A Gleneagle Digital Portfolio

Third In-Depth Blog Post

Hello everyone! This is my third In-Depth project update. This update has unfortunately come after a few weeks of great difficulty with the project, but I’ve made a lot of progress with the time I had! 

 

There were a number of unfortunate technical difficulties this week, from my audio cutting out during scales so I couldn’t get my voice placed in a range (I was looking forward to that) to my phone dying in the beginning of our last-minute meeting. We had a number of other difficulties on top of technical ones as well. My mentor had an extremely busy few weeks and couldn’t meet at the arranged times, so we held an extra emergency meeting on Saturday and kept in touch about the project via email. It was very effective, and I did still learn a lot despite the bumpy road. 

My mentor assigned me the task of preparing some basic nursery rhymes to sing for her, so she could get a sense for my voice and see how I was with breath control. After hearing me sing Mary Had A Little Lamb and Baa Baa Black Sheep (nice theme, right?) she commented that I had a pretty voice with good vowels and decent breath control, but my pronunciation and attack of words/notes was a bit funky. I discovered two bad habits, “scooping” and pronouncing words like the rhythm instead of the actual word, which I will describe later. I am working on fixing these habits, which is decent progress, and I have a lot more to do, like preparing a recording of one of my original songs to show her next Wednesday.

 My mentor has offered to help me out in the songwriting aspect of my singing tool kit as well, which makes me really happy because that’s why I’m trying to improve my singing to begin with. I would have made an incredible amount of progress had it not been for all of these challenges, but I feel like I’ve overcome them enough to have something to show for these two weeks.

 

As for the “How to Have a Beautiful Mind” area of this project, I feel like I’ve done a lot more to follow the instructions in the book this time around. My mentor is now aware of the Beautiful Mind assignments, and she said she could teach me how to screen record on Zoom to help me do the beautiful mind part of the blog post a bit better. For now I’m using quotes and describing situations. 

For chapter 4, “how to be interesting”, I chose a few of the skills outlined in the chapter. I used the simple “That’s interesting!” response after my mentor talked about how your airway naturally contracts a bit as you reach higher notes. After I said “That’s interesting!”, my mentor added to the point further by describing why it happens and how to deal with it, and if I understood her correctly, it is a phenomenon that you should counteract by trying to open up your voice more. I’m glad I commented on how interesting it was, because otherwise she wouldn’t have inadvertently provided such an excellent nugget of singing wisdom. I like this chapter because it discussed making the conversation more enriching and useful by really elaborating on points and thinking about what you could say to learn more about things. It applied to the project really well and I enjoyed my meeting a lot more because of it. 

For chapter 5 “how to respond”, I used a couple of the agreement strategies in my meeting. At one point in my meeting, I asked for clarification when my mentor managed my singing habit of “scooping”, which is when you ‘attack’ a word by sort of scooping or swooping onto the note instead of just hitting it. That’s a bad explanation, honestly, but I do understand the habit in practice. At first, when my mentor mentioned this, I wasn’t totally clear about it, so I asked her to clarify the meaning of scooping to me and she pointed out places in my example songs where I had “scooped”. She provided an example of a time where I “scooped” and an example of how I could say the word properly. She also pointed out another bad habit where I pronounced words incorrectly while singing, like saying “Lit-tle” instead of “little” (too much emphasis on the first syllable because of the rhythm). I supported this fact because I knew it to be true, with some evidence of other times it happened, and next week I want to come back and make sure I’ve fixed that up where I can. 

 

In conclusion, while I wish I was able to make more progress these past few weeks, I’m really proud of the progress I have made and I’m getting the hang of this project more and more as it goes on. Despite the challenges, I’m making it through this project, and I’m really happy about it. I have attached a Google Drive link that will hopefully contain my singing progress from this week (nursery rhymes without the bad singing habits!) and I’m really excited for my mentor to tell me more about my voice including my range and my other skills and challenge areas. I’m pleased to know my mentor also has the experience to help me out with my songwriting goals and aspirations. I have applied both chapters of my Beautiful Mind book to my project, and I’m learning a lot from it, which makes me excited to go further with this project. I can’t wait for next week and I’m happy with my experience so far.

Thanks for reading my blog post and have a wonderful rest of your day, 

– Bana

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1iXkVXqM-RSoNpvcsIIHcHKkLUS_Ciczf?usp=sharing

• February 16, 2021


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