Voice forum session

The Folk Song Lab project continues. On September 18th, we had a wonderful Folk Song Lab session. The participants were all members of RÖSTFORUM (The Swedish Voice Forum). In Röstforum there is a form of meeting and sharing called SNACK (it has a double meaning; it means TALK and also like in English SNACK).

SNACK is a kind of informal form of meeting and sharing knowledge within the community of the voice: Singers, Pedagogues, Logopeds, Voice Physicians, and Researchers.

We had a wonderful session together, improvising both Shadowsinging, Q&A and also some pulse-based improvisation as well.

Also did some presentation of Folk Singing Style – Hence the computer!

In Oslo

At the @ARK23 Symposium, a Keynote with the perspective on Folk Song Lab, Artistic Research and Process was presented. The Symposium was situated at the Kristiania Univerisity College in Oslo. An interested and knowledgeable audience commented on and interacted in the presentation. Also listened to some interesting presentations and had time to tour the facilities. A great day!

Folk Singing Symposium presentation

Presentation of the project findings at the Folk Singing Symposium 24-25 February 2023 in Sheffield, England.

Here is a link to the online presentation:
https://youtu.be/p6-h7fL6hOk

Improvising Folk Songs – The Folk Song Lab project | Susanne Rosenberg

A presentation of the findings in a research project called Folk Song Lab. Folk Song Lab acts as a platform for improvising folk songs in a collective setting in sessions starting from the cognitive framework (Rosenberg, 2019) of ballads, lullabies, folk chorales, and herding songs. It also takes its starting point from B. H. Bronson and A. Lord, indicating that the song only exists in the act of singing. One question asked in the project is what new skills can be acquired with this approach. Another question is how to use different memory systems, system one or system two (Kahneman, 2013) when improvising lyrics and melodies. It explores the possibility of creating artistic methods for flow, using play, risk, mimicry, reorientation, feedback, and real-life situations based on the findings of psychologist Csikszentmihalyi (1990), to nudge the participant to end up in the flow channel, being able to create more freely. A Folk song lab session is about improvising folk songs in a collective setting. Group size can vary from 5 to 40 participants, and a session lasts at least 40 minutes. In the session, everybody contributes by improvising and listening, taking turns, or improvising simultaneously. 

New article about the project

A new article about the project Folk Song Lab “Improvising Folk Songs: An Inclusive Indeterminacy” is published in the Contemporary Music Review. The article can be found here. Read about methods, concepts and findings so far.
This is the first article of more to come summarizing the project so far.

Figure 2 Mirror singing with closed eyes in a session of Folk Song Lab. Photo by Heikki Tuuli.

Den Signade Dag – Christmas meandering

Folk Song Lab in a session trough the internet by Aloha By Elk

It was delightful to improvise in duos on the lyrics to the folk chorale ‘Den Signade Dag’. Using the method ‘Meandering’. A lot of ornamentation and melismas later we had this version – it’s combined by two different duo-sessions. The singers are:
Maria Misgeld, Susanne Rosenberg, Eva Rune & Sofia Sandén. The video is created by Susanne. Enjoy!

Imprint – Meandering

After last week experiment with the method Imprint, we continued with our experiment in the inner circle of Folk Song Lab.
By recording our own versions, from the cognitive frame of the song that Eva taught us, we recorded separate versions in solitude on our respective computer, like doing a Meandering session, but by ourselves.

Then by stacking the sound files onto each other, as if we have sung them together it resulted in this. Like making music together – which we didn’t 🙂

Quite amazing!