Group vocal improv exercises

Over the last few months we at the London Vocal Improv Collective have found, collated, created and collected these ways of approaching vocal improvisation in a group of about 6 - 12 people.

1. Talking nonsense
Start by having conversations in nonsense. Before long, patterns start to arise from the nonsense - hear a phrase you like and start to repeat it. Little loops arrive, and from them music grows...

A good warm up for this is the Bobby M exercise where you go through the alphabet doing a bit of nonsense with each letter of it as the starting letter in turn.

2. Twisted karaoke
One person thinks of a song and keeps it secret. The rest of the group starts a groove (using, if needed, exercise 4). Then the soloist has to put their song over the group's groove, keeping as faithfully as possible to the song yet putting it within the tempo, time and key signature of the groove. Especially good with traditional songs in your mother tongue :)

3. You sing we follow
One person starts singing. It can be a song or an improvisation. The rest of the group brings in sound to support.

4. Motor, interlocker, counterpoint

Small version
Create a base with three roles.

The motor is a 1 - 4 bar repetitive riff. It has to have some space in it. Often you improvise your way into it, start singing whatever and wait for the loop to arise. The motor is also the conductor, and can lead key changes, endings, pauses, dynamic changes and so on.

The interlocker is like the motor's partner. It lives in the spaces created by the motor and works with the motor to create a strong basket to hold the piece in.

The counterpoint is another loop, but now an entirely new kind of sound, to create a fresh contrast to the motor-interlocker partnership. So, if they are very staccato, the counterpoint might be very flowing. If they are cute, it might be harsh. If they descend slowly, the counterpoint might ascend quickly. You get the idea.

Bigger version
Several other parts can layer upon the three part basis. Each of the primary three parts can have harmonies from other singers. In addition, there is base, rhythm (can be two or more people) and a soloist.


5. Whale song
Apparently, communities of whales know who's in their community because they all share the same song. They swim around the sea singing it. Often little variations come in. When a whale hears a community member singing a variation they like, they pick it up. In that way, by the end of a season often a whole community will be singing an entirely different song to the song they started with, but they will all still be singing the same song as one another.

Here's how whale song works.

One person is the conductor. They divide singers into parts and make up a part for each part group.

Once you've been given your part, you can stick to it, you can copy someone else, or you can sing something entirely different. The only idea really is to keep what you're doing in fitting with the whole sound. (It can be fitting to take it somewhere new).

In that way, once you've all got into the car, so to speak, you can take the car anywhere together. The piece finishes itself. When it's over, it's over.

6. Conductor soloist 
This is a bit like whale song but more power remains with the initial conductor. The conductor can keep tweaking the piece once it's live, changing parts, influencing dynamics and generally doing whatever they want.

The conductor can pick a soloist, or different soloists in turn. If you're picked you come into the middle and solo over the group. It doesn't matter how scared you are. You'll relax before long. It's important that the group supports the soloist with their volume, being quiet enough to hear the soloist and matching the soloists energy when they get loud and strong.

The conductor can be the soloist, and can play with the parts, for example cutting a part for half of it and singing in the space created like a call and response. You can silence parts entirely, move part volumes up and down, get everyone singing the same part, create more and more sub parts, and solo in a way that supports and serves the sound - anything that sounds and feels good!

6. Bubble up from silence
Here you just start from silence, with closed eyes, and let sound bubble up, live and die. What I find really delightful here is the mix between more and less musical noise. It can start from breath, rhythm can emerge, strange noises, animal or machinery noises, then some notes might flower like petals, stretch and harmonise, fly a little together, then sink back into atonal sounds.

7. Scene setting
This is a bit like bubbling up from silence, but you start by deciding on a scene. It can be, 'sunrise in Mumbai', or, 'a swamp', or, '2am soho' etc. Again you start from silence, the scene rises, lives out a kind of story, and then dies back into silence.

Do you have any more?

Circle Song

We did a lot of circle song with David. He gets us all singing a repetitive rhythmic kind of backing track and we take it in turns to improvise over it. It's taken from Bobby Mcferrin. Who took it from ancestral African traditions. In many ways it's like what we do all night in The Tent on Mbira camp.

So I'm listening to Bobby McFerrin circle songs on Youtube and I'm starting to think about the possibilities for gathering a group of performance quality singers, maybe a pan-European flexible come and go group, with different constellations of singers gathering for performances in different places

I'm thinking about developing some kind of show that's a mixture of the individual singers' work maybe and some circle songs, and doing some fun playful participatory stuff with the audience, I like that part a lot

I'm thinking about progressive circle songs - I really like the way this one of Bobby's builds so gradually and continually as a whole piece. I'd kind of like it to have some kind of key change perhaps at some point - that's getting quite western, you don't have key changes in, for example, Hindustani (Indian) classical and Shona (Zimbabwean) improvisation-based music. You just have really gradual organic progression within a single key or chord sequence.

Then I'm thinking about the form of Indian classical music, and how you could bring that into circle songs.

You start with the alap - low and slow and arhythmic. The sounds enter like the rising sun; first the gradual, soft lighting of the sky. At some point some way in, the actual sun appears on the horizon. Because of the gradual play preceding it, it's a breathtaking moment, electric like a first touch within chemistry. It's when the improviser reaches the 8th note, (in other words the base note, the tonic, one octave up).

The arrival of each new note is an Event, and one that is lingered upon. Atul described it to me like a road trip. "First you are in England. England is Sa (the 1st). Well you go about England preparing your journey. Then you move - and it is a journey - over to France. France is Re (the 2nd). Now you're in France, do you go straight to Germany? Germany is Ga (the 3rd). No! You stay in France. You play for a while, visit some friends. You play around the edges. Then when you arrive in Germany, it is quite an event!"

And so on. And all the while, softening, softening into the music, softening into the experience of letting the music sing through you rather than you pushing and forcing it out of you.

So that's Alap.

Then a beat comes in. It's low and slow. You improvise but every 12 bars or something a little repetitive phrase comes in that marks the kind of corners that are emerging within your form. Your improvisation stays mellow but moves from the arhythmic quality of the alap to a rhythmic quality in resonance with the beat.

Next the beat quickens. Your improvisation does too. The drummer gets more playful. So you do you. You rise together; the pace, the speed of your sonic movements, the tones, rise rise rise until you reach your first climax.

Next, the intensity goes back down half way. Now enters a melodic composition. It will be a little thing, maybe 8 bars, maybe 16 or 32. You'll sing it a few times over. Then you'll start to play with it. You might sing bars 1 - 4 of the composition, then improvise for 4 bars, then come back for bars 5 onwards. Next round, you might improvise for four bars between bars 4 and 5, and four bars between bars 12 and 13. Then you create bigger gaps in the composition for your improvisations, and more of them, then more and more, until the composition is literally in shreds, tiny strips that give a thematic kind of fiber to the improvisation, and you can whip and weave them around each other. By this point both the melodic soloist and the drummer are going crazy, improvising with wild abandon, beyond all control, yet still within the form and feel of the music, until the final peak is reached, and gradually like the slowing and softening after orgasm, the music moves towards the still intimacy of silence.

I wonder if it's possible to weave some elements of that musical form into circle song. With the right group of people. I wonder who those people would be.

Naturally 7

32 million Americans sing in a choir

At last

It's the last ten minutes of the last voice class on the last day of the course.

Lee, who's been fantastic all week, steps forward. "Shall we do some free Jazz?"

She prepares us beautifully. Shut your eyes. Only do what you feel. Listen. Feel free. You don't have to make noises. It'll have a life of its own.

Silence. Someone starts making the noise of the wind. Gradually, tenderly, we join in. Over the next five or ten minutes we have crazy rhythms, farmyard noises, laughter, delicacy, and harmonic smokerings that would make a contemporary composer drool.

Silence re descends.

We open our eyes. Two people have tears running down their cheeks.

We burst out into the corridoor. That was like yoga, someone says. It was like the wind, says another. My course friend Nicky turns to me. "I liked the honesty," she said. "I have felt a lot of dishonesty this week."

So did I.

I have never tried starting from complete silence. That's next! :)

Choir?

I'm on a jazz summer school at the London Guildhall. I'm in choir. The mood is low. The leader is great but I think it's the form that doesn't work. The youngest, a girl of about eleven, is getting increasingly miserable. She's punching her thighs now in a cute little rhythm. She's the daughter of the saxophone tutor, a big soulful black papa, and her mother is evidently a long lean leggy beautiful white woman. It's as if this child is unselfconsciously embodying the discontent of the group, who, being adults, sing along obediently with joyless faces.

Is it the central leadership, the central control of our musicality? The little pre-designed part-boxes we're being put into?

In Indian music there's no such thing as choir. In Shona singing there are songs everyone teaches each other, which are repeated endlessly and become the basis for a whole lot of making it up.

What happens elsewhere? Am I saying I reject choir?

At my friends Rachel and Alex's wedding, a choir of friends, conducted by a friend, sang “Thank you God for this amazing day” in the service. It was totally magical.

I once walked, late of course, in from a cold December evening inot the Royal Albert Hall where my siseter was performing Christmas carols with the Bach Choir. Almost immediately, tears welled up in my eyes at the beauty and the warm feeling of homecoming.

I don't want to reject the choir form, the form of coreographed, taught and centrally controlled music.

But do I want to take part in it personally?

Does it have anything to do with the fun fed?

How did the young Vin Marti, big papa of Ecstatic Dance, feel going to dance lessons where his movements and interactions with other dancers were controlled by the choreography and direction of another? Where beauty was prized above honesty, technique above expression? His response was to ditch the audience and professionalism, say “Dance Ugly and Drool”, and spread a form of dance that everyone can participate in, love every minute of and get mighty high on.

Ecstatic singing? I've experienced ecstasy through singing twice, and something approaching it a lot.

I google the term, and retrieve lots of stuff about Kirtan, the Indian call and response form of singing, and devotional song, the repetition of mantras. Repetition is one of the routes to ecstatic singing, but I'm not sure about Kirtan and mantra.

How do we do it, then?

I don't want to come back to boring 'sing-as-you're-told' choir. But I form 50% of the tennors section. “You two”, says the choir leader pointing at me and my fellow tennor, “as long as you come back all week we'll be fine!”

Argh! The dilemma! It's lunchtime but I've been drinking my whizzed up breakfast all morning and I'm not hungry. I sidle off to another practice room, get out my Bach prelude and, under the instruction of my unmet Hero, Bobby Mcferrin, sit down at the piano and learn to sing it.

I sing for my pleasure, and for the pleasure of the community, I think. This week, this is the community. I'd be letting them down to bunk choir and sharpen my teeth on Bach instead. I decide to stick with choir and keep Bach for lunchtime.

Sesame Street

We've been talking about touring festivals next year. I'm interested in the kind of vocal jams we get going in workshops, and about the new creative challenge of how you get that kind of thing going in a looser jam rather than a workshop.

I like this.

So I've experienced two kinds of jams. Actually they're not jams, it's a jam and a session.

Sessions are performance led. People jump in with a piece to perform. Everyone else either listens or joins in. When they join in they either join in because they know the piece, or they make it up.

With a jam, someone starts a chord sequence or a rhythm and then other people build stuff on top of that. Diva moments ripple around chaordically.

I'm over-clarifying. Jams often become session-like and sessions often become jam-like, but technically there are two different things going on.

So McFerrin's approach to creating a vocal jam in an informal session might be to do a performance that he's the leader of, which involves getting everybody singing playfully, to begin with by call and response.

So how do you get people into whale song without words? In an informal jam?

Ooo now there's a challenge.

Todd did it at Dance camp. We were doing biodanzer and we'd all ended in a very very big close knot of people standing so close we didn't have to hold ourselves up. He started a loud hum and everyone joined in with different notes that then harmonized chaordically in that wonderful way for about five minutes and it was golden. Golden!

So the dance camp crowd are well trained. There's a difference between long ooommms, and higher risk contributions like melodies, rhythms and silly noises.

Maybe you have part of the crowd primed. If I kicked something off when Loose was there, she'd start playing all over it and other people would follow her lead.

Humm. Something to play with.

Looks like there are two ways to do what Bobby did: 1) write it; 2) make it up on the spot.

rain

Bobby rocks again

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

Nice tent song

Tiny singing

In The Tent in the evenings of Mbira camp, I play the first two easy songs on the Mbira and then put it down and sing along for the rest. I don't know the parts so I copy people and make it up. One time I was singing along on a self-created part, thinking, god, why do I often feel so tense when I'm singing?

Maybe it's because what I'm singing doesn't feel right, I think. So I listen for what might feel more right. I imagine a far simpler line. So so simple, a modest repetitive part of just two notes to fit in the whole. I start singing it. It feels right. I relax. And ever, ever so slightly, so does the whole room, it seems.

A lot of what I'm singing I hear a fraction of a moment before I sing it. It's as if there's another singer I'm copying. I just listen. And when I hear it I follow it.

It's funny that I'm always a little fraction behind the timing of the first voice. Though if the first voice is a good leader, maybe it comes in a fraction early to leave the audible voice right on beat.

Sometimes I'm following the voice note by note, rhythm by rhythm, but often I'm following more of a general sense of the kind of sound to be making now, whether a presence or absence of sound, a slow low and fat sound or a sound like a butterfly.

“When I get the feeling in my tummy,” Chartwell said, “I just sing.”

“I can feel tense and insecure about singing in a jam”, I once told a stoned dreadlocked Israeli during a jam session on a moonlit Indian rooftop. “Well,” he replied, “you have a beautiful voice and you contribute great stuff. So just do it when you feel it and don't do it when you don't.”

I liked that advice.

“Briony?” My writing is disturbed by a voice in the night. It's Chartwell. I'm surprised. I lean out and unzip the front of my tent. He's standing a few feet away in the moonlight. “I brought your Mbira.” He'd been playing it with everyone in the main tent. “I didn't want you to go to sleep without it. It's got a bit of Vaseline on it, I'm sorry about that. What are you doing in your tent not sleeping?” He chuckles.

“I'm on my way to going to sleep! Thank you so much.” I take the Mbira and he bids me farewell and walks his slow swaying walk back to The Tent.

He's amazingly humble and generous. And also something of a great man. Often the two go together I've noticed. There's a documentary crew here this evening, they're making a film about him. He wrote and performed the music for Breakfast with Mugabe, a play that started on a six week run at Soho theatre and was moved to one of the biggies in the West End where it stayed for 42 weeks. He played Mbira day and night, Matinee and evening show, until his fingers were blistered and raw and he kept going. He's taught at Soas and been interviewed on the BBC World Service, according to Sebastian the Mbira maker who was making an Mbira for the man before he met him, turned on the radio in his workshop in Germany and there was Chartwell talking away.

And he has gathered us to him. There's something like 35 of us on this camp. We're all sorts. Rich, poor, young, old, fat, thin, men, women, hippies and regular folk. We've got an Oxford University student and a care worker. We've got two pop stars – well, professional singers with signed bands – some first timers who play no other instrument, and a handfull of people who have made Mbira their lives, and who hold the core thrust of the sound in the tent. And we all take a week off work, pay £180, pack up our tents and sleeping bags and gather to him, to the Mbira and to each other sure but more than that, to Chartwell.

I lie and listen to the music from the main tent. This music is not about the soloist or musical gymnastics, showing off. It seems to be about tiny, repetitive sounds that fit cohesively into the overall sound, with the occasional spontaneous moments of ad libbing up and over the sound when the feeling takes you.

It's like a metaphor for behaviour in a community, I guess. Mostly small humble, generous and considerate acts that fit cohesively into the community, with the occasional moments of wildness, free self expression, when the feeling takes you.

Denise once said that in the Baka tribes of Cameroon, which the band she's in - Baka Beyond - have collaborated with for years and years, when singing together you can error in two ways. You can error by not contributing enough sound, and you can error by stealing the limelight all for yourself with endless Diva moments. The thing to do is to sing loud enough for the person opposite to hear you, and quiet enough so that you can hear them.

I like this way. The way of Baka, the way of Shona.

Now it's 2.40am and I can hear Chartwell in the main tent yodelling a soft tired yodel over the musicians. It's beautiful. He must be feeling it in his tummy.