>> Well aside from misshapen bubbles which is
a common one, commonly people jut their chin
and click and close their mouth, and that
stops the vowel from forming where ever it is.
>> What would that sound like to us if we're.
>> Aaaah.
Aaaah.
>> As opposed to?
>> Aaaah.
Aaaah.
You can hear the basic geometry shift.
If you put your fingers right here on both sides of
your Larynx you can feel where the vowel is going to be shaped.
If you keep your chin forward and tilted up, you can feel that little stretch.
>> Mm-hm.
>> Now, you fundamentally changed, essentially, you're
taking a trumpet and holding it out straight.
You've got a straight tube, and tilted it off
axis, and that has a profound impact on the tongue.
>> So we can, we can, kind of analyse that by
both listening and by watching what our singers are doing.
>> Yeah, yes.
>> Okay.
>> Another thing that people do is they
tend to spread, so they'll take the vowels [SOUND]
or cover [SOUND], and they're changing the length
of the column of air by extending their lips.
But that isn't the same as actually changing the vowel,
where it needs to be changed, which is in the tongue.
A third thing that people will do
is they'll mis-time multiple combinations of vowels.
For instance, one of the things that you
always run into hear is classically called a diphthong.
>> Mm-hm.
>> A word, for instance, like well we, we talked about spacious earlier.
That's got an eh, e, spacious- >> Yeah.
>> Spacious, and you can, you have choices.
You can either spacious skies where you articulate them
both, that would be the closest to to, vernacular English.
>> Speak English.
>> Or you can in the Latin for instance you
can say In Te Domine where you In Te, In Te
you stop it short of it and you form the eh
sound but you don't eh ee it you don't diphthong it.
So you have a lot of people who will miss form
diphthongs there are even worse ones like ooh like the word down.
Is o, u.
So you have O and W, but you're pronouncing it an and o, and an u.
You have three vowels in there which form that, that word.
And if you go halfway to them in a choir, I mean, it wouldn't matter
if you said down or down or whatever, I wouldn't know what you were saying.
Particularly because we know each other and we would read the context broadly.
But if you and I say it together and you go further into
that diphthong than I go into it, then we have a different vowel envelope.
>> M-hm.
>> And different vowel envelopes mean we have colliding sets
of frequencies, which essentially can never be made to sound good.
Never can be made to sound unified.
>> Yeah.
>> The idea of being in a choir is that A, you have to train.
That's why I mentioned earlier about the vowels.
You train, you vocalize the concept of a vowel
into them, and then you apply it specifically in locations.
The problem of ensemble is managing how you choose to do it artistically.
In other words, are you going to use the
vernacular and sing the diphthong, and if so,
everybody has to change from the primary vowel
to the secondary vowel at precisely the same time.
And even if you don't, if you've decided
that you're not going to sing the secondary vowel,
then everybody has to go right up to it, cut it with the consonant and go on.
It's, it, that's, those are questions of,
advanced questions of ensembleness as opposed to vowels.