Ashley Hanna, Kim Taylor, and I developed a workshop around singer’s fundamentals of theory and sight singing, beginning the Sight Club. We focused on developing aural acuity and relating visual stimuli to vocal response — more simply, being able to see something indicating pitch and singing the appropriate pitch back.
Using Kodaly solfege and Curwen hand signs, the three of us repurposed a variety of games to establish tonal center, and promote thinking ahead in the music.
Workshop Handout: Sight Singing and Audiation Games
Here you can see one of the games I led, the Soul-fege Train:
You can see how challenging this can be, and this is a with a group of trained, professional-level musicians! This is a great game for encouraging thinking ahead and responding to visual stimuli.
- In the discussion at the end of the workshop, we agreed this would be a great review-type game, where students practice thinking ahead to the next step in the scale. Some variations and extensions we came up with included:
- a variety of scales (major, minor, blues, modes…)
- chords — also good for examining inversions, extensions
- thematic material from new or current repertoire
- anything you can possibly think of!
All of our games are intended to be manipulated and adapted to work with the material. Whatever will benefit the students — and if they get to run around (as is Ashley’s Four Corners or Interval Races games) all the better!