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Pitch Perfect Music Director Deke Sharon On The Secrets Of A Cappella Singing
Deke Sharon has been singing for as long as he can remember - and even before that.
"I would make up little tunes and sing myself to sleep as a baby. As I bounced my head on my pillow so vigorously, they were worried about brain damage."
Sharon made a name for himself in Hollywood as the music director for the Pitch Perfect movies - a series centred around a group of female college students who take on all-comers in the world of competitive a cappella (unaccompanied) singing.
He comes to Auckland in July as a judge for the World Choir Games - but he believes there is a place for all outside the upper echelons of the artistic pursuit.
Singing is "fundamental to the human race", Sharon says.
"Like birds and crickets and whales, we are hardwired to sing. We ... have communicated with tone and with our voices long before we had any kind of language and long before written language."
He laments how singing has fallen out of favour in modern society, "in part as a result of recording music being everywhere".
"People stopped singing and then now they think they're tone deaf and they're absolutely not ... It's just a matter of of learning to to do this skill that we're so fundamentally ... hardwired to do."
Sharon hit his singing stride in secondary school, starting in a vocal quartet before moving on to arranging and conducting.
He says the "nerdy character" in the Pitch Perfect series, Benji, is based on his experiences while at Tufts University, which has a renowned a cappella group, the Beelzebubs.
His initial auditions for the group were unsuccessful because, while he aced the singing part, he was "overzealous" in pointing out where they had gone wrong.
"I had to audition three times and for my third audition I acted like I didn't care. And then they took me."
Sharon wanted to take a cappella singing beyond the "doo-wop, scooby-doo whop" renditions of Eighties pop songs, and started to experiment with using the voice in different ways.
"I started figuring out how do you make a talking drone with your voice and a shaker and synthesisers, and all these different sounds."
He arranged a four-part piece using these techniques, taught it to the group and they presented it at a college performance.
"At the end of the song, the audience was dead silent for, like too long. And I thought, 'Ohhh, no.' And then they jumped out of their seats, like at the end of a movie, screaming. And I was like. 'OK, this is it.'
"I felt like I had lightning in a bottle, I was going to make a career of it and everybody I told just laughed at me. They're like, 'What are you going to do?' People didn't even know what the word a cappella was, but I loved it so much so I just decided to make it work. And here we are, however many decades later."
There is something "very fundamental" about human voices singing in harmony, he says.
"There's a reason every time the holidays rolls around, everybody wants to hear people singing Christmas carols... that spine-tingling, hair-sticking-up-in-the-back-of-your-neck feeling of connection and community is so incredibly compelling."
This is even more so in an age when auto-tune and synthesisers are widespread in pop music, and "have taken over more and more of music to the point where it's become almost robotic".
"I think people really long for that sense of the humanity and the music and the connection between people."
In addition to his work as a juror at the World Choir Games, Deke Sharon will be presenting two workshops - A Pitch Perfect Singalong and another on vocal percussion.
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