Exactly Jim, NONE of your arguement is wrong!!!!! and thanks for agreeing with me. I posted that with a little trepidation yesterday. You and I, and hopefully anyone else here work hard at the honig,tunig, tweaking, perfection and hopefully eventual mastery of our art and craft. And yes people like Sinatra, Dion (eeeeew!) and the rest...they are mouth pieces for someone elses labours, interpreters.

I haven't said the AI fns are stupid, but they are pandering to mediocrity, accepting and even encouraging it. What is this forum about? Songwriters primarily but also composers and technicians, NOT people looking to have their material given to them...ever wonder just how those glossy idols 'write' their whole CD and have it released mere months after their win???

What can be taught is tempo, phrasing (a bit) lyric memorizing, mic. technique, smiling for the camera, what cannot be taught is pitch control,either you have it or you don't...you can encourage and even train yourself to recognize the difference between pitches (higher/lower) but a 'tone deaf' person can never be beaten into awarenes of pitch. Pitch control for someone who is capable can certainly be enhanced. Which is exactly the same thing as a beginner guitar student who can tell something's wrong with the tuning of their instrument, but don't know which string should go up or down.

Most of the technical part of singing comes from the left brain, the words,the syllables, the purely mechanical part. It is the right brain's influence to turn these mechanical bits into song, your right brain has control of your pitch manipulation; modifying and monitoring it and also the inflections and subtleties of that control ie vibrato, volume.

We have a left brain-centric society, one which rewards those who can memorize long pages of facts and figures, who can follow established routines, 'hold the line'; intuition is hardly ever encouraged adn is often dis-couraged in school aged kids. Dance is almost entirely right brained in it's spatial sence ie body position, speed, rhythm, that is exclusively the domain of the right brain, the left brain counts and remember positions.

So singing shows encourage the right brain to inject some intuitive performances into established forms (songs) and the dance shows encourage the spatial sence of body position and control with an original routine each week. The major difference in the shows is that the singers are not given the job of writng a song or two each week,the dancers have to learn new routines every week. The singers stand still (more or less) and the dancers are forced to allow their righ brain to take control and move them over the dance floor. It comes down to copying/imitating or creating,why encourage copying?

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http://visionarysound.blogspot.com