Binbou Shimai Monogatari 08: This series should have been a musical September 3, 2006
Posted by hayase in *Binbou Shimai Monogatari*.trackback
*Project Raw
The skies are dark, I’m not doing overtime today, so ’tis a great day for blogging! Now on to BSM proper.
Our slice of life problem for today is: Asou can’t sing! Or rather, her rendition of songs leaves much to be desired. The pressure is on her, since her classmates think she can do anything, they also expect her to be good at singing. So our little achiever feels stressed, and what should she do?
Enter a new neighbor, Ichinokura (?) Masao. The guitar-playing boy-next-door makes his first appearance. Our boy is actually the one making the strange sounds that scared Kyou some nights before.
Ok so it’s predictable from the beginning that yeah, Asou would be taking voice lessons from guitar-boy. But of course, getting a good voice isn’t that easy. But shouldn’t they also take swimming lessons too, like what Koyuki did in Beck? The sisters doing push-ups and curls are so unsightly. =p
But after Asou gets that singing voice it’s all downhill from there. Masao disappears for a week to add more drama, his fangirls come looking for him, Asou puts on another oh-dramatic-face, but then minutes later Masao is back playing his guitar.
Regarding the title of this post, yeah perhaps if this series were a musical it might be more watchable. The pink thingies wouldn’t be so out of place and annoying. But then again since the poor sisters’ voices weren’t golden from the start, it would have been impossible to make a musical lol.
Anyway, perhaps the reason why I’m still watching this show is that I wanted to know if I could still get the gist of the story even without subtitles. You really can’t be bothered that much with the story if you’re also busy trying to understand what the characters are saying. And when I say I’ll finish something, I really try to. This anime is only 10 episodes, there’s only two more to go, and then I’m gonna be freed from watching pink thingies!!!
Believe it or not, the voice training here is genuine. I have had some formal vocal training as well, and various physical exercise was demonstrated in some of my lessons. Many people simply don’t have good enough control of muscles around their diaphragm, thus need some exercises to increase both the strength and control of those muscles. I also liked the fact that they got the pitches right for the keyboard; yes, I have good enough tone memory to mimic perfect pitch.
But can that training have immediate effect after only 1 week? Asou seemed to have gotten her singing voice in under one week, if I remember correctly.
The key word here is control, not mere strength. Acquiring or improving control over some muscle takes less time than noticeably strengthening it. For some people, just 3 one-hour sessions can have big impact. Once people learn to control general pitch of their voice to mimic the sound they hear, what was random noise before suddenly turns into understandable music. Even for someone like me, who sings in choir specializing in unaccompanied choral music, would benefit greatly from individual voice lessons from qualified instructors, and since it has been more than a year from the last time I had one, you will hear noticeable difference in less than 5 sessions.
Believe it or not, it is those people who either thinks that they are already a good singer, or whose idea of singing is making as loud noise as you can, that won’t benefit from these lessons easily, for their muscles already have fixed responses that is very difficult to UNTRAIN.
Hehehe I have almost nil knowledge about the workings of singing properly so that’s nice info you got there. Thanks =)