April 2025

Our final rehearsal of the year was last night and it went with a blast! The choir sounded incredible and we’re set to go to Whitstable this Saturday to feature in en Choir’s annual summer concert along with the brilliant house band with Matt Hodge on percussion and Akos Hasznos on bass. Doors open at 19:00 this Saturday, 22 July and we hope to see you all there!

It is hot, hot, hot – that can only mean one thing! We are back for a summer term of singing our hearts out and melting in the sunshine (it’s a good job our rehearsals are in the evening)! From now until the end of July BIGMOUTH are back and rehearsing vigorously for a very special occasion. We are featuring for the first time with en Choir at a summer concert on Saturday 22nd July! Tickets are still on sale so grab yours before they run out! As always, feel free to come down to a free trial rehearsal, or contact us with any queries.

Late last week, some of us were joined by other community singers at Turner Contemporary in Margate for a performance of Birds and Other Stories, a composition by choir leader, Emily Peasgood. The notes sung were worked into a drawing known as a graphic score, pictured to the right, and was created by Emily and illustrator, Joe Inkpen. The performance has been dubbed a success with a large audience and we are now left waiting on the edge of our seats to see what Emily does next! Please feel free to contact us with any queries.

The voice of every individual is as unique as one’s fingerprint. While your Alexa might not be able to tell the difference between two people, the human ear is certainly capable of pointing out differences in voices. So what creates these differences and what do the differences mean for our singing?

Firstly, the biggest factor in shaping your voice is your training. A good singing teacher can near enough get anything from a singer with time, dedication and persistence. There’s very little that will stop most people being able to hit a certain note, though there are outliers and some biological limitations that should be seen as gifts rather than limits. Obviously, if someone has a naturally low voice, there’s not much point learning to sing solely high notes, especially when good bass voices are hard to find.

An untrained singer would be lucky to have a single octave range whereas your average singer taught with traditional technique should have about two octaves, with broader ranges certainly possible.

As one stretches the vocal cords, they become more pliable and able to vibrate at different speeds, however you will also develop your mind-muscle memory and build the connection and control needed to precisely manipulate your voice.

The other major factor in determining ones vocal cords is, as mentioned above, genetics. Some of us will naturally be predisposed towards a lower or higher voice. This is due to thicker, longer vocal cords or thinner, shorter cords. Shorter, thinner cords are able to vibrate faster, producing a higher tone.

Gender plays an important role in this genetic component. By the time the average person is an adult, their vocal cords will be between 12.5mm and 17.5mm long if they’re a woman, and between 17mm to 25mm long if they’re a man. This means most female voices will lean towards a slightly higher untrained register than a male voice. Gifted, lucky individuals such as Nina Simone will fall in this crossover range.

However, what’s more important than range is the quality of tone. There’s no sense being able to hit the broadest range of notes if the underlying voice isn’t pleasing to the ear. Trained singers, like our choir members, have developed their voices to bring out the best of their natural quality. The human singing voice is so much more than the number of notes someone can hit, it’s warmth, control, character and so many more qualities.

Perfect pitch is one of the most enviable talents a musician can possess. It is the ability to identify and recreate a note, though it comes in two forms.

The first is absolute pitch, the ability to recreate notes without using a reference point. Someone with absolute pitch would be able to identify the note produced by everyday sounds such as a car alarm or could recreate a piece of music perfectly. It’s is believed to be a very rare occurrence with estimates suggesting that 1 in every 10,000 people possess the trait.

The second is relative pitch, which is the ability to work out the relation between two notes by using a reference note. For example, someone could play a reference note, like middle C, and then play a second sound which the listener could identify based on the reference note, i.e. “two octaves above middle C”. Unlike absolute pitch, relative pitch is a fairly common skill amongst music students, as it is the same skill we use to sing melodies by ear.

A lot of people idolise absolute pitch, not realising that they have exercised a form of perfect pitch already While absolute pitch is widely believed to be a natural skill, relative pitch is a skill almost anyone can learn. In fact, with extensive ear training it’s even possible to learn a pseudo-absolute pitch by building a relation between the name of the notes and the sounds they produce. People who have been exposed to music from an early age can develop this skill, muddying the waters about whether absolute pitch is quite as innate as some think.

In fact, a recent study on absolute pitch suggests that it may not even quite as absolute as it sounds. In the experiment, a student with absolute pitch was instructed to play a tune on a keyboard while the notes were secretly made flat as he played. When they notes were reset, the student believe the notes were sharp. This shows the perception of notes can be skewed.

Perhaps the bigger question is instead whether we need absolute pitch, and the answer is “probably not”. It’s certainly useful but most of us learn by ear and develop our relative pitch. In an age with pitch pipes and digital tuners, we always have easy access to reference notes to give us a proper starting point. It’s more important to worry about your familiarity with notes than someone else’s possible ability to work out notes, and to spend time practising (possibly within the context of a choir) to maintain your memory of these notes.

BigMouth Chorus is a friendly and innovative non-audition singing group in Thanet for anyone aged 14 and over who loves to sing.  You don’t need experience to take part and don’t even need to think you can sing!  Our role is to support you in believing you can while having a great time. Get in touch if you or someone you know would like to join a fantastic and fun choir.

We’ve spent some time before talking about the history of singing. We know it’s been a part of human history since before humans were even recognisable as such, but what about recording? When was the first recording of a human singing?

Recording technology hasn’t been around all that long. Though some people have hypothesised a kind of archaeoacoustics, reading waves of sound etched into clay pots as they spun, though this idea has fallen out of favour.

Many people have believed Thomas Edison held the record for the earliest actual recording, in 1877 when he recorded “Mary Had A Little Lamb” on his new phonograph. However, this was not the first recording. What it actually was, was the first recording which could be played back. The phonograph accomplished this by etching sounds into a tinfoil sheet wrapped around a wax cylinder. These early machines were quiet and produced a more nasal tone than the sound they reproduced.

But if this isn’t the first recording, what is?

The answer seems to be a recording made on April 9, 1860 of a woman singing the French folk song “Claire De La Lune”, recorded by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. This recording was never meant to be played back – technology at the time just wasn’t there but with more modern methods of interpreting sounds, we’ve been able to extract the sound.

The original recording was made on a phonautograph, a device that transcribes a waveform onto paper. As this was a hand-cranked machine, the pitch and timing of the recording fluctuates throughout and produces an eerie warbling that probably wont be making it onto anyone’s gym playlist anytime soon. In fact, recordings from 1867 have been uncovered but their lack of regular timing means we are not yet able to accurately identify the speed at which they should be played in order to accurately represent the quality of recording.

As our technology improves, who knows where we’ll be able to pull sound from. Perhaps the idea of clay pot recordings will eventually yield a result or maybe we’ll find sound hidden in some other, deep, unexplored way.