caryme

Typically exercises I work on for M2 start with an SOVT (typically straw phonation, puffy cheeks, or water bubbles) and then transitioning to an [u] vowel on a five note descending scale. For me, at least, while this can be very unstable depending on the day, M2 is much more easily accessible with an SOVT.

You might also start with a gentle SOVT in M1/chest and siren up as high as is comfortable without pushing/pressing or trying to be loud. Don't think about registration, just let it go - SOVTs tend to let the voice go where it wants easily.

Highly recommend my teacher's book: https://www.pluralpublishing.com/publications/a-systematic-a...

One relevant excerpt before the article goes into several pages discussing M11 vs M2:

> These four laryngeal mechanisms are typically termed as: vocal fry (M0, pulse register); chest voice (M1, modal register); falsetto (M2, head voice?); and whistle register (M3).

Another article by Dr. Ingo Titze (an icon in the field of voice science and basically the father of SOVTs) about the debated "mix" register, starts this way:

> One is called chest voice, full voice, or modal voice, which is described by a vibratory mechanism that some have labeled M1. Acoustically, harmonic energy above the fundamental dominates the sound spectrum in this register. The other anchor is called falsetto or light head voice, which is described by a vibratory mechanism labeled M2.

(from https://vocology.utah.edu/_resources/documents/mixed_registr...)

A couple recommendations I'd suggest exploring to be even better aligned with current understanding:

Current literature does not distinguish between head voice and falsetto. While "falsetto" often carries a connotation of breathiness, that is not inherent to the register. Both are referred to in literature as laryngial mode M2, in which the Cricothyroid muscle is dominant in shaping the vocal folds. In contrast, chest voice or M1 is Thyroarytenoid dominant. While that may be a bit in the weeds, I found wrapping my head around this very helpful in cutting through a lot of confusing language around head voice .

Use of these different registers changes across genre and voice type. Classical sopranos and mezzos use head voice in their upper range, while musical theatre sopranos and mezzos bring their chest voice up (i.e. belting). Meanwhile, tenors and basses typically use chest voice for their full range in both classical and musical theatre genres, with much more use of head voice in pop/contemporary genres.

One other suggestion is to more prominently feature SOVTs (semi occluded vocal tract exercises). You reference them in your warm up section (lip trills and straw phonation) but these are highly effective and evidence-based tools to develop efficient phonation.

Further, for anyone looking to learn to sing (and anyone can learn to sing!), there's no better resource than a voice teacher. Most teachers nowadays teach online as well as in person. A great place to start looking for a teacher is through NATS or ICVT.

Here's the face-aware crop script (somewhat quick and dirty - I haven't moved the output dimensions to CLI arguments yet): https://gist.github.com/carylee/62dbe19579ed9fa1714a3635ff0b...

Here's an example script for stitching the output video: https://gist.github.com/carylee/a13ae1a1ecb2f81c6536476f6dfb...

And here's the resulting video (text was added later by a different editor): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7Pm4nLPslY

A lot of people are producing virtual choir videos right now, but I suspect few use a process similar to mine. I use Audacity to edit the audio separately, then crop the input videos using a face-aware cropping script (which uses https://github.com/ageitgey/face_recognition), then generate a video grid using ffmpeg + xgrid.

Ha, this happened to me. I found out I was getting laid off before my boss and boss' boss did.

Sometimes we assume others like the things we like. This year, I got a secret santa gift of an inflatable portal 2 turret. Although I'm a software developer, I don't play video games; the gift was lost on me.

When we're talking about diversity, we need to move beyond assuming homogeneity and seek to understand and celebrate difference. Getting there can mean visibility, and that can be tough.

Gay people, bi people, trans people, and some people of color can fade into the background if we don't make our presence known. Wearing that rainbow Mickey at a conference could mean a lot to a queer person who feels alone in the tech world.

I think that a lot of people in tech have experienced growing up being different. Different in some way that made people uncomfortable, didn't help them fit in, and possibly got them made fun of.

At least so far, I've found the tech world a pretty easy place to be gay. But I do make sure to come out early at every place I've worked. Not only does it avoid any awkward (for both parties) questions about a girlfriend, it helps us move toward a world where we celebrate our differences.

At Microsoft (at least on my team) we are encouraged to be active in our forums. We use them to keep a pulse on the issues we are having, identify bugs out in the wild, and get feedback on our products. We may sometimes sound a little robotic, since we're not going to divulge insider info or participate in arguments, but we are listening and trying to help (and attempting to figure out what is actually happening on peoples machine's, which is tough). We also provide feedback to our customer service folks in the forums, giving them answers to common problems we do know about and identifying when they provide misinformation and correct that.

I suspect that Apple reads their own forums but doesn't respond. The optimist in me says they're investigating this Wi-Fi issue due to the noise in the forums. They may not have or know a good workaround or at-home fix at this point. And frankly, it's really difficult to get any useful diagnostic information from folks in the forums (especially angry ones who turn to personal attacks on engineers - been there, done that for me on answers.microsoft.com).

http://hanging.chads.arelikefacebook.com/

Is there a technical reason for this or is this a bug?

What he's referring to as a dash is actually a hyphen (-), which is pretty ambiguous when compared to the en dash (–) and em dash (—), both of which require modifier keys to type (and are frequently used in prose, to counter another of his claims). Fortunately, I've never seen em dashes or en dashes used in code.

By charging for their search API, I would just say that Microsoft is beginning to take their API seriously. It seems pretty clear that minimal resources, if any, were dedicated to the free version.

I'm bummed, because I've found relative success using their news search api (particularly for the article aggregation component of http://www.congressionalprimaries.org/), and now we'll have to look into alternatives, but if this means actually providing a decent product, I think this is a good move for Microsoft.

Microsoft's efforts to create a truly equal workplace and community for me played a significant role on my decision to accept an offer there (note: I don't say this at the exclusion of other companies who make similar efforts).

The irony with this is that the men who are honest about having sex with men are also more likely to be aware of their HIV status than men who lie at the blood bank.

I feel the same as nostromo every time I am asked to give blood. I know I'm HIV-negative. I'm not South Asian, so I couldn't help Amit anyway.