Overview:
Ever wanted to know how to sing and create music using what’s around you? Join artist Tina Stefanou and, through simple techniques, explore what is possible using your voice and the everyday things around you.
The resources on this page provide a step-by-step guide to exploring your voice using everyday materials.
Appropriate age groups/school levels:
The Art Kitchen workshops have been developed to appeal to students and teachers from a range of year levels. Please use discretion when deciding on the appropriateness of each workshop for your students.
About the Artist:
Born 1986, Naarm/Melbourne.
Lives and works in Wattle Glen, Naarm/Melbourne.
Tina Stefanou is an undisciplined artist working across performance, film, music, voice, sculpture, and socially engaged practice. Her work explores the performative potential of vocality to materialise immaterial relations between humans, animals, infrastructures and forces.
Stefanou’s practice moves across disciplines, resisting fixed aesthetics and imposed hierarchies. Whether in a gallery, a paddock, or a public space, she creates work that embraces difference, awkwardness and unexpected connections through voice, film, performance and sculptural interventions. Her film work includes long-term field research in grain country Western Australia, where she develops Agripoet(h)ics — a practice of performative action shaped by place. More recently, her collaboration with blind motorcycle rider Matthew Cassar transforms the rider into a totemic presence, disrupting rigid representational logics and tricks.
“My influences come from my everyday experiences with people and animals around me, my grandmother is a huge influence. Just for the sheer resilience of survival and aspiring to the Australian dream, and what she’s overcome. These things I find really moving. And what moves you is ultimately what inspires you.” – Tina Stefanou
Examples of the Artist’s Artworks on Display:
What you will need:
- Yourself
- Your voice
- A desire to play and experiment
- A resonating chamber, e.g, a cup, tub, bucket, water bottle
Process:
Step 1: Breathing
- Sit in a comfortable position. You may like to sit cross-legged or on a chair.
- Listen to the environment around you, ground your feet in the earth, soften your eyes, and expand your ears as far as they can go.
- What sounds can you hear in the distance? A bird, a car?
- Take a deep breath in and let it out slowly.
- Soften your eyes, soften your muscles, continuing to listen, breathing in and out, slowly.
- Experiment with breathing from both your nose and your mouth.
- Inhale from your nose, exhale from your mouth.
- Inhale with a closed mouth and then exhale from an open mouth. Repeat.
- See how long you can hold your breath for. Whilst you hold that breath, listen to the sounds in the distance.
- Let the breath go.
- At your own pace, give your full attention to how you breathe.
- Is it fast or is it slow?
Step 2: Humming
- Breath in for as long as your breath allows, then close your mouth and produce a tone – ‘Hum.’
- Let it roll out. It’s okay if it’s short or long, slow or fast, it doesn’t matter.
- Hum for as long as you can, as long as your breath allows.
- Allow the hum to sound as clear and as long as possible for you.
- Try changing the note.
- Try a little softer.
- Try a little louder.
- Let’s hum together.
Step 3: Toning (Open and closed mouth)
- A tone is a long note.
- Open – make an ‘ah’ tone, which is your mouth completely opened.
- Relax your jaw, lift your eyebrows, and relax your body.
- Hold the sound as long as you can, without force, relaxing into the sound.
- Closed – while making the ‘ah’ tone, try opening and closing your mouth.
- Opening and closing your month, opening and closing.
- Do this continuously.
- Try a new tone – ‘oh.’
- Try doing it fast and slow.
Step 4: Vocal Register
Slides (up and down)
- The vocal register is moving between your lowest note and your highest note, and everything in between.
- Try a new tone – ‘Mmm.’
- With a closed mouth, slowly move from the lowest note to the highest note by sliding as quickly as you can between.
Bubble (up and down)
- To make a bubble, place your two index fingers on the corners of your mouth and gently push in.
- Now apply sound.
- It sounds like an engine – ‘Brrrrr.’
- Try sliding up and down.
- Try doing this with a hum tone – ‘Humm.’
Wobble
- A wobble can be heard in your voice when you shift between a pitch in a way that is slow and wide. Technically, this is called excessive vibrato.
- Experiment with your vocal wobble.
Zoom
- This sound emulates dirt bikes, tractor noises and cars. The voice can sound like many things.
- All you do is apply the word zoom to the slide, up and down – ‘Zoom’.
Step 5: Vocal Play and Improvisation
- Find a surface or a space that can help you become more than yourself with your voice.
- You may use a water bottle, your lunch box or maybe some equipment in the playground.
- Using that surface as a vessel, try humming into it.
- Listen to it echo.
- Make lots of different types of sounds.
- Experiment and play with the sounds you can make
- Change it from a hum to an ‘ah’, open and close your mouth on the same note.
- Change those sounds. The echo is your collaborator.
- Experiment with wobbling your sound.
- Enjoy the way that it reverberates.
- Listen to it.
Inquiry questions
1. Did you start with a preconceived idea of singing?
2. How did it feel to follow along and make sounds with Tina?
3. How did you find the experience of making sound? Did you feel it vibrate in your body? Which sounds did you enjoy the most?
4. When you began to play and experiment with sound as a vessel to amplify your voice, were you surprised by the sound that your voice made? What were some of the successful vessels used to amplify your voice? Why was it successful?
5. Did this workshop change how you thought about singing and making sound?
