Typical

I'm having unmistakable symptoms which signal the beginning of a sore throat, possibly with accompanying cold:

Difficulty swallowing
Headache
Aching eyes
More than the usual muscle pain/discomfort
"Tight" feeling in the neck/throat
Sleeping more than usual/tiredness
Difficulty concentrating/thinking/remembering anything
Pain on high notes

Which is just what I need when I have a concert on Saturday.

If you're around on Saturday evening you should come along - Mozart's Requiem and Faurés Messe Basse and Cantique de Jean Racine (all of which I like). 7.30pm, Firth Hall, Western Bank, Sheffield. Should be fun.

I must be ill. It's 9.30 and I want to go to bed - that's very much not normal.

You know, I learned something yesterday

Went to a singing workshop yesterday, run by my conductor Pete and our accompanist Robert, both of whom are singing teachers as well as conductors.
The first half was Pete teaching us how to breathe, warm up, etc. (most of which I already knew but always useful to be reminded), how to sing with different parts of the voice, how to sing louder, and most importantly of all for me, how to sing high notes without that horrible closed up squeaky nasy-sounding effect I usually get on anything higher than a top F (and sometimes get on lower notes than that).

Sometimes I do high notes quite well. There are times in rehearsal when we're warming up by singing scales which get successively higher, and I can manage to keep up with the sopranos almost all the way. I mean it doesn't sound nice, but I can do it.

But with the tips and techniques Pete gave us, I reckon I've added a whole lot of notes to the top of my range, which still sound good - and it was easy. Apparently it's always been there, I just didn't know how to do it before. Watch out sopranos! I might test myself later and see how high I can actually get, because it's always good to know.

Oh and I added a tone to the bottom of my usual range as well, but I don't know how I did that. Now I can sing almost all the notes in the tenor range (I can sing down to a low E, and the bottom of the tenor range is a D), and I've reached my actual physical limit. Cool.

The second part was Robert teaching us sight-reading, with a lot of useful short-cut type techniques. Now when I joined SingSoc 3 years ago I was awful at it, but I've definitely improved a lot since I joined (particularly when a certain alto who always got everything perfect left and I could no longer just listen to her and sing what she was singing).

I think my main problem in the past has been over-reliance on my ear, which has always been very good. I always learned everything by ear because I could - however in a choir you often don't get anything played to you unless you get it horribly wrong.

We went thought loads of exercises yesterday, of the type you get when you take instrument/voice exams at Grade 4 and above. The first ones I didn't find too tricky because they were just pitching notes - this gave me confidence because I thought I'd struggle.

I did struggle on the next bit though, when we moved onto actual pieces of music - I had trouble with doing pitching and rhythm at the same time. I blame it on being tired after all that work though, because I usually manage better than that with more difficult music. I'll try the exercises at home and see how I do when I'm not exhaused

In general, I feel much more confident. I mostly held my own with people who had much more musical experience and knowledge than me (if not singing experience) which means I'm better than I think I am.

And I also learned something important about sight-reading - I perform much better when I relax a bit, and stop working so hard. There's a part of my brain that knows all this stuff fairly well, and I should just stop thinking so hard and let that bit do the work for me.

More on the synesthesia thing

So I've been thinking about this some more tonight, especially as a friend of mine told me she's read my last post and that she has coloured numbers.

I was discussing the number form/coloured numbers thing with Michael when I came home (he has a day form too, and an alphabet form) and realised that there are some numbers and letters which have an associated colour in my head. I didn't know I did this.

It isn't at all strong, and I don't "see" the colours in the way that I "see" the positions of days - I just have a "feeling" that certain colours go with certain numbers and letters. I don't feel uncomfortable if those letters/numbers are printed in the wrong colour, but if I was to choose colours for them to be printed in, I'd tend to pick the same ones every time. I can easily ignore it since it isn't that strong.

A is red. C is yellow, D is green. F is purple. G is brown. H is green. M is dark blue. Lower case n is green, but upper case N doesn't have a colour. S is white.

1 is white. 2 and 3 don't have colours. 4 is dark red, 5 is a mid blue. 6 is pinkish purple, 7 is green, 8 is blue (but a lighter blue than 5), 9 is pink. Bigger numbers don't have colours either, but the digits that make them usually do. (The colours I've used here aren't the exact shades by the way, just the closest ones I could find on the text palette).

Some musical notes have colour as well. It's not the actual pitch that gives it colour (they don't change colour if someone plays the music in a different key or whatever), just the position on the staff. Some correspond to the colours of their letter, like the yellow C. But some are different, like the D under the staff (brown).

Interestingly the E on the bottom line is blue, but the E on the top space is white. A is red like the letter, but the As above and below the staff (not shown) aren't coloured. The F way below the staff (the lowest note an alto can reasonably be asked to sing) is dark green, the F in the bottom space much lighter mint green and the top line F isn't coloured. The higher D (second line from the top) is dark purple.

Weird, isn't it?

The shape of time

Well I said I'd draw my day and month forms, so here they are.

Apologies for the poor quality, i used my new digital pen and I haven't had chance to play with the software much yet.

The colour of my life at the moment...

... is red.

I've been trying hard to find a particular yarn for a custom order. One of my return customers wants four knitted hedgehogs made in "Santa" colours - a bright scarlet red with white.

Now I have probably 6 or 7 hedgehog-friendly yarns in red, but all bar one tend towards crimson and more purple kinds of red. Typical. Actually it's probably that way because I prefer purple to orange, so I've picked out reds that reflect that.

I'm also making red beads at the moment, because I've sensed an opportunity to sell jewellery to the girls in Ladies' Choir. We wear black in concerts, and try to wear red jewellery. Several people have mentioned that they don't have anything red - so that's where I come in! I have three necklaces ready so far, hopefully should get a load more done over the next few days.

Bear with me - this seems irrelevant but it's not. Sometimes I look up something on Wikipedia, and while I'm reading the article I'll open up links that interest me in other tabs. When I finish the article I close the tab, and move onto the next tab, and do the same thing. It's kind of like surfing, except I end up in loads of different places at once. Often I just mean to look up a couple of subjects, and end up spending hours reading page after page - I call it "falling into a Wiki Hole" (see also Wookey Hole - nothing to do with Star Wars - and K-hole).

I fell into one when looking up the word red, just to check out if there were other good words I could use.

Somehow that lead me to the page on virginity, but that's not what I wanted to talk about.

While on the synesthesia page, I made a not-really-very-surprising discovery. I have a form of synesthesia. I'm not going to explain what synesthesia is, follow the link!

I have number form synesthesia, specifically for days of the week and months of the year - each day or month has a position on a circle for me.

Days follow this pattern: the week forms an oval shape, wider than it is tall. Wednesday is exactly at the bottom of the oval, Saturday and Sunday at the top. The days run anti-clockwise so Monday is on the left and Friday on the right, and the weekdays are closer to each other than they are to the weekend.

Strangely, the months run clockwise, unlike the days. The year is a circle, not an oval, but the months are unevenly spaced. December is at 9 o'clock, April at 12 o'clock. July is 3 o'clock and 6 o'clock sits just between October and November. And for some reason, I can't help by think of December as the start of the cycle (it's in the same position as Monday).

Maybe I'll draw my day/month forms so you can see more clearly what I mean.

If I know that Tuesday is the 13th for example, and want to count forwards so many days, I see the oval in my head as I count, and the numbers fit into the form in the right positions for the days. if that makes any sense.

I discussed this with my mum fairly recently, and was surprised to find out that she has the same thing, except her days and months both run clockwise and Monday and January are at the top. Whick is kind of logical, because she's reflecting the clock face.

Anyone else experience this? Or something similar?