Musical Theater Character! This week we started working on different extensions of our baseline forward placement (or different extremes we will use to manipulate the way our voice sounds to fit different styles and genres).
With our Musical Theater Character placement, we take parts of our baseline placement to extremes in order to sound more musical theater, and to cater our sound and performance to that of a musical theater song with a strong or subtle character performing it. We use acting techniques with this placement as we treat the song more like a monologue - mapping out how our character would act and/or react to words they are singing (if they're supposed to be happy, spastic, excited, sad, angry). We analyze the way the character should be played - adjust our talking voice accordingly - mapping out our song the same way we would a scene or monologue, with high points and low points.
We then, start to incorporate this new character-like speaking into our song by first, completely talking it out - making sure the energy and voice inflections are what they need to be in order for the character to shine through while we're singing. Then, we slowly elongate certain words and give our song a slightly more melodic feel.