Howdy Folks.

Mr Wizard and I spent some time at the Real Men Sing course this week. Those barbershop guys are as serious as Opera folks when it comes to getting their vocals in the right spot, with the right tone at the right time. Barbershop is NOT for wusses

One of the topics that came up this week was the way that our accents and pronunciation affect our singing.

La Proffessore Vicky explained that Australians pronounce words such as 'THE' as 'eh', as in 'egg' and that makes it  harder to sing, as there's no Vowel sound to carry the note.

Ah, I see I gotta explain it a bit more. When we sing, the noise you hear is mostly from the vowel sounds.

You cant get much tone on 'ssssssss' (try it!), but on an EEE, OO, A (AYY), III etc, you can move some air and make the nice noises we call singing.

When we say 'A' (hard  AY not 'ah') there's an EEE sound in there - AAAAyeeee (Tarzan come, elecution lesson start).

What fascinated me about this was the use of 'A', in particular. The Australian accent is a tough beast to master, just ask any of the actors around the world trying to get it right. Smirks ensue when locals hear'em, with a few rare (and impressive) exceptions.

Part of that is because of the Hybridised English/Irish/European/You-name-it and yes, even American influences in our spoken English.

We retain a lot of British quirks in our writing and speech (the use of 'our' endings, colour, favour) and in particular, we retain the Soft 'AH', which renders such words as 'Can't' intor 'Kah-arnt' as opposed to the American style 'Kant'.

Ok, what's so interesting about all this? Well, if you've heard us Aussies sing, you'll notice the shift to hard A sounds, almost Americanised accents, especially in Country and Blues style music. I'm guilty of that myself and it makes me wonder whether we are simply unconsciously imitating our influences (in part) or  whether it's because the Harder Vowel sounds (Cant/KANNT) actually hold the note more favourably than our soft Ah's.

So, to put it in a nutshell, do we sing like Americans because of their Hard A's and our Soft Ahs?

:-)

Cultural cringe be damned, it's all about the vowels!