Episode 6405 custom

Why Daily Singing Disappeared and How to Rebuild It

Danish composer C.E.F. Weyse designed 1837 morning songs specifically within a single octave so untrained citizens could sing them without straining.

Nov 1 18:09 Transcript

With

Herman

Corn

Prompt by Daniel

0:00

Episode Details

Episode ID: MWP-6607
Published: Nov 1
Duration: 18:09
Audio: Direct link
Pipeline: V5.26
TTS Engine: chatterbox-regular
Script Writing Agent: Claude Sonnet 5.5
Topics: music cultural-differences relationships

AI-Generated Content: This podcast is created using AI personas. Please verify any important information independently.

The prompt

The prompt that started this episode, as sent in (production notes for the hosts removed).

I would like to explore how one can integrate song into one's daily life. We have discussed before how one could try to take the fantasy world depicted in musicals and bring it into one's daily life, trying to normalize the act of breaking into song as an accepted part. But maybe that is a step too far, and we have to set our ambitions more modestly. I have been doing some vocal work lately for my fine-tune of a language model, spending hours at a time, and I really appreciate that. Vocal warm-up, and your voice is a real asset. But there's something powerful about the voice, as you emerge from slumber and your voice gains strength for the day as your voice gains power, you gain confidence. Surely other stay-at-home vocal artists have observed something similar. So today I wonder if we can share a light upon practices of kick-starting the process, as it were. I would like to begin my day with a song and perhaps end it, and perhaps even presage lunch with a song, perhaps enjoyed by the household. Can we find any traditions of personal singing as a manner of deliberately chronicling the day and traditions where collective household singing was Enjoyed as a routine household exercise, I feel like we have shrunk the list of occasions when singing is normal and acceptable into too narrow and the future of our generation depends upon, in part, breaking out of this shaggy to unleash more song into this increasingly troubled world.

Singing as a regular, functional part of the domestic routine is far more feasible than modern habits suggest. While morning vocal stiffness stems from overnight fluid accumulation and tissue dryness, gentle exercises like humming and lip trills can ready the vocal cords without turning the kitchen into a concert hall. Historical and cultural precedents show that daily singing flourishes when tunes demand minimal technical skill. Denmark offers a prime model through B.S. Ingemann and C.E.F. Weyse's nineteenth-century morning songs, which rely on narrow vocal ranges and stepwise motion specifically tailored for untrained communal singing. For households adopting daily songs, success depends on keeping tunes accessible, practical, and strictly voluntary.

Sources

What the research for this episode read before the script was written. Primary sources first.

Mentions

B.S. Ingemann Danish poet who wrote 1837 morning songs
Højskolesangbogen Danish folk songbook with morning songs
Karen Loew Writer on decline of public singing
Mangala Arati Vaishnava early morning devotional song
Politiken Danish newspaper that covered singing revival
School of Rock Music program recommending 10-20 minute warm-ups
Singing for the Million Joseph Mainzer's 1840s UK singing classes
Spencer Welch Voice teacher on morning voice physiology
The Atlantic Called quiet quitting a fake trend
Weyse Composer of Ingemann's morning song tunes

Downloads

Episode Audio

Download the full episode as an MP3 file

Download MP3

Transcript (TXT)

Plain text transcript file

Episode Book (PDF)

The episode's record — date, duration, models, sources — with the full transcript

#6405: Why Daily Singing Disappeared and How to Rebuild It

Most coverage of singing in daily life leads with the same picture: a woman spinning on a hilltop, a whole street joining the chorus, life as a musical. Nobody in this flat wants that. Daniel doesn't either, and he's said so. His ask is smaller. He's been doing hours of vocal work for his language-model fine-tune, and it's made him treat his voice as a real asset. He's noticed that as the voice gains strength through the morning, confidence arrives with it. So he wants a song to open the day, maybe one to close it, maybe one before lunch that the household shares, and he wants to know whether anyone has ever done this on purpose. He also thinks we've let the list of occasions where singing is acceptable shrink to almost nothing.

Herman Poppleberry, here to say the answer to "has anyone done this" is yes, at national scale.

Hold the Danes. First the thing he noticed. The voice at seven in the morning is not the instrument it is at noon.

Right, and that part is physical.

Good. Because my morning voice is mostly a rumour.

Here's the frame. This isn't "how do I become a person who sings." It's what it takes to make singing a scheduled, ordinary part of a day. Two halves. Physiology first: the voice really is different in the morning, and warming it up plausibly has a confidence knock-on. Then culture: why the occasions narrowed, and whether the narrowing is a universal law of modernity or something more local.

And the evidence on the confidence part?

Nobody has measured it. No study takes morning voice strength and tracks confidence later in the day. The claim lives in teachers' advice and marketing copy. The nearby evidence is on group singing and mood.

So either Daniel's wrong or he's unstudied.

Unstudied, I'd say. A voice that won't do what you ask is a small daily humiliation, and one that will is a small daily competence. That's a perfectly good mechanism without a paper.

But a mechanism without a paper is also how most wellness advice gets started. How would you tell the difference between a real effect and a nice story?

You'd have to run it. Take people with the same morning routine, give half a warm-up and half silence, and measure how they rate themselves at noon and at five. Nobody has bothered. Until then it's a plausible story with a reasonable physical basis, and I'd hold it at that.

And the obvious snag is that people who warm up their voices are probably people who already like their voices.

Which is why the experiment needs random assignment. Otherwise you've only measured who enjoys humming at a kettle. Self-selection would swamp everything.

Start with the croak, then.

A voice teacher, Spencer Welch, puts it plainly: when you sleep, so does your voice. Muscles go slack, circulation slows, tissues stiffen. Another coach adds fluid accumulating in the tissues overnight, and dry air makes them less pliable. Hence the morning alter-ego.

So it's swelling and dryness. Not a personality.

Not a mood, no. The Ariella Approach says none of us are equipped to sing an aria, or give a business presentation, first thing. The job is moving from the half-there morning voice to the full daytime one. Step one in every routine is water.

I could manage water.

And the warm-ups are short. School of Rock says ten to twenty minutes. One guided routine is six tiny exercises that ask nothing of a cold voice, about four minutes, starting with a hum and lip trills. Another app builds five, ten, fifteen or twenty minute routines designed to run on your phone while you stand at the kitchen counter.

Lip trills at the kettle. Hannah will have views.

Which is the point. It's non-performative. People already buy that.

What do you mean, buy that?

Stretching, for one. Nobody thinks you're showing off when you touch your toes before a run. A hum while the toast is going is the same category: maintenance, not recital. If Daniel frames it that way to the household, the embarrassment drops a good deal.

And the lip trill itself? It sounds like a motorboat impression.

It is, roughly. You blow air through loosely closed lips so they flutter while you slide up and down in pitch. It's gentle on the vocal folds because the lips take the pressure. A cold voice can do it without strain, which is why it opens so many routines.

Do you buy the confidence leap, Herman? Honestly. You were a pediatrician. You've watched small kids go from croaky and shy to loud in about an hour.

I buy it as a feedback loop. The nearest measured thing is choir singing raising self-efficacy and self-esteem in bereaved people, fifty-eight of them. Group, not solo, not morning. But the direction fits. Do something your body does well, early, and the day starts from success.

Fifty-eight is not a lot.

No, and bereaved choir members aren't Daniel at his kitchen counter. I'm using it as a direction, not a proof.

Fine. Now the Danes.

Which raises the question Daniel actually asked. B.S. Ingemann wrote morning songs for children in eighteen thirty-seven, with music by Weyse, and evening songs the year after. The morning set is seven songs, one for each day of the week, plus a spring song.

A song per weekday. Somebody gave Denmark a rota.

And it's known in Denmark the way Hans Christian Andersen is, and barely known outside. Sten Høgel calls it one of the finest creations of the Golden Age. The tunes were built for untrained communal singing: within the compass of a ninth, mostly within an octave, stepwise motion, small intervals.

So designed to be sung badly.

Designed to be sung by anyone. Think of it as the opposite of a pop chorus that climbs to a high note and dares you to follow. Nothing in these tunes asks you to leap. They were written for the Copenhagen day nurseries, which spread because industrialization was taking working-class women out of their homes. Ingemann donated them.

He gave away a national institution. Generous, for a poet.

The evening songs are different. Harder, with leaps of sevenths and octaves, and only one is for children. Easy mornings for everyone, more artful evenings.

Which makes sense. At seven you're a hum with legs. At night you can attempt a seventh.

Daniel could steal that design outright. And it's maintained. In August nineteen ninety-five a Politiken front page showed Copenhagen schoolchildren singing "I østen stiger solen op" off an overhead projector, caption saying morning singing in schools was becoming popular again. The nineteen ninety-three Højskolesangbogen has six morning songs to four evening ones.

An overhead projector. The most Danish possible revival.

So the template is modest, calendrical, low-skill, communal. The harder question is the household, because singing the day in for a family is a different proposition from doing it for yourself.

Because somebody in the house didn't ask for it.

Exactly that. The USC folklore archive has a Korean-American family's morning song: the morning sun has arisen, get up from bed, brush your teeth, wash your face, let's go to school. Lovely. And an American grandfather who sang "it's time to get up, it's time to get up" at full volume. His daughter said that after she moved out she never wanted to think about that song again. He sang it so loudly and so early.

So the ritual is a gift and a tyranny, depending on who's holding the covers.

Same song, same house, two verdicts. Worth admitting. Notice the Korean-American song is also a checklist: get up, brush, wash, go. The song does a job. The grandfather's song only announced that he was awake.

So a useful song gets forgiven where a loud one doesn't.

That's my reading. Nobody resents a song that gets them out the door on time. They resent being the audience.

Daniel has a bugle, Herman. I'd like that noted.

Noted. Other traditions are plentiful, though. A Lakota sacred repertoire includes a Morning Song. In kirtan the audience answers the singer, call and response. The Vaishnava Mangala Arati is glossed simply as early morning song. And work songs are a whole category, sung to coordinate a task.

So singing the day is common. Denmark just wrote it down.

Then why did it narrow? Karen Loew in The Atlantic gave three causes: we're insecure about our voices, we don't know the words, we resent being forced. Her example was baseball. The seventh-inning stretch is the last mass adult sing-along, and when the season ends, that's it until spring.

Insecure, ignorant, resentful. That's also my review of most meetings.

The economic version is neater. Around nineteen ten, songs like "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" were sold as sheet music, so popularity meant people buying notation to play at home. Sheet music demanded participation. Records demanded only purchase. One writer recalls a childhood where Julie Andrews breaking into song in the course of her day wasn't the least bit unusual.

Which is Daniel's fantasy, but with an upright piano.

And Victorian domestic music was a real market. Joseph Mainzer's eighteen-forties Singing for the Million classes sprang up across the United Kingdom and unsettled the authorities.

Authorities worried about a million people singing. Reasonable, honestly.

Here's where I'd push back on the tidy story. A big comparison across a thousand-odd societies, thousands of recordings, found group singing more common than solo singing. And it found no consistent link between group singing and community size or social complexity. Bigger societies don't sing less together.

So no law of modernity.

They do concede that in post-industrial societies music is more presentational than participatory. And Estonia: participatory singing didn't vanish, it got institutionalised, into choirs, schools, organised events.

So it moved out of the kitchen into a building with a schedule.

Which suggests the narrowing is a Western, adult, middle-class thing. And if the cause is partly material, songs for listening versus songs for singing, then the fix isn't more performance. It's more material built like Weyse's.

But Daniel can't commission a Weyse. What does he do on Monday?

Pick songs by the same rules. Narrow range, stepwise, familiar words. A hymn, a folk tune, a nursery song. The test is whether a tired adult can get through it without a warm-up.

"Happy Birthday" fails, then. It has that leap on the third word and everyone's flat by the end.

It does, and yet whole rooms of people attempt it. Which says something: people will sing a hard tune if the occasion gives them permission. A daily song has to be easier, because it can't rely on a cake.

What does that mean for a household of three, one a toddler?

What do you think? You're the one who'd have to be awake for the morning one.

I'd do the evening one. Slower tunes.

So the practical question is whether a household could ever keep to a schedule of singing, and whether that would change anything at all.
Ivan: This is Harrow. Forty one, sixty seven. Nine nine, twenty three. Forty one, sixty seven. The jar is sealed before the kettle sings. The onion counts the verses, not the choir. Nine nine, twenty three. The lid goes on at midday. Nightjar.

Understood. Same place as last time.

What on earth was that?

Anyway. Whether a household can keep a schedule is mostly about whether anyone's allowed to opt out.

An opt-out is how it survives. The grandfather didn't offer one.

Fair. Make the song short enough that skipping it costs more effort than singing it.

And what about the days nobody feels like it? A rota only works if it survives a bad Tuesday.

Then Tuesday's song should be the easiest one. The Danes gave each weekday its own song, but nothing says every song has to be equally demanding. Put the simplest on the day you expect the least enthusiasm.

And a toddler isn't going to opt out anyway. She'll just sing the wrong words with total conviction.

Which helps the adults. It's hard to feel self-conscious about a flat note when someone two feet tall is doing worse and enjoying it more.

Briefing! Right. So. The briefing is, um, this page. It says "Singing at Home." That's the title. I read the title very carefully.

Neville, hello.

Hello Herman! Hello Corn! I'm the intern. Sorry. Uncle Hilbert irons his receipts before he files them, and he said I should prepare, so I looked it up on the bus. My flatmate Dougal sings in the shower on Kestrel Street, every day at six, and I thought, Danish. Is it Danish? Or Dutch?

Danish. Seven morning songs, one per weekday.

Oh, that's much better, actually. I had Dutch and a different number. Also a hedgehog can roll itself into a tight ball with a ring of muscle that pulls the spiny skin around it. Sorry. It just came up.

Keep going, Neville. Dougal?

Dougal only knows the first line of everything. So the shower is mostly the first line, over and over. The landlord complained, but then he started humming along. It's nine pounds fifty a week for the bathroom, and nobody wants to give that up.

Sounds like the Danes had the same problem and solved it with a songbook.

A songbook! I'll tell Dougal. And Uncle Hilbert. He'll want it filed.

Which is the interesting thing about Dougal, Corn. He doesn't know the words, and he sings anyway.

Loew's second cause, and he ignores it.

Insecurity doesn't seem to touch him at six in the morning.

Warm water helps. Or the tiles.

Both, probably. Warm steam is kind to a cold voice, and a tiled room makes anyone sound better than they are. It's a free rehearsal space with built-in reverb.

So Dougal's been warming up this whole time and nobody told him.

Nobody told him, and he'd probably stop if we did.

Should I tell him about the songbook, then? Or would that spoil it?

Give him one song, Neville. Just one, with all the verses. See whether the shower gets longer or shorter.

So if the occasions for singing are narrowed rather than lost, then Daniel's version, a song at the bookends and one before lunch, has a hundred and eighty years of precedent behind it.

I'd say it matters beyond the household. A kid who grows up hearing a parent sing badly and on time learns that singing is something you're allowed to do.

In a world as tense as this one, more of that wouldn't hurt.

If Denmark can keep one song per weekday for a hundred and eighty years, what does a household need? Better songs, or fewer excuses?

I think songs written for untrained voices would carry most of it. The excuses mostly evaporate once nobody's performing.

One adjacent thing we left out. Ingemann's wife wrote in eighteen thirty-seven that he'd written morning songs for the day nursery children, but all but one would do well for children in general. The whole national repertoire started as a note about a spare song.

A spare song. That's how institutions start.

Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing, and Neville for sitting in.

If you enjoyed this one, try episode eighteen sixty-one, Emergency Prep You Can Sing To. This has been My Weird Prompts. If you want more, the show lives at my weird prompts dot com, with a few thousand episodes to work through.

See you tomorrow.

Sing something on the way.

This episode was generated with AI assistance. Hosts Herman and Corn are AI personalities. It may contain errors: disclaimer · report an error

Why Daily Singing Disappeared and How to Rebuild It

Sources

Mentions

Downloads

Recommended Listening

You Might Also Like

#6405: Why Daily Singing Disappeared and How to Rebuild It