Vocal Variations

We discovered today another way that people can tell the difference between us: singing.
We went to do the grocery shopping with Mum today. It was her, me and the munchkin in the car, and on the way there the munchkin went into his repertoire of nursery rhymes. He sang “The Grand Ol’ Duke of York” and then the alphabet and then he was trying to think of other things to sing and settled on “Morning Has Broken” Mum was surprised about this one but Max has a varied stock of both irreverent and religious songs that he runs through and “Morning Has Broken” is one that he has sung for the munchkin, which is ironic as it’s usually a bed time song when it is sung to him.

So, we all three sang that with the munchkin and then he wanted it sung again so we sang it with him. However, I, am never sure of the lyrics and I didn’t quite realize it was a somewhat co-conscious moment for a little while were I was still aware but was not actually the one singing as we finished up the verse.

Mum remarked that there was a tonal shift, and Max went, “Huh? Really??”

So, then there was a bit of tongue in cheek about Max being out and not being directly recognized and all the rest of it; but it got us internally thinking and I realize that there are some of us who don’t sing. Jay really doesn’t/can’t. There’s been some talk of the fact that he is “not musical”. Kiddy likes to dance but she doesn’t really like to sing other than singing along to Shakira, to a point, when she dances–though a lot of that tends to get mangled because none of us speak Spanish. We “clepped” out of language arts after our first year in US schools because we’d had seven years of French and six years of German in the United Kingdom. Unfortunately that also means our linguistic ear is very out of practice.

Anyway, the point was that we realize different ones of us sing differently. I think part of that is to do with confidence in the singing ability/musical ear. Our voice is out of practice but we’re not entirely out of tune. We have the Rock Band ratings to prove it (;P) but at the same time apparently there’s a slight tonal difference, and Jay is apparently very flat when he sings and really doesn’t like to do so but will make an exception and sing “The Alphabet” with the munchkin on game-running nights where he has to put the munchkin to bed. Hubbie doesn’t sing when he takes the munchkin, but none of us can get out of it because it’s something the rest of us have done almost every night. I think the only times it hasn’t happened are those when he’s fallen asleep in the car and not really woken up properly when going to bed. If we’re completely indisposed or not here (on the rare evening date nights) Kore will sing to him. He’s finally starting to grasp that the songs that Kore sings to him we don’t necessarily know as she has a different repertoire, but that’s a different story.

On the other hand I don’t know why it’s surprising to me that we have different singing voices when a lot of us have different speaking voices as well.