Week 14 — Drill Studio · Embellishment and the Outer Voices

Course: MUS 155 Aural Skills I · Kenosis College
Instructor: Professor Hemsworth
Unit: Learning Unit 14 of 15 (Week 14) · two sessions per week
Objectives: SLO 1 · SLO 2 · SLO 3 · SLO 5
Drill Studio 14 · 20 points · Drill-studio group · In session, both meetings (session 1 and session 2) · documented make-up path below, full credit, submit by the end of the week
Format: two-voice singing, pointing at notes that aren't in the frame, one four-bar dictation on two staves — and, at the end, your break maintenance card. This is the last new-material week of the term.

Named in Music Theory I: contour, step vs. leap, climax; the six non-chord tones, with the suspension figured 4-3; the augmented-second trap in harmonic minor; embellishing a two-voice frame. An hour later we hear all of it — the extra notes get pointed at before they get named.

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Part 1 — The big picture

Last week you held a plain line against another plain line. Real melodies are rarely that plain: between the frame notes, singers and players slip in extra notes — notes that belong to no chord, and that make the line sound like music instead of an exercise. In this morning's theory session those extras got their family name — non-chord tones — and six labels. Here we drill the three your ear will meet everywhere: one that walks through (passing), one that steps away and comes back (neighbor), and one that hangs on and falls late (suspension). The rule of the whole course applies one last time: you will describe each sound before you're allowed to name it.

Part 2 — What we do

The frame. The week's skeleton, first — two groups, two lines, sung on solfège the way we sang last week's frames. Group 1 takes the upper line, group 2 the lower; then swap. Nothing extra in it yet; that's the point. It is deliberately built like last week's Frame A, so it will feel familiar in the voice:

KEY: C major    METER: 4/4    CLEF: treble
U: | E4/h G4/h | A4/h B4/h | C5/h B4/h | D5/h C5/h |
L: | C4/h E4/h | F4/h G4/h | A4/h G4/h | G4/h C4/h |

Frame-then-flowers. You sing the frame; Professor Hemsworth plays a flowered version of it. Your job: point at every note the frame didn't have and say what it's doing — walking through, dipping and returning, hanging on. Then, and only then, the morning's names attach. After the game, here is a flowered frame in print, for your own singing at home — a passing tone in bar 1, an upper neighbor in bar 3, and a suspension in bar 4 where the upper voice holds on a tie while the bass moves and then falls a step late. (The fuller flowered version, with a bar-2 neighbor as well, is the one Professor Hemsworth plays in class.):

KEY: C major    METER: 4/4    CLEF: treble
U: | E4/q F4/q G4/h | A4/h B4/h | C5/q D5/e C5/e B4/h | D5/h~ D5/q C5/q |
L: | C4/h E4/h | F4/h G4/h | A4/h G4/h | G4/h C4/h |

The suspension lean. The one drill to feel in your body this week. Group 1 sings the held top line; group 2 sings the moving bass. At the barline the bass walks out from under you, your held do becomes a fourth over its sol — dissonant, leaning — and you resolve down to ti only on beat three, bass re-struck beneath you, before both groups land home. That lean-and-release is the suspension; the theory figure for it, 4–3, is just the two intervals you sang:

KEY: C major    METER: 4/4    CLEF: treble
U: | C5/w~ | C5/h B4/h | C5/w |
L: | E4/w | G4/h G4/h | C4/w |

NCT-ID by ear. Short two-staff fragments at the piano: one extra note each. Passing, neighbor, or suspension — approach and departure heard, not seen.

Outer-voice dictation. The full version of last week's preview: four bars, two staves, bass and melody, slow, four hearings. Bass first — it is the spine; the melody's quick notes come last, because now you know what they are.

Climax hearing. Two public-domain melodies — Shenandoah and Danny Boy — heard for one question each: where does the tune peak, and what happens right after the widest leap? (It steps back down. It almost always steps back down. This week you learn to expect that.)

The lurch. In harmonic minor, singing le up to ti is a three-semitone lurch on a single letter step — the augmented second the theory class named this morning. You will sing it on purpose, feel it, then sing the melodic-minor fix (la–ti) and feel the lurch vanish. You have been singing around this trap since Unit 5; now it has a name and a repair.

Solo hearings. Quick individual turns inside the frame and lean drills — 6 to 8 singers per session, about twenty seconds each; at a full section of 36 the standing rotation still reaches every voice about every two and a half weeks, and in a small room everyone sings both days. The ledger is nearly full — Unit 15's hearings assume it.

One sidebar, while we're near the topic: some real melodies lean on notes from outside the key entirely — chromatic color notes. For now, sing a chromatic lean on its nearest syllable and call it a color note; full chromatic solfège belongs to Aural Skills II, next semester's course. What we are training this term is the diatonic frame that makes those colors audible at all.

Part 3 — Before session 1 (the prep step)

Run Tutorial 14 first — it hands you the approach/leave grid: how each of the three drilled non-chord tones arrives and departs, in words. The studio's pointing game assumes you've met the grid; the game teaches your ear, the tutorial teaches your mouth.

Part 4 — THE BREAK MAINTENANCE PROTOCOL

The break sits between this unit and the final unit — nine days without class, right before the cumulative final. Aural skill fades faster than any other skill in this course when it goes silent, so this week issues your break maintenance card: 10 minutes a day, five days of the break, voice alone, no equipment.

Minute	Do this
0–2	The do ritual, from memory. Hum any comfortable do, sing do–mi–sol–mi–do, then flip it minor: do–me–sol–me–do.
2–5	One prepared-final melody. You received four with Unit 13. One per day, on solfège, out loud. By day four you've cycled the whole set.
5–8	One interval ladder. From do: up a third, back; up a fifth, back; up a sixth, back; up the octave, back.
8–10	One both-modes flip. Any melody you love or any drill from this page — major, then parallel minor on the same do.

Keep a two-line log — day and what you sang, nothing fancier — and bring it back as part of Unit 15's prep. Honor system, and honestly kept: nobody checks your living room. But the voice that sang daily walks into the final warm; the voice that went silent for nine days spends the first session finding do again. Ten minutes protects fourteen weeks of work.

Part 5 — What counts, and how

Participation is the grade: sing both lines of the frame, point at flowers, lean and resolve, take the dictation, call the climaxes. 20 points, graded in session across the two meetings.

Criterion weights: perception 50 · realization 35 · labeling 15

A student who sings the right pitches with the wrong syllables loses only the labeling points. A student who sings the right syllables on the wrong pitches fails the item.

Criterion	Full	Partial	None
Perception — NCT calls describe the sound accurately before naming it; dictation hearings used per protocol; climax and lurch calls land (10)	9–10	5–8	0–4
Realization — frame lines, the flowered line, and the lean sung in tune against the other voice, in any octave that fits, sung or played (7)	7	4–6	0–3
Labeling — passing, neighbor, suspension, and the syllables applied rightly once the describing is done (3)	3	2	0–1

Part 6 — Missed a session? The make-up path

Full credit by the end of the week: (1) record the frame and the flowered frame from this page, upper line, back to back; (2) record the suspension-lean top line while a tone (or a partner, or your own phone playing your recording of the bass line) holds the bass notes under you; (3) three sentences naming each extra note in the flowered frame and what it does; (4) start the break maintenance card today and say so in your submission. Submit clips + sentences in Canvas under this studio's make-up assignment.

Why this makes you a better musician

Your fills stop being decoration and start being grammar. The run your favorite singer throws between two chord tones, the note that hangs over the barline and melts — you can now name the move, hear where it belongs, and steal it for your own bridge. And when a great melody peaks, you know why it peaks there — once, high, leap up, step down — because you heard Shenandoah do it and pointed at the moment it happened.

Canvas placement block

canvas_object    = Assignment
title            = "Unit 14 Drill Studio — Embellishment and the Outer Voices"
assignment_group = "Drill studios"
points_possible  = 20
grading_type     = points
submission_types = [on_paper]        # graded in session; make-up: online_upload (clips + sentences)
due              = in session, both meetings; make-up by the end of the week
published        = true

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