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Be the Music: Creating songs without musical instruments

The original musical instrument, the human voice has come a long way since the first humans used their voices to create music before the invention of musical instruments. Today, there are two ways to create songs using only your voice: you can use technology to record individual tracks and then mix them together, or as a group of singers, each of you can sing individual parts at the same time. Here are a few examples of the best vocal a cappella musicians of our time.

Bobby McFerrin, the Master Vocal Musician

Bobby McFerrin grew up surrounded by music and first became a pianist, accompanist and singer, but eventually selected his voice as his preferred musical instrument. His hit song Don’t Worry Be Happy, reached number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1988 and won 3 Grammys in 1988: Record Of The Year, Song Of The Year and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.

Don’t Worry Be Happy is made up of seven vocal parts that McFerrin performed vocally, recording them separately and then mixing them together.  If you’d like to listen to the individual parts, see how they fit together and maybe even “sing it note for note”, McFerrin’s website provides an interactive web page where you can listen to each of the tracks individually or in any combination you like.

McFerrin continues to perform internationally as a “solo” artist and is able to perform multiple parts simultaneously on his own, as this video of Drive shows.

McFerrin has sung with jazz greats such as Herbie Hancock and Chuck Corea, comedians Bill Cosby and Robin Williams, as well as classical musicians such as Yo-Yo Ma. He sings with a number of vocal groups, including his own, Voicestra, Hard Choral, his trio Bang! and has conducted orchestras across the United States.  McFerrin is also known for his generosity of sharing vocal improvisation techniques, and often tours giving vocal improvisation workshops.

Swingle Singers, 8 voice a cappella choir

Ward Swingle, born in Alabama also grew up surrounded by music and would study piano as a young adult in Paris, France.  He took the idea of scat singing (the vocal jazz technique of singing non-lyrics as an instrument) and applied it to choral singing, yet instead of singing jazz songs the Swingles Singers started off in the 1960s singing Bach compositions written for keyboard, winning multiple Grammy Awards for their efforts.

The Swingle Singers continue to perform and record today, including classical choral work as well as their own versions of popular music from The Beatles, Annie Lennox and Joni Mitchell, to name only a few.  This official promotional video shows the group as they’ve evolved since the 60s.

The Swingle Singers released a new album last week, Ferris Wheel, with their versions of Eleanor Rigby by The Beatles and No More I Love Yous by Annie Lennox.

The Beatbox Choir

Comprised of four of the best of UK beatboxers, and The Swingle Singers, The Beatbox Choir, was featured in a 2007 documentary film, of the same name (The Beatbox Choir), directed by Collette McWilliams.  The film tells the story of bringing together voices from “diverse backgrounds, conflicting musical genres and clashing cultures” to create vocal performances well outside their regularly beaten paths.

VocaPeople

The Israeli a cappella vocal performance group, Voca People, may be wearing funny costumes, may be making funny noises with their voices individually, and may exaggerate their dance movements theatrically and comically, but they are one talented group and collectively, the sum of their parts is quite entertaining.

The Honda Civic Choir

Honda has a choir? This group was formed for the specific purpose of creating a vocal sound track for a television commercial for Honda Civic. The sound track was created entirely using human voices. The musical directors recruited 60 singers, “wrote” the parts (you can buy the sheet music), and conducted the choir.

Honda also produced a “making of” video to demonstrate how the sound track was made. You could use the following video as a guide to learn how to make your own vocal sound effects.

If all of this is too serious for you, here is a little light-hearted parody of the Honda Commercial.

UW Redefined sings Nintendo

If Honda can have a choir, why not Nintendo? Ok, so this isn’t an authorized Nintendo choir, but it has come to be known as the Nintendo choir on YouTube.  UW Redefined is the University of Wisconsin’s 17 voice a cappella group whose repertoire  is mostly comprised of current popular music. They have gained internet notoriety however for their “art piece comprised of original music from Japan”, the Nintendo Medley.

An a cappella tribute to John Williams and Star Wars

This four part a cappella tribute to music composed by John Williams, was arranged by Moosebutter (a singing comedy troupe) and Mr. Tim, and was originally released on Moosebutter’s 2002 album see dee.  Moosebutter has performed it, as well as the Western Washington University Mens Choir, but it has garnered the most success on YouTube however with a lip-sync performance by Coral Vidal (who had help from Moosebutter and the sheetmusic from Mister Tim):

 

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Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir

Sleep by Eric Whitacre, is a standard SATB (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) arrangement and could be considered a traditional choral piece, except for the fact that the singers in the following performance, did not actually sing together.  Singers from around the world recorded their individual parts on video and uploaded them to YouTube. Whitacre mixed the parts together (including the video images) and then uploaded the result to YouTube. The finished piece is shown below, but if you want to see and listen to the individual sections as well as parts, they are available on the Related Videos section on YouTube.

Where’s the scat

We know.  We didn’t mention scat singing - also a technique that uses the voice as a musical instrument. Scat singing is usually performed with musical accompaniment and we will cover scatting (vocal instrumentation/improvisation) in more depth in a future article.

In the meantime, if you haven’t already read Mary’s article on other ways to use your voice “creatively”, it’s waiting for you Crazy Things People do with their Voices.

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