Is Your Voice Fun?
Some people take their medicine with honey, others just knock it back and never mind the taste. When it comes to your vocal health and skill, do you enjoy doing your exercises? Do you do them on your feet, bouncing around the room, or sitting in the car in between cursing other drivers? Would you take advantage of a mobile app that made it fun to do your warmup? Here’s a short survey I’ve devised to gauge interest in such an app.
We all know by now that the whole body is involved in the way we sound. The shape of the instrument determines the quality of the sound that comes out of it, and this is true whether the instrument is made of brass, wood, or flesh and bone.
So there’ll be a different result depending on whether you do your voice exercises standing, sitting, or hanging upside down from a trapeze. All three positions are perfectly acceptable, as long as you do them at least some of the time while balanced upright with your feet in reasonable contact with the ground.
However, this doesn’t address the problem that the thought of doing exercises of any kind, even something as simple as The Hum can fill most of us with unease, reluctance, and a sudden urge to bake. I’ve been working on this problem for most of my life, trying to find ways of making the doing of the exercises more time-efficient and enjoyable. From the moment I developed a warmup that could be completed in under 3 minutes. I found that my students would not only DO the exercises, regularly, but also they quickly discovered how much fun it is to do them, and of course, if you’re having fun, you’re going to do them willingly, and often.
That is how the Mini Vocal Warmup came into being. You’ll find it here; it takes a few minutes to learn the sequence, but once you know it, you can do it any time of the day or night, as a warmup to get you going, a warm down to relax your voice last thing at night, or it can be extended (with coaching support) into a full voice training program to build your power, flexibility and range.
These audio files can easily be integrated into your iTunes folder, and played on your smart phone or mp3 player.
The next step, (obviously!) is to turn the program into a mobile app, which is what I’m working on now.
There are thousands of apps for warming up the singing voice, but very few indeed for warming up the speaking voice. Even the singing apps aren’t really warmups, they are scales to work on AFTER you’ve warmed up.
I’d love to know if you would find such an app useful, and especially whether you’d be interested in an app with just the exercises, or something more fun, like a game that would stimulate you to play with your own vocal sound. So I’ve created a survey, 10 questions, which takes about 5 minutes max to complete. Please click on the link below, and don’t forget to let me know if you’d like to be a beta tester when it’s almost ready for public release. That way, you get it for free!
Please share this with your friends and colleagues. The more feedback I get, the better the product will be.
Do you have any ideas for mobile apps that would be helpful for performance skills training? Or do you have your own way to keep the exercises fresh and fun to do? Leave a comment below…
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