Guide Singer practice

This is a presentation made for my students of innovative choir direction at RAMA Choral Center (Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus and Aalborg, Denmark).

After the video, you find a transcript of the voiceover text.

Transcript:

Guide singer practice, also known as mirror singing.

Uniqueness

You are unique, and so is everybody else in your choir or your vocal group. Each of you come with a vast range of different sounds.

How can we explore those sounds, and how can that be a way of showing respect for the uniqueness of everybody?

Agency

How can we respect the agency or the capacity for active participation of each singer, where each singer contributes with their creativity and their willpower together to create a very powerful sound?

Here’s a template for how you can do this type of practice known as guide singer practice.

So each of the singers is unique, and therefore they have different colors in this presentation. The blue singer has the role of being the guide singer, and then everybody else has the task of copying and cloning the expression of the blue singer, and then you get the blue sound. And then you rotate the initiative. The red singer gets the role of being the guide singer, and then you get the red sound, and then you give the task of guide singer or the role of guide singer to the yellow singer, who then has the role of providing musical initiative, which also means that everybody else serves in the role of providing support to the guide singer. Very powerful.

The goal may emerge as a result of the process

In this way, the person with the musical initiative gets support from the others, and it’s a way of showing your respect for the person with the initiative. And when you rotate this type of practice, very interesting things can happen where you actually rarely know what the result will be. So it’s a way to have musical exploration where the goal may emerge as a result of the process, and this is an important cornerstone of the learning system that I call Play It By Voice.

Floor Roof exercises

Let’s take a look at a special case of the guide singer exercises, known as Floor Roof exercises. The starting point for the Floor Roof exercises was things we did with The Real Group. We didn’t call it Floor Roof exercises then, but from things that we did, I have further developed this way of rehearsing into something systematic, that works for choirs also. I have done these exercises many many times with groups from two people to 300 or 400 people.

So here is an overview.

Guide singer leadership with rotated initiative and support.

Musical parameters

Musical factor – many musical factors have a minimum value and a maximum value, and the maximum value is the roof and the minimum value is the floor. It is a way of saying minimum and maximum in an un-boring way, if you will, and then you do an exercise that may take one minute or two minutes or something, and the guide singer has the role of making a change between floor and roof, depending on which parameter, and everybody else has the role of copying and cloning that in real time.

Learning principles with this type of practice:

Experience first, theory and reflection later

This is a type of thing that you can just start doing. You don’t have to give a big explanation first. Maybe say a few words about what type of issue that this exercise is supposed to be a solution to, and then just do the exercise.

You can do it with repertoire so that you apply the principle of the floor roof exercise to an excerpt of your repertoire, or you can do it as a standalone exercise. But it’s a powerful thing to use it with repertoire because then you can get outside of the box with the expression of the song, and then you can get back in the box after having done the floor roof exercise, and then improvement will happen almost always, I would say.

We learn through change

When you give the initiative to a singer to apply change to a musical parameter or musical factor, then change will happen and singers will learn about what that musical parameter is about, and they learn that by doing.

Very powerful.

Playfulness

What is playfulness? I would say it is exploration here and now, and I could even say exploration here and now where you apply change. That is actually improvisation.

I don’t use the word improvisation in this context because sometimes singers can get tense, but if you say, “Apply change to this example and change between floor and roof in terms of dynamics, change between quiet and loud,” every choir singer in the world can do that, and it is an improvisation with only one musical parameter, and that’s a simple task. It’s much more simple than if you ask the singers to come up with a rhythm and a melody and harmony at the same time. That’s a very complex task, but in this case you give the singer a simple task, and actually chances are higher in my experience that playfulness will happen even with inexperienced improvisers. Any choir singer in the world can do this.

Rhythm, intonation, sound and blend, expression

A few examples of musical factors that have a minimum and a maximum value. In other words, Floor Roof exercises can be applied to these musical factors.

For example: tempo.

Of course, you want the singers to be in sync and maybe even have a steady tempo, but the thing is, you learn about tempo when you make change between slow and fast, and you can have a guide singer making that change. It is an intuitive and very physical way of understanding what tempo is, and after you have done that, you can go back to singing with a steady tempo, and then ninety-nine times out of ninety-nine, the tempo will be steady.

Intonation

Note pitch, of course. So how can you apply change between a minimum and maximum? Of course, you change between flat and sharp. You glide with the pitch up and down, like for example you do with the Big cluster, Small cluster exercise, and that’s a way of becoming aware of note pitch. We learn through change. We become aware through change.

Sound and Blend

Voice timbre: dark / bright.

“I’m old fashioned. I love the moonlight. I love the old fashioned things.” (I sing this)

By changing between dark and bright as shown by a guide singer, everybody else have to adapt their whole voice instrument to the guide singer, and this is a way of really understanding what blending is. Very powerful.

Articulation

Also very interesting. Some singers will sing with a small mouth, and how can you inspire them to explore the whole range between small mouth, large mouth, big articulation, small articulation? Well, you can ask every singer to sing with the smallest articulation possible and then sing with the largest articulation possible. That will provide awareness. Singers will become aware of articulation in this way, especially when they have to copy and clone a guide singer who changes the articulation.

Dynamics

This is often the parameter that I begin with when I do Floor Roof exercises: change between quiet and loud. Every choir singer in the world can do this, in my experience. First you sing as quiet as possible, everybody does that, and then everybody sings as loud as possible, and you may need to negotiate this a bit with the group, like asking them to sing even more quiet or more loud, and then you have a guide singer who will change between quiet and loud and everybody will understand not only what dynamics is, but also what dynamics are possible. It’s a way of exploring the range of possibilities, and that goes for all of these factors.

A “database” of sounds

So in this way, you give yourself like a database of sounds for your choir created by the singers of your choir. Again, it’s impossible to know beforehand exactly which results you will get. Very often it may exceed your expectation, so the goal of doing it emerges as a part of the process. Afterwards, you can say, “Okay, so this was the goal: to develop this sound or that sound or that sound,” but it’s almost impossible to have known that before you started. So this is a way where I think exploration can be a very great complement to goal setting.

A problem is not a problem – until it is a problem

Floor Roof exercises work best, in my experience, when you apply a Floor Roof exercise to a problem in your repertoire. If, for example, you do have a problem with dynamics, nothing happens, or singers sing with a super boring standard mezzo-forte all the time, then you can apply a dynamics Floor Roof exercise, and singers get to understand: “Aha, we can sing quiet, we can sing loud, and it feels like this and it sounds like this.” And that’s a way to introduce exercises like this in a way that it becomes easy for the singers to understand why you do it.

But if you anticipate a problem beforehand, sometimes you will actually lose the opportunity of getting the singers on your team with doing this kind of exercise. So wait with the solution until you have a problem. A problem is not a problem until it is a problem.

Motivation and engagement

Why and how this pedagogy can inspire singers’ motivation and engagement:

In non-verbal communication, everyone can express themselves at the same time without chaos to happen. In verbal communication, you have to speak one person at a time. If everyone tries to express themselves at the same time, you will have chaos. You won’t hear what they say.

So in verbal communication, you have to speak one person at a time. In non-verbal communication, everyone can express themselves at the same time, and that’s a fantastically powerful setup, and this is possible especially with singing and dancing.

Build in singers’ interaction with musical practice

– which is just to say what I just said, that in the musical practice, you can build in social interaction actually, and that can help when you get into conflict, which sometimes happens even if your choir singers are the sweetest people in the world.

If you have built in, in the practice, to support the guide singer for example, you’re building initiative and support in the practice, and that is helpful to your social dynamics.

Imago Dialogue

Imagine yourself in somebody else’s situation is a part of various communication practices. Guide Singer exercises are inspired by the Imago Dialogue, developed by Harville Hendrix and Helen Hunt.

The basic exercise of the Imago Dialogue is that you express the opinion of somebody else in your own words, and with guide the singer exercises you do that in a musical way, which is super powerful. Then you can do it later with words as a tool in conflict resolution.

Establish personal boundaries within a safe group space

The safe group space emerges when people feel that they can, and that they are allowed to be themselves and get a sense of belonging. As Brené Brown says, there is a huge difference between belonging and fitting in.

If you have to fit in to be accepted, then you have to change something about yourself. With a sense of belonging, we feel that we belong to the group, but then it’s super important that who you are as a singer, for example, is accepted, and guide singer exercises is a way to experience that.

Also, the person who provides the change to a musical parameter says without words, “This is how I like to have it,” and that is a way of establishing personal boundaries, and you get direct feedback from every person who practices support that they respect the personal boundaries of the guide singer, very powerful.

Give people a framework for how to show respect for the agency of others

This is of course built in: agency, active participation. Everyone is active in this type of game, both the person with the initiative and the people with support, with very clear roles.

Initiative with change

When you have the task of providing initiative and apply change to a musical parameter, then you cannot do that without also expressing your willpower. “This is how I want this phrase to be”; it’s built in, it comes with a package of providing initiative with change. And with willpower comes motivation.

As soon as you express your willpower, you will become motivated, even if you were not motivated thirty seconds ago. And motivation is the mother of engagement, and engagement is the mother of responsibility. So there is a strong connection between providing initiative with change and assuming responsibility for the group. Take responsibility for a lot of things that the choir leader would wish that the singers would assume responsibility for. Congratulations!

A feeling of being heard and listened to

This is of course built in when you show yourself, when you show, “This is how I want this phrase,” and you get that copied and cloned in real time will give you a feeling of being heard and listened to if everybody is in on the game, and it’s very hard not to be in on the game the way it has been set up.

Play It By Voice, playfulness.

playitbyvoice.com is going to be launched in January 2026.

Have fun. Good luck!