That insufferable over-enunciation you get in choir and Broadway

And bad guitar covers.

Some examples here here, and here. It's best exemplified on Glee.

Is there a name for this? Is this how people are specifically taught to sing or what? This kind of singing just sucks all the emotion out of the song like an excessively vibrating vacuum cleaner. Not even that excessive vibrato you get in opera is as annoying or insipid to me.

edited 15th Apr '11 8:09:58 PM by DonZabu

Yes, in choir you are taught that you are supposed to enunciate so that people way in the back of wherever you are can hear you. It makes sense, since in a lot of choirs, you perform in a variety of different places and sometimes they have good mics, and sometimes they don't. I'd know, I've been in choir for over half of my life. Also, I have no idea what's up with the guitar covers, since they don't have much to do with choir or broadway.

Making threads beginning with IJBM to indicate complaining can get you the sort of moderator attention most people like to avoid. This is your warning.

I'd like to note that, in my experience, this doesn't sound "emotionless" so much as "hammy".

...nothing if not consistent.

The first thing that struck me was that at least the a cappella group and the guitar girl both had other, more pressing things wrong with their singing (the girl also avoided singing the "into the light" part completely, which makes me think she can't sing it). Still, while I see what you mean a little bit, would you rather not be able to understand them? Poor enunciation is a mark of a poor performance, and to be honest except for maybe the girl none of the other videos seemed to have that much more enunciation than the originals. When performing live you don't have the luxury of a group in a recording studio; that is, it can't be listened over if you missed something, there's no lyrics pamphlet, you don't know for sure whether people can understand you or not each time, and in the case of broadway shows there's a story that has to be told.

Anyways, when you said over-enunciation, this was the first song that came to mind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htFsdiyxxXM

Which has very strong enunciation (live rather than studio recording, I have it on itunes but I don't know how to upload it) through most of it but certainly is not emotionless.

edited 20th Apr '11 10:10:31 PM by spasticgecko

You especially want to over enunciate in Broadway songs because a lot of the time they advance the plot, so you want to be very clear in your singing so the audience can understand what's going on. The first time I saw Les Miserables I had very little idea of the plot because, even though the leads did a good job enunciating in their solos, the ensemble pieces were a mess of sound because very few people were enunciating clearly.

It's the same for choral pieces; you want to make sure the audience understands the lyrics and what's going on in the piece.

Give me this kind of bell-clear voice over Celine Dion-style "Ah pray you'll be mah eyessshhhh" any day.

Glee isn't usually that bad about it. I don't notice it too much, at least. Though occassionally, they do things like this where they don't enunciate properly that it bugs the hell out of me. (Seriously, someone needs to tell the music director to work on the "e" vowel, 'cause the problem was present in "The Only Exception" and "Firework" too.)

Oh, yeah. They say the "e" vowel like an "a" sometimes. It's weird.

My voice teacher always say go for an "ih" sound.

^ Same.

As said before, over-enunciation has a purpose in choir and Broadway because they need the people at the back of the theater to hear it as well.

This is why you never sit in the first few rows of any live performance. The middle seats are always the best seats in my experience, because they're close enough to be heard clearly and far enough for me to SEE them clearly.

I hate when people try to tape a show and (especially for musicals) zoom in for closeups for entire songs. The stupidest error was when my high school's performance of Footloose was taped, and the camera-guy zoomed in on our leads' faces for every gorram song. Including a song specifically about dance. Because, you know, Footloose.

For some reason, it does grate on me when people sing "angel" and pronounce the second syllable with a short E. Nobody ever does that while speaking, and the schwa sounds fine. Quit it.

Not when Sam Cooke sings it that way. But he was Sam Cooke, so I digress.

Yes, the point is to get people to hear you clearly—enunciation and projection are different things, dear children—but it's still annoying as hell when you have people singing that way without any kind of variation or slur. It's kind of unnatural.

Also, earlier, the guitar cover thing: Am I the only person who thinks that a lot of contemporary musicals come off as incredibly musically lazy? Seriously, what happened to the sophistication in the music? It's like all the modern writers have collectively blocked Bernstein and Sondheim out of their minds for some reason...

edited 9th Dec '11 3:57:53 PM by JHM