I call myself a voice artist instead of a singer because I view the role of my voice to be greater than just singing. I use it to speak, call, yell, whisper, laugh. To tell stories of joy, sadness, truths, and lies, just like all of you. The voice has the ability to deeply connect to one's heart or to completely blend in and disappear into our surroundings. It’s called the mirror of our souls for a reason.

I started to experiment with effects and my voice when I was looking for the ability to blend with my instrumentalist peers. What I probably wanted was to hide and be one of them, but that’s a different story…I’ve always loved to sing, but never for the reason of being the front person. I’m incredibly fascinated by the voice and all the sounds we can get out of it. The lows, the highs, the round, the sharp, the beautiful, and the ugly. The ability that we all as humans have to create sounds and communicate with one another with just the 17-25 mm length of our vocal folds is mind blowing to me. What other instrument has that? Still, what was troubling for me after trying to accompany other instruments on stage, was that no matter how hard I tried to have my voice blend like an instrument, there was still always this human timbre to it that I could not camouflage. Human ears would always gravitate towards my voice, even when I tried my best to hide it with a low volume and wordless singing. “Sing louder,” people would say. “Don’t hide, you should be at the center of the stage. You’re the singer.” After every gig, I would leave feeling misunderstood. “Why is it so hard for me to be like everyone else? I just want to be one of the band. Be the lead when I want to, and accompany when I want to. Why can’t my voice just be an instrument like everyone else?”

One night in Stockholm around 2012, I went to a concert at Fasching, one of the city’s most popular jazz clubs. Up on stage was Robert Glasper, featuring Casey Benjamin on saxophone up in the middle of the stage. They were playing music from the Double Booked record and Casey was incorporating pedals into his playing. The horn would sometimes sound like a sax, sometimes like an electric guitar, and sometimes he just added sonics to the overall landscape. My mind was blown. “He’s doing exactly what I want to do, blending in when he wants to, changing sounds, being aggressive and being raw. What if I could do that with my voice?” The next day, I started to research vocal pedals and stumbled onto the TC Helicon VoiceLive Play. I got one and started to experiment to see what I could do with it. Most inspiring was the huge reverb and delay, which enabled me to sound like I was performing at Stockholm Stadium where I had listened to Coldplay from outside the fence during my high school years. I brought it to my band MOLO and started to write music with it. The pedal totally changed the game and I started to be able to blend in with the sound of the band in ways I hadn’t before. I also had the ability to completely change the sonic landscape of the whole band due to their bleed into my microphone. At first, this was an incredible effect which later on started to become problematic, the more performances we did and the more feedback issues we started to face. So I went back to a cleaner sound for a while.

Fast forward to 2015; I got the honor to compete in the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Jazz competition. I would have loved to have incorporated my pedal at my final performance but there was no time to soundcheck so I just had to go full jazz. Having incorporated the pedal into my sound for five years, I started to feel naked when I couldn’t use it. I did not win the competition that year, but it gave me exposure which landed me a record deal with GroundUP Music. Michael League and I started to work on the album shortly after the competition and one of the things we made sure to do early on was to find ways to use my voice as an instrument throughout the album. Not by including scat solos, but by camouflaging my voice and incorporating it as a color to the overall sonic landscape, both as a lead and accompanying instrument at the same time. On the song “You Know It”, we built the entire synth pad of me singing long notes and layering them as a pad. We also played with different characters as you can hear on “Shut it Up” where the background voice is imitating bitchy Thai angelic inner voices. For the ending of “Emperor of the Sun”, we decided to experiment with camouflaging my voice completely and making it hard to distinguish the difference between my affected voices and Justin Stanton’s synth patches. Michael laid out seven of his EarthQuaker Devices pedals and we started to experiment. I felt like I was in heaven. Suddenly I heard all these sounds coming out of my mouth that sounded nothing like a voice. I even had a few moments while I was recording where I wasn’t sure if it was my voice that created a certain sound or if it was Justin’s pre-recorded synth. Frankly I still don’t, even in hindsight.

The album came out in February 2018 and I got ready to tour. I had purchased the EQD Afterneath a year earlier along with the EHX Pitchfork to pitch down my voice two octaves, and the TC Electronic Ditto X4 to loop myself. But this was not enough to replicate the sounds that I created on the album. I therefore went on and added the Rainbow Machine to my setup to have the option of disguising my voice completely on the ending of “Emperor of the Sun”, and the Hummingbird to create tremolo-based synth sounds in combination with the Pitchfork. All these pedals became extremely handy on stage. I was finally able to decide when I wanted to take the lead role and when I wanted to support someone else. I was now also able to accompany myself on solo looping pieces. The audience stopped asking about why I wasn’t singing louder or acting as a “singer” at all times; instead they started asking “how” I did the things I did with my voice. Finally I felt like my view of the voice as an instrument was being understood.

Since the album release until now, my pedal board has grown into a full self-sufficient setup where I can do 60 minute performances by myself. With Ableton and a midi controller, I can loop myself, trigger tracks, harmonize without limit and use all my pedals as my color palette.

Depending on the song and my mood, I can decide to create a beautiful angelic landscape with the Afterneath and cluster harmonies or turn on the Westwood and take a burning distorted solo. My pedal board is as much a part of my color palette as all the different parts of my voice. This has opened up many creative collaborations where artists hire me to be a lead singer and a sound designer. This is exactly how I’ve envisioned jazz singing in 2020 could be. With all these color possibilities, we as singers can completely tear down the wall between instrumentalists and singers. It’s possible to sound like any instrument you can think of, from drums to synths, bass, strings and electric guitar while still sounding like you. The inspiring part about using pedals with your voice is that it can help you morph the sound of your voice but it will still always sound like you, since your voice is unique to you. The voice is like your paint brush, the pedals your color palette, and your musicality your canvas. It’s completely up to you what you want to communicate and which colors you choose to communicate that.

LIVE PERFORMANCES IN QUARANTINE FEATURING EQD PEDALS

Sirintip is a voice artist and composer. Her debut album, TRIBUS, produced by three-time Grammy award winner Michael League of Snarky Puppy was released in 2018 on GroundUP Music.