A little over a year ago, when I dressed up as Bono for Halloween, someone asked me if I could sing a couple chords for him, thereby proving either a lack of musical knowledge, or a misunderstanding of the limitations of human vocal cords. For those who, like him, do not know what a chord is, it is simply any combination of three or more tones played together.
What kind of hit me today, though, (and I find it rather funny), is that whenever we sing, we always imagine a bunch of harmony going on in the background. When you sing your favorite guitar or keyboard part to a song, you can only sing one note at a time, so for any part that has chords or harmonies, you can't actually sing it as it is. This is one reason why when people, like my dad and Jack Black, try to rock out air-guitar style and sing, it's embarrassing.
This leads me to an interesting pondering--when we hear someone singing a song, how much do we fill in the background for people? Does our brain naturally fill in the harmonies? Will we automatically like someone singing a song we know a cappella more than someone else singing a song we don't know a cappella, simply because we can let our brain be the backing band, regardless of whether we really actually like the song? Hmm...
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to sing your own harmonies, though? I mean without a studio. I'm talking to you, Brandon Flowers. You still sound great, though.
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