembles. It is possible to accomplish this even in all-volunteer, amateur organizations that include non-readers with little or no choral experience. The solution lies not in attacking these problems piecemeal on an ad hoc basis, but in fundamental intonation training for singers’ ears so they can detect these problems for themselves early enough to respond independently to maintain pitch stability. This empowers singers to correct themselves spontaneously. Accomplishing this, however, requires a personal, sure-footed judgment of fine intonation and appreciation of its extreme value in contributing to a superb blend and beautiful choral sonority as well as a deep, clear understanding of the factors that underly the global skill, its subcomponents, and how they interact.
on January 15, 2011 11:06am
I reduced several sources on the topic to this brief list of reasons. This is my quick reference for consideration in proactive planning to build good intonation and in reactive response as pitch problems occur in the rehearsal.
❏ Poor tone production
❏ Vowel color is not uniform
❏ Lack of physical involvement
• Sluggish or inactive pace
• Fatigue or boredom
❏ Acoustics of room
❏ Piece is too high
❏ Faulty concept of interval or key
• Scooping or smearing a note
• 1/2 step vs. whole step unclear
• Under- or over-shot interval
on January 15, 2011 11:09am
NOTE: I put my solutions to this list in my book Making More Sense of How to Sing (Meredith Music, 2009). Solutions in the book address each of these reasons.
on January 22, 2011 5:44am
practice make perfect... dont stop to believe that you can do it...
dont stop to practice and makesure yourself that you can sing...
and the first think is, find a good voice teacher...
on May 26, 2011 5:04pm
I agree Amy. I work with non-audition choirs, so I have encountered many pitch problems. It is never impossible to teach a person to sing on pitch if you work with them one on one or in small groups. With individual or small group work, all of the students I have coached eventually do sing on pitch. These students usually don't understand how to carefully listen to themselves (or those around them). They also need breath support and proper vocal technique training, which includes pure vowels. Having the ensemble echo you while cupping their ears during warmups at each rehearsal helps as well as walking throughout the group and whispering to those who need to sing a little higher or lower. This does not intimidate singers who feel they are in a safe rehearsal environment. Happy summer!
on May 27, 2011 7:38am
Hi, Nicol.
To this long list of well-explained causes of poor intonation, I would also add improper registration. Many singers (particularly inexperienced ones), are reluctant to change registers because of the change in tone quality that they hear inside their head. (Many beginning singers [particularly altos and basses] find the sound of their head voice unpleasant at first, and so they avoid it. So they tend to push their chest registers higher than they should, and this tends to make them sing a little flat.) If you're hearing flatting in your choir, listen carefully to the tone and ask yourself if it is too "chesty," heavy or lacking in focus. If it is, adding more "head quality" and/or focus to the sound should help the intonation.
Good luck.
Chuck Livesay
on May 27, 2011 4:24pm
Only one reason I know of, the majority of the choir is not producing a technically correct singing sound. Therefore, they are muffling their sound and cannot hear the pitch accurately.
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