Yes! This is something I've been working on - not for the sake of the M2 mode itself (head voice / falsetto), but because M2 development tends to help with high notes in M1. When I started studying with my current teacher, my M2 felt somewhere between absent or very weak.
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.
Yes, though again, the language around registration gets really messy. Here's a great article (with a great title!) from the Journal of Singing by Christian T. Herbst "Registers—The Snake Pit of Voice Pedagogy": https://www.nats.org/_Library/JOS_On_Point/JOS-077-02-2020-1...
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.
This is cool! There's a lot of bad (and by bad, I mean misaligned with modern voice science and science-informed pedagogy) on the internet, so it's nice to see a resource striving to organize some good information.
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.
I've been using ffmpeg's xgrid filter (similar to hstack and vstack, but allows for arbitrary grids) to produce virtual choir videos for my church choir during covid. Here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oeg9w8X6hrA.
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.
Sorry, we know all the people on your team are good, but you have to fire five of them. And . . . don't bother picking them, HR already did that without your input.
Ha, this happened to me. I found out I was getting laid off before my boss and boss' boss did.
As a gay subscriber, I completely agree with "manly enough without scaring off the metro-sexual or gay crowd." Masculine without being defensive about it.
I think a lot of folks tend to assume others are like themselves. Sometimes difference is obvious: my female and asian coworkers are obviously not white men like me.
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.
I just bought a $69 Nokia Lumia 521 (Windows Phone) off contract. Mozilla isn't at the forefront here - both Nokia/Microsoft and Motorola are driving down the off-contract price point.
Forums are tough. I can see why Apple opts not to participate, although I disagree with their decision. It also seems to be consistent with the Apple ethos to remove overly negative posts and calls to action from the apple.com domain. Again, I don't like this, but I'm not surprised.
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).
Setting the tomatometer to above 0% and the years to 1915-2012 with the filter set to just Gay & Lesbian movies only returns 21 movies. Netflix has 256 Gay & Lesbian movies available for instant streaming, many of which (among the ones I quickly checked) are reviewed on Rotton Tomatoes.
Is there a technical reason for this or is this a bug?