Course overview

This lesson presents an overview of the chapters of Unlock your potential :

Inner spotlight – Rhythm – Intonation – Sound & Blend – Expression – Physical ear-training.

Nine areas of practice

This lesson contains a map of skills that are fundamental to singing together.

Doing the Unlock your potential exercise modules leads to successive development of nine types of musical skills. Accordingly, Unlock your potential practice is divided into nine areas, with exercise modules for each area of practice, or skill type.

Inner spotlight is a metaphor for the continuous activity, while singing, to move your target point of focused attention between different musical factors.

Your power to give attention

– to whom and to what do you give your full attention right now?

This is a short lesson with just one video that aims at bringing awareness to the power of your visual attention.

Audiation

Audiation is notes, phrases, melodies, rhythms and harmonies that you perceive in your inner hearing, without any music being actually heard.

This short lesson includes two exercise videos: Inner hearing activation and Your inner note.

Goals: to bring awareness to the power of your audiotory attention, to introduce audiation as an everyday tool, and to release eventual insecurity or fear of intonation.

Bodyation

Bodyation is physical and kinaesthetic imagery. Experience and research has shown that physical imagery has an impact on both neural and physical development, even when no physical movement has taken place.

This lesson includes four videos: Physical attention, Bodyation, Voice instrument activation, and Five body instruments.

Goals: to bring awareness to the power of your physical attention, to introduce bodyation as an everyday tool, and to release eventual insecurity or fear of rhythm.

Downbeat and upbeat with a sense of gravity

Physical movement with a sense of gravity provides you with a reference to pulse, in your own body – your “rhythmical GPS”.

This lesson contains two videos.

Physical relation between pulse and subdivisions

In this lesson, your practice is to relate rhythmically to four different pulse sources: 1) your voice, 2) your hands, 3) your feet, and 4) your whole body. The pulse source serves as a reference to simple rhythmic phrases that you rotate between your voice, your hands and your feet.

This lesson contains three videos.

Goal: for you to be confident about your performance of pulse, tempo, and rhythmic patterns.

Synchronization

In this lesson, you practice internal and external reference to pulse.

Internal reference: that your singing is synchronized with the pulse provided by your own body.

External reference: that your voice and your body are tightly synchronized with an external pulse reference; a metronome, a recording, other singers, your conductor.

This lesson contains three videos.

Goal: for you to be confident about your capacity for rhythmical tightness.

Aim for the next station

This practice is about how to audiate notes (“stations”) in the next phrase coming up. Experience has shown that once stations are sung in tune, the intonation of the whole phrase falls into place around the stations.

This lesson contains one video with an example exercise, followed by tutorials for how to use this basic concept with your repertoire.

Hit the right notes

This lesson is about physical preparation.Your voice is a very flexible instrument, capable of making a wide range of different sounds. For proper intonation, it is essential to be prepared physically before you change the shape of your voice from one sound to another. In a cappella arrangements, such changes often happen very fast. Which is why you need to practice very slowly at first.

This lesson contains three exercise videos, plus tutorials for how to extend this practice to your repertoire.

Fit in with the harmony

This lesson is about fine-tuned intonation, balance within a chord, and intuitive understanding of harmonic context.

It does make a difference which note within the harmony that you are singing.

Some knowledge of music theory can be helpful, but you don’t need to be trained in music theory to do this lesson.

This lesson contains one video and tutorials.

Physical ear-training exercises follow up on the contents of this lesson.

Make personal sounds appropriate to the music style

This lesson is about your own long-term process that begins with music that you like. What kind of sounds are natural to that music? Not only the voice sounds but also other instruments.

The exercises of this lesson are mainly about jamming along with recordings (presumably in a room where nobody can hear you).

Adapt your sound to the expression of others

The ability to adapt your voice to the expression of others is central to singing together. This is a skill that any choir singer can learn, first step by step, and then by putting the different pieces together in an intuitive way.

The exercises of this lesson require another singer to practise together with.

This lesson consists of three parts:

1 - sing a simple melody with different dynamics; anything from quiet to loud

2. Identify important keywords (=”stations”) in a song lyric to emphasize in your voice expression

3. Sing a simple melody in different ways, by visualizing various kinds of emotional states.

Physical ear-training: to learn music theory by doing. Music theory without theory.

Sing and play at the same time

This lesson includes two videos and exercise tutorials for singing and playing at the same time. You need a keyboard, a piano or a guitar to do this lesson. Or a piano app in your smartphone.

Purpose: To activate intuitive understanding of connections between notes, intervals and scales.

Audiation of harmony

This lesson contains exercises for basic understanding of chords, through visual and tactile means.

Two videos.

Embodied score learning

This lesson contains exercises for visua, audiotory and tactile understanding of notation of rhythm, and notation of note pitch.

Two videos.

Anything Can Happen

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Gøta

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Syncopations

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Polyrhythms

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Glossary

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Course updates

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