When I was a kid, I learned how to do some basic BASIC. That instilled in me a desire to write computer programs, but it’s been one of those things that has never worked out. The closest I’ve come is working on little bits for this website. But with the ever expanding internet, there are a ton of ways to teach myself, and so I’m making it a point to keep at it.

Why????

With the way technology is going, I feel that programming is going to be like reading; we can survive if we can’t do it, but we’re way better off if we can. It gives us a chance to participate actively in some neat new markets and expand on existing markets. For example, classical music is going further in the direction of digital distribution for live concerts, and software is making further inroads in voice lessons.

Beyond the economic reasons, I’m curious, and it looks fun. I like making things and tinkering. I can only sing so many hours a day, after all.

So here are two resources:

Code Year

One of these is called Code Year. Basically, you sign up with an email address, and they email you with a link to a series of new programming lessons every week. It’s very approachable, and all the programming is done in the web browser so there’s no need to do anything too complicated on your computer. So far I’ve done some very simple things such as making counting games, but it’s quickly getting more challenging.

Free Online University Courses

Another way is to utilize free online courses by major universities. Stanford, in particular, has made it possible to take some of their computer science courses on our own. We can watch the lectures, read the handouts, and download the programs. All for free.

I’m currently checking out “Programming Methodology“. The professor is a lot of fun, and the class is fast paced. So far, I’ve done no actual programming, but that will be changing soon. It’s a little more involved than Code Year since I’ve had to install some software on my computer. You don’t get the benefit of human feedback except that the programs just won’t work if you do them wrong.

For further academic resource, if you look in iTunes University, you can find several whole semesters of courses from different universities.

Hat Tip to Slate “You Need to Learn How to Program” for publicizing Code Year.

It’s doubtful.

I hear people describe themselves and others as tone deaf fairly often. It’s quite a judgment to make about oneself or somebody else because it is a real disorder, and once called “tone-deaf” a person might believe it even if they aren’t. We’re moving away from blithely referring to ourselves and others as having other disorders (learning disorders for example), and it’s time to limit our use of this term.

Amusia (tone-deafness, where people who are tone deaf are called amusics) affects about 4% of people (this number is up for debate). That’s slightly fewer than one in twenty. So it’s possible that you’ll work with someone who is genuinely amusical, but it’s still unlikely. Some people with tone-deafness get no pleasure from music at all and avoid it (from “Tone deafness: a model complex cortical phenotype” by Timothy Griffiths in Clinical Medicine).

Sometimes, we might feel inclined to chalk up somebody’s difficulty with music to tone-deafness. This is very true with kids, and adolescent boys especially. With transitioning voices, a phenomenon that you see is difficulty with matching pitches. When it appears day after day, it seems impossible that it could just be awkwardness.

But that’s usually what it is in my experience. The primary challenge is due to the changes of the vocal folds themselves. As Titze says in Principles of Voice Production:

During this growth spurt, adolescent boys find it difficult to control register. They often flip back and forth between their child voice and their new adult voice. This is understandable because modes of vibration are dependent on the shape of the vocal folds. As the folds become thicker and more rectangular, different muscle patterns need to be developed to control the modes of vibration. It is basically a trial-and-error process.

(Emphasis mine)

This anatomical change can mean intense difficulty accessing parts of the voice or matching pitch at all. Some people have blank spots in their voices or cannot access certain registers (I was unable to use my falsetto until I was about 19 once my voice changed).

In “Effect of Voice Change on Singing Pitch Accuracy in Young Male Singers” by Elizabeth Willis and Dianna Kenney the authors focused on matching intervals in boys whose voices are changing. On average, the boys couldn’t match an interval greater than a fourth and would be consistently flat. A fourth. I’m sure that hearing a group of boys singing an interval flat repeatedly is mind-boggling and frustrating, but it’s not tone-deafness.

I’ve worked with teenagers who do so poorly at matching pitch that they might be chalked up to being tone deaf. But often there was some other cause in addition to their growing voices. For example, there’s often a lack of recognition between the sound of the piano and the tone of their own voice. It’s hard for them to hear the piano play their note and then sing it back.

But as soon as I would sing their phrase in their own octave, they could repeat it back to me. So, yes, there’s a disconnect somewhere, but it’s not tone-deafness. There’s a big difference between the timbre of the piano and the timbre of the voice, and it takes practice to reconcile the two.

True amusics may have trouble discerning common melodies. So if someone can’t recognize “My Country ’tis of Thee” or “Mary had a little lamb” or some other common tune by melody and rhythm alone, then you might have someone who is amusical. But it is doubtful that those people would voluntarily sign up for a choir.

So I figure that if you have someone who’s a) drawn to choir in the first place and who can b) match any pitches at all in some part of their range despite major pitch difficulties and who can c) identify common tunes, then they should not be discounted as tone-deaf. There might be other factors at play, but they deserve our patience as music educators.

Snow covered mountains from last night’s weather:

The land of enchantment continues to live up to its nick-name.

“I make it as hard as possible,” he told the group. “It’s up to you to make it easy on yourself.” He drove his point home with a cautionary tale. In India, he recalled, a yogi came to study at Iyengar’s school and threw himself into a spinal twist. Black said he watched in disbelief as three of the man’s ribs gave way — pop, pop, pop…

Black has come to believe that “the vast majority of people” should give up yoga altogether. It’s simply too likely to cause harm.

This quote is from How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body printed in the New York Times Magazine.

Here’s the thing; I really like this article. The headline is a bit controversial, but the point is excellent; yoga is often sold as inherently beneficial when, in fact, there are serious risks in doing the poses that need to be considered.

Prideful practice

Let me tell you a story; when I was living in Tucson, I started a yoga study using B.K.S Iyengar’s book Light on Yoga. It’s an excellent book if you want to understand the mindset and philosophy of yoga and the various asanas. I tried his various regimens and felt pretty good. I pushed myself further and further.

Beginner?

But the one time I ever walked into a yoga class – which was labeled “beginner” – I felt thrashed. During the class I was shaky and weak. I also felt bad because I couldn’t keep up, and I felt worse when the teacher loudly told a new student, “I can see that you practice yoga” (his emphasis) when the student was successfully holding difficult poses.

For an example of those poses, in the very first class we were asked to do the inverted back bend “wheel pose“. The person I came with had wrist injuries at the time, but she still felt compelled to do the pose. The teacher made a show of some folks’ skills by having one person come out of the pose by standing up in a kind of spring action. This was dispiriting while it  simultaneously stoked my desire to push harder.

I never went back.

Injury

Still, I really liked practicing on my own. I loved inversions and back bends. I also pushed side stretches, arm stretches, and leg stretches as far as I could, and if I felt pain then I thought that I should push further. I liked to prove that I could sit in lotus position for extended periods.

Now, I have nagging injuries in my sternum, knees, wrists, and ribs. I turn 29 tomorrow. What could have caused it? It was me…doing what I believed to be a totally safe exercise. Incorrectly.

Oops.

Any asanas I do now are very limited in intensity, duration, and range.

The author of “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body” cites stories and studies showing possibilities for much more dangerous results. There are populations for whom shoulder stands – for example – can cause strokes. Also discussed are yoga teachers and students who have serious back problems due to years of yoga study.

Yoga has no inherent good or bad qualities

Yoga is not inherently bad, and everyone won’t injure themselves doing it. “Yoga” is just a name for a collection of philosophies and exercises. With the right ideas embodying the name, you can get healthy. With the wrong ones you can get hurt.

It’s just…we’re really likely to get the wrong ideas. Yoga poses are often sold as inherently good, and that’s to a society that focuses on achievement and image. And let’s be clear: yoga is being sold. Those magazine covers with beautiful people posing on the mountain-side are selling us something. I mean, what fella wouldn’t want to look like Rodney Yee? The guy’s in his 50′s and looks better than most 20 year olds.

But stepping back from dreams of mountaintop awesomeness, we should be as careful doing yoga poses as during weight lifting or any other high intensity activity. Perhaps more. Yoga is meant to be done by people with deep self control. If you push yourself while doing yoga poses, then you may very well injure yourself.

How Yoga Can Wreck Your Health via the New York Times

K2 photo by Adam Jacob Muller under the GFDL

Today, I’m giving a lecture/workshop at the New Mexico Music Educators All-State Festival up at the University of New Mexico. The topic is adolescent male voice change, and I’m really excited to share this research. Very groovy.

One of the Christmas presents I received was a gorgeous Tibetan singing bowl. These are bowls used during meditation and can be struck or made to “sing”. When struck, their rate of acoustic decay is very slow. When you rotate the mallet against the outer edge in a strong but steady way then the bowl sings; it begins to vibrate at a steady rate and produces a very pure tone.

Here’s an example of the struck tone:

Of course, I immediately began focusing on the quality of the tone itself and ran it through my power spectrum software. The struck tone tends to be full of stronger overtones than the sustained tone. But the overtones don’t initially appear to be part of the harmonic series. It seems that there are several distinct tones happening at once that aren’t necessarily harmonics of a fundamental pitch. But I need to do this analysis at the school where I can have a less noisy environment than my home.

The two dominant tones have distinct names; they are the “male” tone and the “female” tone. The male tone is the lower frequency tone while the female is often a tritone higher (mine sounds like a slightly sharp 11th). By using the wooden part of the mallet against the rim of the bowl, you can isolate the female tone while the suede or wool part of the mallet used lower against the bowl walls can produce the lower male tone.

This next audio example is of the male tone. It’s extremely pure and beautiful, and it carries well throughout the house – sorry, Rebekah!

You can hear that I’m not a singing bowl master just yet. I suppose that’s what practice is for.

For more information, check out the excellent blog The Secret Life of Singing Bowls.

Here are some of the straws I used on my recent road-trip to keep myself from being kicked out of hotels practicing on the road. They also have the effect of training the light mechanism in a safe and not-too-noisy way.

My plan is to incorporate much more straw practice into my teaching and practicing this year.

Made it home last night after our drive to and from Oregon to visit my Ma. Along the way, we saw some really beautiful sights. Some were new, and some were places I’d seen before, but they are nevertheless stunning.

This was precisely the kind of thing my mind needed for some rejuvenation despite the long stays in the truck.

Rebekah and I also listened to a few audiobooks along the way, both of which I can recommend. The first was Steve Jobs and the other was Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. It’s shocking how much easier it is to drive for upwards of 13 hours in a day when you have a good audiobook to escort you.

Last week, I saw former NMSU alumna Kirstin Chávez give some lessons here as part of her Artist in Residence position. You know? She’s a pretty darned good teacher, and one thing really stood out to me:

She knows how to see the big picture.

One of my favorite distinctions in any field is macro/micro. It’s the difference between the overall big picture and the smaller details. You see this in a number of fields including evolution, economics, and … Star Craft (truly, search for micro and macro on Google and you’ll see the first result).

In singing we also have macro and micro. Let’s check out what I see as the macro side of things:

• Breath
• Life philosophy
• Overall health
• Body connection and coordination
• Musical taste
• Musical skills
• Language comprehension

On the micro side we have:

• Diction
• Individual muscle tensions
• Vibrato
• Tuning
• Vowel modification
• Timbre
• Loudness
• Onset

The list could go on.

Any of the micro things could in fact be the most pressing issue for a singer. For example, if I’ve got everything else going great, but I insist on singing pure “Ah” vowels really high in my voice, then that is my most important problem.

But often it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees (or shift the deck chairs on the Titanic, etc.), and I’m as guilty as anyone. It’s so easy to get totally wrapped up in one micro issue and miss the macro issue that’s causing several smaller issues. It’s easy to notice the lack of vibrato and not notice that the singers isn’t taking in enough air to begin with. It’s easy to see one tension but miss the lack of air that’s causing it.

But we need to see ourselves and any singers we work with as total beings rather than just a collection of parts. And often, micro problems will vanish after working with the big picture. And when they don’t, then dig in for some micromanagement.