Day 8: Vocal and Instrument Improvisation with Chrissy WolpertToday we had a class of vocal & instrument improvisation with a local composer/musician, also a leader of the women’s choir group Assembly of Light Choir, Chrissy Wolpert. Chrissy started the class with voice warm up. “As loud as possible”
Then we sang a round: “Ah Poor Bird”
After the warm up, Chrissy took us into the Media Lab where she set up microphones with effect pedals. Each of us got a microphone, and experimented with vocals (singing, talking, whispering, making funny and unrecognizable sounds) with different effect pedals such as distortion, octave, reverb, echo. We also tried to sing “Ah Poor Bird” again through the pedals.
Then Chrissy introduced us to a loop pedal. Everyone separately recorded 3 seconds of vocals and ended up with layers of vocal loop recording. We did this a couple of times – one of them turned out to be all speaking words (which sounded like a poetry reading battle), and another one turned out to be a tower of complex harmonies. After that, we were introduced to contact microphones. We each got one homemade contact microphone, which we first taped to our throats and then taped to our instruments. Contact microphones are much more sensitive than regular microphones because they directly attach to the sound-making object and delicately pick up all the vibrations made.
What a class! Possibilities of finding different ways of sound making, even on the same instrument, seems to be limitless. Our experiment with sounds and music making never ends. Big big thanks to Chrissy!
Listen to some samples of what we made here: [audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/1_9_12-634-PM-Voice-Memo.mp3|titles=1] |
