Blending their voices

Group: Swingle Singers (a cappella) Members: Joanna Goldsmith-Eteson (soprano), Sara Brimer (soprano), Clare Wheeler (alto), Lucy Bailey (alto), Oliver Griffiths (tenor), Christopher Jay (tenor), Kevin Fox (baritone/vocal percussion) and Tobias Hug (baritone/vocal percussion) Latest album: Ferris Wheels (2009).

[Kevin] For most of the group ... it's our first time in Hong Kong. It's a beautiful city. It's very colourful and vibrant. We're hoping to have some time to go out and explore a bit.

[Tobias] The Swingle Singers ... have been around [in one form or another] for like 50 years. We all joined at various times. One leaves and we'll look for a replacement. I joined exactly 10 years ago, on the first of April.

[Kevin] For the auditions ... we normally have people sing a few songs to get a sense of what their voices sound like. We also have them sing with the group - they have to memorise in advance - and we sing together so we can have a sense of how the voices blend together. It's also so we can have an idea how a person can learn a lot of music in a short time, which is part of the job as well.

[Tobias] Vocal percussion was ... a fairly new thing when I joined the group in 2001. Now you can see beatboxing on YouTube anytime. It's become widespread. So it's a lot easier now to pick it up. Before YouTube it was hard to find examples of it.

We hooked up with a beatboxer called Shlomo in London. He joined us on stage and did some gigs together. He always uses a loop station in his solos, so we had the idea where we could be his human loop station. He would use us and assign us certain sounds and we could form a loop.