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“Making Bad Singers Sound Good” at the Touch of a Button

It used to be that people in this country sang all the time. Around pianos. On porches. In factories and cotton fields. But with the advent of recorded sound and the growing professionalization of music-making in the late 19th and 20th centuries, people largely moved away from singing themselves to passively listening to others with more expertise — and sex appeal — do it.
“Itâ€™s not surprising that this has happened,” says Prerna Gupta, the chief product officer at Smule, a company that develops music-making apps for mobile devices, and the guest on this week’s edition of VoiceBox. “If you can listen to all this amazing music sung by stars, itâ€™s easier than creating it yourself especially if youâ€™re not particularly talented at it. You get accustomed to hearing professionals and more embarrassed about your own amateur abilities.”

In my VoiceBox interview with Prerna, we discuss how the nascent landscape of vocal music apps is helping people rediscover a primordial desire to use their voices but with a 21st century slant. You don’t need to be able to sing well or even at all to get something out of the experience.

The LaDiDa app, for instance, allows users to sing in as off-key a fashion as they like into their device, and at the touch of a button, the app will convert the raw vocal into a produced song complete with harmonies and instrumental backing.”LaDiDa makes bad singers sound good,” Prerna likes to say. (Even bad singers have to have a sense of timing to use LaDiDa, however. If you can’t maintain the selected tempo while voicing your song, the backing is all out of joint with the singing in the final product, as I discovered when I tried the app myself and didn’t see the countdown icons flashing on the iPhone screen signifying the tempo I was supposed to sing at.)

Here’s a fun YouTube clip showing the app in action.

Another interesting app is Songify, which takes any spoken text and converts it into sung music. Clever. You click a button on your iPhone interface, say some words into it, and when you click another button, your speech becomes a song, again with a choice of backing instrumental. One limitation of this technology, though brilliant, is that it’s not advanced enough to maintain the quality of the user’s voice. The output sounds quite tinny and processed.

Here’s a clip showing the technology in action.

A third app that I really like is Sing! which allows users to invite other users to join in singing a song as an ensemble. It’s a sort of a remote group karaoke experience. Prerna tells me about how Sing! was quite movingly used in 2011 by someone who wanted to show solidarity for people’s suffering in the aftermath of the tsunami and earthquake in Japan. That user put out a call on Sing! asking people to join her in singing Bill Withers’ “Lean On Me.” More than a thousand people answered her call. Powerful stuff.

Here’s a clip from YouTube showing how two people living on opposite sides of the world can use the Sing! app to sing together.

I could go on and on. There are so many interesting apps out there for voice. Though I’ve long been a fan of apps like Soundhound and iPitchPipe, talking with Prerna has really broadened my horizons.

Of course, there’s a long way to go with the technology, especially in terms of extending the range of harmonic, musical genre and instrumental options for the accompaniments, and retaining the unique individual quality of a user’s voice. There’s also the question of if and how these apps can be of use to people who already sing and do it well. How can apps encourage and reward virtuosity?

But in my world, any resource that encourages people to sing — and especially sing together — is a good thing.

To find out more about the VoiceBox program about mobile vocal music apps, which launches on Friday 25 January 2013, click here.

A True Dance Community

In 2005, the San Francisco-based professional contemporary dance company ODC merged with Rhythm and Motion, an organization which offers dance classes to members of the Bay Area community.

I originally presumed that the merger was one made mostly out of economic necessity. More recently, now that the organization has been operating under this unified guise for several years, I’ve come to see it as being truly special.

While there are many professional dance companies around that offer classes, there are few that manage to integrate the professional and community aspects so thoroughly and comprehensively, without sacrificing artistic quality or a sense of inclusivity.

I was thinking about this only yesterday when I was attending a class at ODC, whose base is in the Mission district of San Francisco. The class, entitled “Fusion Rhythms,” is one of the most popular on offer at ODC. I’ve been taking it for more than a decade, on and off. You can take this class every day of the week and on most days, several fusion classes are on offer.

As someone who loves to dance but hasn’t sustained a real practice in any single form since I took ballet as a little girl, I love the unintimidating vibe of ODC’s Fusion Rhythms classes. I’ve taken salsa, ballet and modern rhythms classes at the institution too and found each class to have its own character while still feeling welcoming. I don’t think I would feel as comfortable trying to take a class at, say, the Lines Ballet in San Francisco, another organization in town which marries a professional company with a learning institution. As far as I can tell, Lines caters to “serious dancers.”

The fusion rhythms class is more or less a dance workout but with choreography that blends many different dance styles (such as hip-hop, salsa, disco, Scottish country dancing and classical ballet) that can easily be adapted to suit the beginner or the seasoned pro. The emphasis is on having fun and breaking a sweat. The class attracts all kinds of people, including ODC company dancers and other professionals.

Beyond this class, the sheer range of educational dance opportunities on offer at ODC Â is extraordinary. You can learn hula, tap, West African Guinean, modern jazz, classical ballet and belly dance to name just a few programs on offer. The porosity between the lives of the professionals who come in and out to brush up on skills, teach classes, hold auditions and participate in performances at the ODC Theatre across the street from the school, and the students of all ages and backgrounds, testifies to the strength of ODC as an institution.

A Hybrid Peer Gynt

The San Francisco Symphony’s attempts at multimedia musical spectacles have generally been quite patchy in the past. The heavy-handed take last year on Messiaen’s Le Martyr de Saint Sebastien is a case in point.

Constructed in the 1980s, Davies Symphony Hall was built before technologies like digital video projection expanded the possibilities of what orchestras could do in their auditoriums.

But with the orchestra’s ambitious latest production of Peer Gynt all the elements, from music to acting to visuals, come together organically.

The San Francisco Symphony’s vision weaves together music inspired by Ibsen’s play from three composers — Edvard Grieg, Robin Holloway and Alfred Schnittke. The styles in which these composers write is entirely different. Grieg’s score is of course the one that everyone knows. The melodic lines are so beautiful and the orchestra gave a characterful performance throughout, albeit perhaps overdoing the rubato a touch in the iconic “Morning Mood” movement.

The production devotes the most airtime to Grieg, but Schnittke’s more modernistic lines and Holloway’s ethereal soundscapes added fresh material to the mix that made the work come alive in a new way.

The production tells the Peer Gynt story through scenes from Ibsen enacted by a cast headed by a lithe and pleasingly disheveled Ben Huber in the title role. Even the San Francisco Symphony Chorus gets to act in this production — serving as a sort of omnipresent jury watching over and at times physically reacting to the action downstage from their view in the chorus seating above the orchestra.

The visuals for this production are also eloquent. Above the orchestra hangs a mesh-like form resembling a patch of moving fog or cloud. Video designer Adam Larsen, director/production designer James Darrah and lighting designer Cameron Jaye Mock set a mood for each scene that’s subtle and doesn’t try to manipulate the audience’s emotions.

The first half of the program feels more focused than the second overall — the second half loses some of its momentum during a very long and not extremely evocative piece of music about Peer’s sea voyage composed by Holloway. But the ensemble manages to sustain a dreamlike, narrative quality throughout which is quite spellbinding.

Peer Gynt plays through this weekend at Davies Symphony Hall.

Don’t fancy running for charity? Sing for it!

Long before Kickstarter and other social media-based crowd source funding platforms became the backbone of fundraising endeavors in the western world there were fun runs and charity cycling events.

In this tried and true funding model, which continues to raise millions for all kinds of worthy causes today, people support charities they believe in by persuading their networks of friends, family members, colleagues and other acquaintances to sponsor their bids to run a marathon / cycle a hundred miles / complete a triathlon etc etc.

Now, a group of entrepreneurial San Francisco vocal music nuts has set up a new initiative which takes the charity sports event model and applies it to choral singing.

Sing for America, which is based in San Francisco, is advertised as “a new idea for those who would rather not walk, run, bike, or otherwise exercise for their charity!”

Of course, we all know that singing is a pretty athletic activity. Plus, it’s not like other genuinely non-athletic pastimes, like mustache growing, haven’t spawned their own charitable donation schemes. (Check out the Movember movement in this regard.) Nevertheless, the concept is an interesting one.

Sing for America aims toÂ provideÂ online fundraising toolsÂ to individuals and modest sized arts organizations to raise money for a charity of their choice by rehearsing for and singing in a concert.

In the latest iteration of the project, singers are being asked to trainÂ once a week every week forÂ a choral concert that’s happening in this instance in April. The participants, who are expected to be competent if not professional vocalists, sign up for a Sing for America personal web page in order to solicit funds for a charity of their choice. They are expected to use social networking and email to reach out to their friends and acquaintances.

According to vocalist Erich Wolf Stratmann, who heads up the Sing for America Foundation, the concert that the organization staged last year (its first ever) raised a few thousand dollars in funds for 47 different non-profit causes.

Organizations that received funding in the first round include 42nd Street Moon, a producer of vintage musical theatre works in the Bay Area, and the American Heart Association. Or, to quote a more specific example provided by Stratmann, a representative from American Bach Soloists enlisted a couple of singers to join in the choir and walked away with a $1000 return for the Bay Area-based early music organization.

Getting the concept off the ground has not been easy. Recruiting singers is a challenge. After all, to have a decent choir you need to have a critical mass of people; whereas it doesn’t really matter how many people might train to run a marathon or grow a mustache as these are essentially solo endeavors. Last year’s Sing for America chorus has more than 60 vocalists in it.

Also, for people who like to sing and do it regularly, “training” to sing in a choral concert isn’t exactly a Herculean endeavor by and large, unless the music is extremely difficult. And it doesn’t seem at least from this piece of footage from last year’s concert that this is the case. Training to run a marathon on the other hand is a big stretch for many people, which is what makes it so appealing to supporters. Growing a mustache for charity isn’t that hard, but it’s the comedy value that brings in the bucks. There’s typically not that much comedy in a choral concert, alas.

And then there’s the issue of obtaining buy-in from the local singing community.Â “Our biggest obstacles are the “gatekeepers” of various church and specialty choirs/choruses,” wrote Stratmann to me in an email. “They have their own one-on-one fundraisers and do not recognize this as a means for their choristers to reach out on the internet to more than just ticket buyers for their concertsâ€¦..a supplemental and complimentary vehicle.”

I’ll be curious to see how things unfold for Sing for America. To sign up, click here.

Reactions to Haneke’s Amour

The staff at The Clay movie theatre in San Francisco say that people are walking out of Michael Haneke’s critically acclaimed and Oscar nominated film, Amour, in droves.

Amour is not a horror movie, and yet it’s perhaps tougher to watch than any slasher flick because it cuts so close to the bone. It’s impossible to watch this story about a educated, elderly French couple’s journey towards the end of life complete with strokes, rude nurses and adult diapers without thinking, “this is going to happen to me or to someone very close to me someday.” Not “this could happen,” but, “this, very likely,Â will happen.”

My friend Sarah who attended the film with me last night cried silently throughout. She wouldn’t accept a ride home. She needed the cold night air and a walk. I understood and would have enjoyed a stroll myself to decompress after Haneke’s relentlessly glum portrayal of the inevitable process of human putrefaction. It’s two hours of slowly and painfully watching two people shuffle off this mortal coil.

Strangely though, my reaction was quite different to Sarah’s. I left the theatre feeling discombobulated but not depressed. For one thing, the scenario is unavoidable. So I found Haneke’s movie to be rather life-affirming. It made me tell myself to make the most of each day. For another, the troubles facing the couple Georges and Anne in the movie and their daughter Eva (sensitively portrayed by the formidable actors Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva and Isabelle Huppert respectively) make the challenges I face each day in my life seem utterly trivial. In other words, the film provides an excellent source of perspective on one’s own existence.

One last point of reflection about this movie, which I still can’t decide if I liked or not: It reminds me of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame , only with less subtlety. The wheelchair-bound Anne and her stiff-legged but mobile husband Georges could be reincarnations of Hamm and Clov, only with a great deal more affection between them. Haneke’s characters share the interdependence of Beckett’s. Plus the bleakness of their lives is edged with as much sweetness as it is with sleep.

Sands on Pinter

The actor Julian Sands began performingÂ A Celebration of Harold Pinter, aÂ tribute to the famous British playwright, actor and screenwriter, in August 2011 Â at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

The 90 minute long solo recital of Pinter’s poetry and other ephemera intertwined with Sands’ own reminiscences of collaborating with Pinter over the years, Â finally made its way to San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre for a one night stand yesterday evening under the auspices of City Arts and Lectures.

The combination of the subject matter and the fact that the show is directed by John Malkovich brought crowds to the venue. I imagine that for some part of the audience who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s and like me remember Sands as George Emerson in the movie version of A Room With A View opposite Helena Bonham Carter, the actor himself was a major draw to last night’s event. I had never seen Sands perform on stage before and was curious to see what he could do.

I left feeling somewhat disappointed. Sands, though quite commanding in stature and still raffishly handsome in his 50s, is physically stiff. There’s not much mobility in his back and he stands in one spot for the entire show with his torso pitched slightly forward. Sands has a lovely, round voice but his very declamatory style of delivery gets tiring after a while. And he uses his right hand for emphasis way too much. The actor basically spends the entire show looking like he’s trying to hail a cab.

Yet as the evening went on, Sands loosened up and became more warm and slightly more loose. I enjoyed his thoughts about the difference between a “beat,” “pause” and “silence” in Pinter’s plays. And he took a wonderfully loving yet playful view on his subject — gleefully imitating Pinter’s barking voice and poking fun at his intolerant side.

The other thing that struck me about this presentation, though, is how bad so much of Pinter’s poetry is. It’s probably heretical of me to say this, but a lot of it sounds like doggerel. I leave you with one example of a poem that Sands read out loud:

Death May Be Ageing

Death may be ageing
But he still has clout

But death disarms you
With his limpid light

And he’s so crafty
That you don’t know at all

Where he awaits you
To seduce your will
And to strip you naked
As you dress to kill

But death permits you
To arrange your hours

While he sucks the honey
From your lovely flowers

Harold Pinter
April 2005

The Bing’s Mixed Opening

Stanford’s new Bing Concert Hall opened on Friday night with a concert emceed by Anna Deavere Smith and featuring the San Francisco Symphony, the St. Lawrence String Quartet, Frederica von Stade and various university ensembles.

The best thing about the venue is the sound. The acoustics are clean yet limpid. The opening night concert successfully showcased some of the different formats that might be heard in the space from lyrical cor anglais solos in Jonathan Berger’s specially commissioned work, A Place of Concert, to the St. Lawrence Quartet playing Haydn’s String Quartet in F Major Op 77 No 2, to Â the San Francisco Symphony Â performing John Adams’ A Short Ride in a Fast Machine. And the electronic fanfare that started off the show by Stanford Professor Chris Chafe made great use of the surround sound speaker system.

I wonder what a jazz big band or rock group would sound like in the space? Shame we couldn’t find out on Friday night, which was exclusively focused on western “art” music.

The second best thing about the Bing is its size and shape. The vineyard-style auditorium feels both spacious and intimate. And it doesn’t look like there’s a bad seat in the house.

So the University has managed to get the most fundamental aspects of the concert hall experience right. What I’m less crazy about is the way the management has handled some of the more peripheral yet important details that can make or break a concert going experience for people.

The lobby is vast (it feels like an airport) and yet there are very few places to sit down and have a real conversation — though scattered benches allow you to sit in a row which is less convivial for cheater. There are and only a few tiny tables upon which to balance one or two glasses of champagne. And I really hope the management improves the food offerings. $12 for a measly and not very appetizing cheese plate seems a bit excessive to me.

One more thing: I spent some time on Friday night backstage with the radio crew from KDFC. The facilities seem great, but clearly there are still a few technical kinks to be worked out. The ISDN line that was needed to enable KDFC to do a live broadcast of the opening concert wasn’t working until right before the event started. And then it went out after six minutes leaving radio audiences without a live feed. The quick-witted radio people had to switch to their emergency Plan B of using non-live music from its San Francisco studio. Disaster.

MTT on Peer Gynt

The San Francisco Symphony’s music director — looking, in the spirit of Ibsen’s play, a little windswept and craggy — talks about his organization’s upcomingÂ semi-staged multimedia production of Peer Gynt at Davies Symphony Hall next week.

The production weaves music by Schnittke and Robin Holloway into Griegâ€™s famous score.

Check out the YouTube video here.

Poetry By Heart. Is it Smart?

Reading about the British Government’s poetry recitation initiative for school children,Â Poetry By Heart,Â in The Guardian over the past few days brings to mind another recent attempt by the UK authoritiesÂ to inculcate school kids with more sensitivity and smarts through cultural engagement.

The scheme I am thinking of is Sing Up!, which was a government-backed project that ran for four years from 2007 to 2010 to get school kids singing regularly.

Primary schools all over England received training and formed choirs. They learned songs from special songbooks that had been created for the program and worked to achieve various levels of attainment.Â To promote Sing Up!, the initiative was spearheaded by the composer Howard Goodall, who was dubbed the UK’s “Singing Ambassador.” At the height of the project, around 90% of schoolchildren in England were involved in Sing Up! according to Bridget Whyte, who was one of the key figures involved in planning and executing the scheme.

Poetry By Heart also has a dedicated poetry anthology as well as a public figurehead in the form of Andrew Motion. There’s a strong competitive element to the initiative.

Sing Up! and Poetry by Heart both seem to be guided by the same positive impulse: that kids who get comfortable with activities like singing and reciting poems are more likely to be more engagedÂ human beings.

But I wonder how much genuine good such initiatives really do? It’s all very well running a national poetry recitation contest for a few months in 2013. But what about the sustainability that’s necessary for truly inculcating the spirit of poetry in students’ minds and hearts?

It took a while for Sing Up! to get off the ground. Bridget told me that things were slow to get going and only eventually snowballed their way to success. And even with a plan that continued on for several years, the good work that Sing Up! achieved seems challenged at this point in time owing to a change in business model. The government stopped funding the initiative after the initial four year grant and now it is meant to be self-sustaining through schools paying to be members.

But apparently — and unsurprisingly — many UK schools are not very happy about having to pay for the project’s resources, which used to be free to them when they were government-funded. As a result, Sing Up! seems to be losing some traction as an agent of change in music education.

What does this mean for Poetry by Heart? I guess that what I am getting at here is that cultural initiatives in the schools can be powerful tools for developing young minds. But if really careful thought isn’t given to the long-term sustainability of these endeavors, then their value must be questioned.

A Quick Rant About iTunes

I hate iTunes. It’s official.

Organizing my digital music collection has always been tricky. Many of the recordings I own aren’t commercially available so the data often fails to correspond to the tidy, pop music-oriented categories prescribed by the application.

But since my computer prompted me to download the latest version of the iTunes software a few months ago, the situation has become worse.

At least in the past I used to be able to search my iTunes library in a generic way using whatever term I thought might appear in a recording I wanted to access.

But now that the software seems to force users to search for tracks under the specific categories of songs, albums, artists, genres, videos, playlists and radio, I frequently can’t find what I’m looking for. This is due to the fact that the data that goes with many of my recordings isn’t categorized “properly” according to the limited iTunes classification system.

When it comes to looking for tracks in a genre like classical music, this has proved particularly frustrating. If I’m in the “song” category, do I search for the title of a complete work or an individual movement? And is the “artist” box filled by the name of an orchestra, an individual soloist or a composer?

In short, I feel like abandoning the latest version of iTunes and going back to the older interface, which at least didn’t penalize me for having a non-conformist music collection.

A Day at the MFA

It’s no surprise that Mario Testino’s photographs, some of the most iconic of which are currently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, are Â attracting thundering hordes.

The images, which I ogled yesterday on my first ever visit to the MFA, are huge, colorful, sexy and packed with celebrities and super models from Madonna to Kate Moss.

But besides Testino’s brilliantly disconcerting image of the actor Ashton Kutcher looking Photoshop perfect in a pristine white suit with an arm savagely torn at the elbow to reveal the wires and cables of a robot, I was completely bored by the eye candy on display. It amounts to little more than celebrity porn, even if the colors are rich, the prints, glossy, and the torsos depicted, beautiful.

Of much greater interest is the museum’s current The Postcard Age exhibition. The show brings together around 400 postcards from the collection of Leonard A. Lauder. What’s fascinating in our age of Twitter, Facebook and email is how powerful the postcard was a hundred years ago not only as a medium of communication, but also as a means of transmitting political, social and commercial messages. Plus, many of the tiny canvases on display are gorgeous works of art.

I was particularly struck by a pair of postcards depicting photographs of men’s neckties on which scantily-clad ladies clung to the central knots. Cards like these apparently inspired the surrealist art movement. A card with a painting of a fat man running down a beach with arms outstretched above the tagline “Skegness is so bracing” made me laugh: Â Anyone who grew up in the UK would find this reference to the windswept and barren resort town of “Skeggy” to be funny.

The exhibition is packed with small wonders that reveal a world of rich communications that seem so much more tactile and personal than the mediums that proliferate today.

Oh, and I should mention how much I enjoyed wondering around parts of the MFA’s permanent collection too. The museum has clearly thought a lot about how to activate spaces that might attract less people than big-draw exhibitions such as the Testino photography show.

In one of the more gaudy nineteenth century American art galleries packed with white marble sculptures, it was fascinating to chat with a young man who was demonstrating and answering questions about how sculptors work with stone. He was seated in the middle of the room at a table with a plaster cast bust and a stone bust as well as a bunch of artist’s tools. The presence of the docent in this capacity makes people slow down and pay attention to the work in a gallery that might otherwise be more of a “walk-through” space.

Revel-ation

People in this country can’t get enough of old world traditions at this time of year.

Events like The Bracebridge Dinner, a high-end yuletide feast based on Olde Englishe customs which takes place at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite, and The Christmas Revels, a form of holiday pageant involving singing, dancing, storytelling, poetry and music steeped in similar Anglo-centric traditions, usually sell out. And audience members do things that they don’t usually do at other times of the year, like — dare I say it — sing and dance in public.

There are a number of Revels troupes around the United States today such as New York, Oakland and Houston. But the version which takes place each year at Sanders Theatre on the Harvard campus in Cambridge, MA is the mother of all of them. It’s where the Revels organization took root in 1971, when the pageant’s founder, John Langstaff, began producing the event to capacity audiences.

Last night, I attended The Revels in Cambridge. People were wedged into the lovely old theatre’s pew-style seats. A jolly atmosphere prevailed. Though pageants of this kind don’t generally appeal to me all that much — they tend to feel a tad canned, kitsch and earnest for my taste — this one makes for a fun experience because it is so professionally produced.

This year’s show has an Irish theme. It begins with the massive cast of some 60 adults and children all dressed in immigrant drag boarding a rusty old bark for America. At the center of the loose narrative of travel and hope for a better life is a cantankerous old Irish poet (Billy Meleady), who doesn’t feel so cheerful about leaving his homeland for the United States.

One of the most tightly scripted, humorous and beautifully performed sections of the episodically structured show (which is basically a patchwork of dances, songs and skits aboard the “ark”) is a wild tall tale taken from Fairy and Folktales of the Irish Peasantry published by William Butler Yeats. It’s narrated by the poet and it concerns a fisherman who befriends a supernatural, fish-like character and travels with him to the bottom of the ocean where he finds and eventually sets free the trapped souls of drowned sailors. The story involves a fantastical folk dance by a group of actors in ruby-red lobster costumes.

On the whole, though, I relished the instrumental music aspects of the performance more than the songs, dances and skits. A warm musical prelude at the top of the show provided by The Cambridge Symphonic Brass ensemble is one highlight. Instrumental sets performed by The Rattling Brogues, a phenomenal Irish music group whose membership includes one of the best harpists I’ve ever had the pleasure of hearing, had me enraptured.

The crowd, many of whom come back to the Sanders Theatre for The Revels every year, appeared to relish the many moments of audience participation. These ranged from singing carols like “Deck the Halls” to getting up and joining an enormous, snaking conga line at intermission.

The whole thing made me happy, and also made me sigh: I wish that audiences would embrace the participatory spirit at other times of the year. Carols are a great way to bring us out of ourselves. Should start singing them in the Spring too?

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