Using a graphic score for music making

Our latest sessions have included 'the carousel singers' experimenting with graphic scores as a means of conveying musical ideas.

The idea was to create marks on paper that can then be interpreted using vocal sounds. For example a wavy line could be interpreted as vibrato or a spiral could be an illustration of dynamics eg. a sound getting louder. The singers had great fun creating then interpreting the drawings with vocal sounds. We incorporated fixed pitch by adding figurenotes symbols for the musicians to play in accompaniment to the voice work. It was a great creative session that I think would work well in many settings either for voice work and/or instrumentation.