How much does the concept of culture affect our way of singing and vice versa?
One of the questions I always asked myself since I started singing is: How much does the society I live in, including its capacity of create culture, affect the quality of my sound when I sing?
Listening closely to the recordings of my concerts, I often noticed that in my voice there is the presence of some inflections derived from the dialect of the region where I was born and where I live in: Piedmont. Over time, thanks to my professional experience, I understood that the influence of a specific culture is not only expressed in artistic externalizations but also in teaching methods that change according to the place where you teach.
Starting from this introduction which might seem banal, I would like to talk about a famous British anthropologist: Edward Tylor who is considered the father of the contemporary anthropology. He defined the concept of culture
Culture is a complex whole that includes knowledge, belief, law, morals, customs and art.
What is the meaning of this explanation?
Taylor defines culture as the understanding of people’s habits as members of a society in which religion, language, rituals and of course music can determine the evolutionary process of the society itself.
why is singing definable as culture?
As you know I am a learning methods and scientific research enthusiast, for this reason the reading of various treatises by Edward Tylor led me to deepen the comparative methodology field developed by Tylor himself. As mentioned above, language is an integral part and vehicle for the evolution of the concept of culture and it can influence the way we sing and express ourselves. In this sense, from an acoustic analysis point of view, we can find the presence of altered vowels and consonants derived from the use of various idioms in which these alterations are common and for this reason we find them in speech and therefore also in singing expressions.
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