Latest Blog Posts

Singers seem to be good for many things: Visual Thesaurus just created a database that includes pronunciations:   We’re extremely proud to announce that the Visual Thesaurus now offers accurate, high-quality audio pronunciations for every single word in our database — all 150,000 of them! This was a mammoth undertaking, and the results are unequaled […]

Who needs a choir anymore?  RequiemLight sounds just like one: Requiem Light is based on a variety of new recording- and sampling techniques some which have never before been integrated in choral sample libraries. The library can literally sound like a real choir and includes both full choir (SATB), divisi groups (males/females) and two solo […]

Liz Garnett blogs about Bertalot’s greasy pole metaphor: John Bertalot produces a wonderful description of the rehearsal process in his book How to be a Successful Choir Director. He says:   The leading of practices is like pushing a man up a greasy pole. He goes up with a bit of effort, but slides down naturally […]

All of the record labels turned them down, so they released it themselves.  And now, the recording is tops on iTunes.     Patrick Quigley told ChoralNet about it on Monday.  I thought it needed a little more prominence, so here is the story:   From WMU News: A new compact disc by the Western […]

A Cappella News points us to this: The A Cappella Condom Song is back! In August 2008, when www.condomcondom.org was launched by the BBC World Service Trust as part of its Condom Normalization mass media campaign, it was primarily to showcase the campaign and enable people to download the ‘Condom a Cappella’ ringtone. Within the […]

ChoralNet member Steve Szalaj shares this with the choral community:   Recently, the New York Times ran an article about the Mormon Tabernacle Choir being a part of the first live international satellite broadcast called Operation Telstar on July 23, 1962. The article relates personal stories and the significant cultural/political/social importance of this event against […]

Covey tells us we must “seek to understand” before we can be understood as teachers.  With that in mind, I share this list that I found referenced on Jeff Carter’s blog – the mindset for this year’s freshmen student:   1. Few in the class know how to write in cursive.   2. Email is […]

Malcolm Gladwell says "Our instinct as humans…is to assume that most things are not interesting." in What the Dog Saw, he challenges that assumption with stories of great interest that come from ordinary individuals. We've seen the redeeming aspect of reality television, in my generous opinion, in the discovery that mundane things ARE interesting. Part […]

My new graduate student Peter Haley keeps pushing new sites my way.  First it was the “Sing and Compose” pen and now it is Forvo.   Forvo describes themselves as the “largest pronunciation guide in the world.”   From their website:   Ever wondered how a word is pronounced? Ask for that word or name, […]

It isn’t the latest story, but it is still great news that Chanticleer will sing in Chicago at the ACDA National Conference.   From December 2008: