I'm in Mr. Hunt's seminar Albums Worth Hearing. This is my second semester in it, and I've enjoyed the majority of the things we've listened too: X, Joni Mitchell, The Ramones, The Zombies, etc. I've started thinking about this more because Mr. Hunt just gave me a mix CD today, and I was listening to a lot of variety. One thing that Mr. Hunt emphasizes is that singers can be fantastic even if they're not stereotypically vocally good, and that unique weird voices are cooler to listen to than trained ones. Of course in choir we don't really follow this line of thinking, we're trained to hit the notes. When you're singing a song like we do in choir, we're going for a really specific sound though: what the composer wrote. And in other music, people are going for what
they wrote. And if they're in charge, they can do whatever they want, sometimes creating new genres while singing off key. Obviously training your voice to be able to do things like hold notes longer or increase your range is helpful, but I think sometimes because we don't have the creation aspect in choir we don't think about how an untrained voice can still be musically valuable and significant.
I do recording with my guitar teacher and my cousin and I are going to record together soon too, and what I like about it most is that I am in charge of how I want a song to sound. Being trained helps your voice improve, but having the freedom to create and choose is going to help your voice too.
I think in choir there's sort of an opportunity for this with the solo project available to 3 years+ or senior choir students, so I'm looking forward to that.
Lastly, I'm going to share some of my favorite/most variable songs from the CD Mr. Hunt made me:
"No Children" by The Mountain Goats
"10:37" by Beach House
"Sad Song" by Au Revoir Simone
"Broke" by Modest Mouse
I completely agree with you that what’s the most touching in music is not always a technically trained voice. Sometimes it’s more emotional, or more fun, or more whatever the composer is trying to communicate. I listen to a lot of alternative/indie music, and a lot of it is sung by voices that are gravelly, or really really high pitched for a guy, or smokey, or belt-y etc (although they do all sing on pitch…). Basically things that are not typical in trained voices. However something else to note is that I see this un-conventionalness most effective in the singer-songwriter genre. The rawness of the sound can be exactly what makes the music work. In choir it’s necessary to sing in the same way as the people around us because otherwise the choir would sound confused and un-synced. I’ve noticed also that a trend for most chart toppers now is to have a really clean-sounding female vocal. I attribute this mostly to the wide use of autotune but hey, no point in trying to fight the times haha. ANYWAYS my point is basically that “stranger” voices are far less versatile within the music industry (and singing incorrectly can also lead to permanent harm, take Adele for instance, she got nodes), but that I too enjoy hearing voices untouched by traditional standards.
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