Duet

For a mock assessment, myself and Abi were put into a group to create an accapella duet to a song of our choice that we would have to change/put a fresh twist on, add harmonies and perhaps combine with another song. The song we chose to do was 'Toxic' by Britney Spears after experimenting with several other songs such as 'Fix You' by Coldplay and 'Viva La Vida' also by Coldplay, but decided against them because we felt the style we wanted to go for was portrayed better in 'Toxic'.

We started off by finding the piano chords for the song so we could find our starting notes and decided that we would slow the song right down and make it eerie with lots of dynamics to make it really effective. It was decided that it would all be sung in our head voices as this meant we were able to add slides to notes and really play around with dynamics which would be difficult if we were singing full belt.

We started off with a really soft, eerie tone - with a really simplistic setting and then from the second line onwards we added harmonies and a range of quite and loud dynamics (piano and forte). We experimented with adding another song, 'Mad World' by Gary Jules to sing over the top in some sections but then decided that less is more and the song suited a more simplistic set-up and just stuck with the one song. To suit the simplicity theme it was decided that there wouldn't be much movement involved when we performed it and just arranged to stand facing inwards opposite each other which on reflection and through feedback we realised that we should have added some movement in and changed our stances. I was stood with my hands in my pockets which is not an appropriate stance for singing and performing, however it worked that we were looking at each other and engaging during the performance to judge when to come in to make sure we were completely in sync and this really worked well. If we were to do it again we would add movement, keep the simplicity but add another eerie song into it to add an eccentric twist to it.

CMU105 Musicianship 1A : Meg and Abi Vocal Arrangment