Singers: Do you harmonize "by feel"?

[Little_Bird]

I can’t sing harmony by ear. It makes me sad. I was a BIG singer in HS, I was in the regular and auditioned choirs both years, went to the contests and brought back a number of 1s and 2s (even solo, yay!) and always in musicals (always a soloist, never a lead. :P). I can pick up a melody/harmony by listening to an accompaniment and once I learn my part I never miss a note. But I can’t do that nifty harmony-by-ear thingie. My friends could, and it made me really jealous. Oh well. I could kick all their harmonic little butts, so it wasn’t so bad.

[amarinth]

It depends on the song and me, and the time, and a bunch of other factors - sometimes, I do just know where the harmony is, and I can sing it. Sometimes, I can just sing along with someone else, sometimes I need to see the music a few times, sometimes I need to follow along exactly with the muic all of the time, and sometimes, it doesn’t matter there’s no way that harmony is ever going to come out of my mouth.

[iampunha]

*Originally posted by rivulus *
Tavalla’s mention of Handel brings another thought to mind. Much classical vocal (and instrumental) music is too complex to improvise harmonic lines. Once you get to anything more tricky than hymns or other basically diatonic music in homophonic textures, then singing by ear becomes less useful that being able to read the written music. So there is little incentive to listen in a way that would foster improvisation.

The fun part, though, comes when you know the music well enough, or when you can predict where a piece will go. With some music I’m able to tell where the piece will go and plan ahead. I think it’s just because a lot of music is very similar.

I’m not really up on popular music, but I suspect that harmonies may be easier to predict. From what little I’ve heard recently there seems to be a fair amount of parallel motion, movement in thirds, repetitions of harmonic patterns and so on. That kind of music would be more amenable to improvisation of harmony.

Oh, it can be painfully easy. A lot of pop music is tunes similar to those that people have already heard. For example, if you listen to “More Than a Feeling” by Boston, and then a couple Backstreet Boys songs, the tune is almost exactly the same. Sort of like that whole Vanilla Ice thing;)

[royjwood]

I have sung solos duets, trios, quartets, and well, you get the picture.
I can read treble cleff music only as far as playing the piano or the trumpet, but not for singing. I can match just about any pitch from baritone to high tenor, with no problem.
But what I find enjoyable, as well, is to harmonize just for fun. Since I can only read music well enough to know to go up or down, but not how far, I always harmonize by ear.

I love to sing, some of the most popular requests for me is “The Holy City”, “Oh Holy Night”, and “Ave Maria” (in Latin). That may give you an idea of whether or not I actually can sing, and what my range is.

I wish you many more singing pleasures.