Silicon Valley techie by day, singer by night (and weekends). This blog is about how I use technology to study, rehearse, and perform (mostly) classical vocal music.
Now, it IS a really brief mention. And the scientific explanation is somewhat (over?-)simplified. But I guess you could use it to explain opera singer anatomy and acoustics to your kid!
At any rate, I think it’s cool to see opera singers highlighted in a science museum exhibit in any way, shape, or form!
And dude, I think I know that guy in the picture (and yes, he is in the biz…)
This is for you opera/theatrical types out there. After being in an acting class this summer, I was curious if iTunes U had any courses on related topics. I discovered that the National Theatre has a collection of video clips on iTunes U on every aspect of theatre, including:
One annoyance I’ve had with the iPad is that normally there isn’t a way to simultaneously listen to YouTube recordings in the background while using other apps. If you try to switch to another app while the YouTube video is playing, the audio will stop. I ran into this situation a couple of time recently: once when I wanted to listen to a Le nozze di Figaro YouTube clip while viewing the Bärereiter score on the excellent Neue Mozart-Ausgabe website, and another time when I wanted to listen to a bunch of Wolf lieder on YouTube while reading their texts and translations on The Lied, Art Song, and Choral Texts Archive (also an excellent site) and consulting a song literature reference book that I digitized and put on my iPad.
I did some Googling and discovered a few ways around this limitation. It may depend on what version of iPad and/or iOS you have. As of this writing, I have an iPad 3 running iOS 5.1.1 (because I’m jailbroken, and like a fool, I neglected to upgrade to the latest jailbroken iOS 6 version (6.1.2) before the window closed). Here are some ways to get around the YouTube hurdle:
Jasmine app, which is an alternative viewer for YouTube and currently available on iOS 6+ only. I’ve heard that it’s supposed to support background audio – but I’ve also seen app reviews suggesting that this capability might have gone away in the iOS 6 version (possibly due to limitations in iOS 6). At any rate, if it doesn’t work, you won’t lose, because the app is free and I’ve also heard several users sing its praises as a great alternative to YouTube’s native app/website.
Play Tube app, which is another alternative viewer for YouTube. This is what I use, since it also supports iOS 5. The background audio definitely works for me. I fire up the video in Play Tube, and once it’s done buffering and actually starts playing, I can switch over to my other apps like forScore, Safari, or iBooks in order to view scores, libretti, and other reference materials while listening to the recording on YouTube. You can also create locally-stored playlists within the app and have those play in the background. I think there is also a way within the app to log in to your YouTube account and create/manage/play the playlists in your account, but I haven’t tried that yet, so I can’t confirm. Sometimes there is a little hiccup in the audio the first time I switch from Play Tube to a different app while the video is playing, but it’s not too big a deal.
There’s also a method for playing background audio from YouTube that’s documented in a number of places on the web and doesn’t require installing a new app:
Double-click the Home button on your iPad to bring up the recent apps bar. The audio will stop.
Switch to the other app you want to use.
Double-click the Home button again on your iPad to bring up the recent apps bar.
Swipe left to right on the recent apps bar until the music controls appear.
Press the play button. The audio will resume and you can now use the other app while the audio plays in the background.
Frankly I don’t like this method as much because it requires more tapping and swiping than just using an alternative YouTube viewer app. Also, you have to go back to the music controls and press the fast-forward button to advance to the next track in a playlist. But it’s useful as a backup method if for some reason you can’t use an alternative YouTube viewer app.
The Flemish Radio Choir took a further step in the digitization process launched in November by the Brussels Philharmonic, neoScores and Samsung. For the first time, the entire production trajectory of a musical score will be carried out digitally: from the delivery of the music for practising at home and rehearsals through the concerts to archiving after the end of the performance.
The conductor, Nicolas André, comments:
I am pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to use the digital scores. The work by Dufay leaves a lot of room for interpretation, and thus evolves in the course of the rehearsals. Thanks to the tablets and the neoScores software, I can mark up the score quickly and easily, and can pass these on immediately to all choir members, who in turn can immediately access the updated version.
Here is a two-minute video (in Dutch and French) from tvbrussel showing the Flemish Radio Choir using the tablets in rehearsal. At 1:19 one of the singers demonstrates annotation on the tablet.
I just created a video tutorial on one of my favorite new features introduced in forScore 5: tabbed viewing of scores. The tutorial also covers the Quick Peek feature which shows you an thumbnail preview image of the score before you open it.
(If you’re new to forScore or this blog, or if you’re just curious about what it’s like to work with sheet music on an iPad/tablet, check out my series of forScore tutorials at http://tinyurl.com/forScoreTutorials .)
I’d like to be more knowledgeable about the anatomy of my vocal instrument. As a first step, I’ve been working my way through this series of YouTube videos from Anatomy Zone. (Check out their whole YouTube channel here.)
The 3D model used in the videos is The BioDigital Human. You can try out a free version on their website, and it’s also available as a paid iPad app.
In case you missed the live stream of Joyce DiDonato’s master class at Juilliard in January, most of it has now been posted on YouTube, courtesy of Juilliard’s YouTube channel. Many thanks to Ms. DiDonato for having the idea to live-stream her class, Juilliard for making it happen, and the young artists in the master class for sharing their art and their learning experiences. Enjoy!
(P.S. Speaking of YouTube, if you read my blog post about downloading YouTube videos on your iPad to watch offline and are using the iCab Mobile browser to do this, DO NOT upgrade beyond version 6.8 or you will lose this capability! Apple cracked down on the developer and forced them to remove this feature. I’ll blog more about this later, as well as which video download app I switched to.)
Last Thursday I had the pleasure of meeting for coffee with Dan Molkentin, co-founder and co-artistic director of SingersBabel, the subscription-based website with lyric diction resources. He happened to be in town for the Music Library Association conference, so we took the opportunity to get together and talk shop. I knew at once that he was a kindred spirit when our conversation ranged from web technology stacks, media workflows, and website project management, to textual discrepancies in different composers’ setting of the same poems, Italianate vs. German Latin, and whether we should be rolling or vanishing our final R’s in German.
One piece of SingersBabel news that Dan shared was that they will be introducing Russian resources to the website in coming weeks. The resources will include multimedia guides for learning the basic sounds of the language, as well as guides for specific texts and repertoire. Speaking of repertoire, Dan tells me that the repertoire guides on the site will focus on choral works and oratorio, with a bit of art song to boot. (Although I REALLLLY hope – pretty please – that they’ll consider bringing some opera people on board to produce diction resources for the operatic repertoire and Italian. There’s an untapped market there, and even if they just did the arias from those ubiquitous Larsen anthologies, I bet they’d get business from a bunch of vocal performance majors and the like.)
We also talked about the recent SingersBabel website testing program, which I participated in. One thing that I discovered in the course of testing is that the website has many more resources than I thought; it’s just that they’re hard to find (and the SingersBabel team is working to rectify that). A sampling of notable resources:
And I really like this video on how to prepare a song text and really break down the text and diction components:
Dan shared some other online music resources with me as well. One of them, Peachnote, is something I’ve been meaning to check out for a while. From what I’ve gathered, Peachnote is a provider of a number of interesting music technologies, but one that particularly attracted Dan’s interest was Peachnote’s platform for collaborative online multimedia annotation of music scores. In plain English, that means that you can use Peachnote’s score viewer to annotate the score with your own text, audio, or video notes and also view annotations that others have added. Here’s a screen capture of Peachnote’s score viewer with annotations:
Peachnote also makes it possible to embed the score viewer in your own website, and in fact the viewer is already in use over at IMSLP with a number of scores. For example, you can go to the IMSLP page for Le nozze di Figaro, navigate to the full score for the overture, and click the “View” button:
The Peachnote viewer then displays the score, which someone has annotated with a YouTube video recording of a performance of the overture:
Dan also tipped me off to the Sparks and Wiry Cries blog and e-zine about art song. (I can’t believe I’ve never stumbled upon this.) From their masthead: “Our mission is to provide a virtual home for the art song community: performers, students, scholars and fans. We endeavor to provoke thoughtful discussion about the extraordinary art of song.” One of their contributors is Emily Ezust, creator and maintainer of The Lied, Art Song, and Choral Texts Archive, and they have a number of other notable contributors as well.
Lastly, Dan mentioned Medici TV, a French website which offers free live broadcasting of concerts, operas, and ballets along with video on demand from their catalog of concerts and classical music documentaries.
Thank you, Dan, for our engaging and enlightening conversation, and best of luck with the SingersBabel venture!
There’s been a lot of hubbub lately about up-and-coming high-tech ways to handwrite music notation into your iPad. In the meantime, let’s discuss some lower-tech (relatively speaking!) methods for writing on virtual staff paper on your iPad. Over the next few posts, I’ll cover some different methods for doing this, starting with the note-taking app Penultimate. Here is my video demo of how to set up Penultimate with staff paper. Note that this is an iPad-only app and it requires paying a few bucks for the app and the staff paper download. [UPDATE 3/24/13: In the comments section of this post, blog reader Brian reports that you can get free staff paper for Penultimate from ipadpapers.com.]
Technology for the Classical Singer 