People often ask us, "What is mouth music?" and "Where can I hear more of it?" Mouth music is a way of singing tunes that were originally devised to be played on an instrument (in Scotland, usually the pipes or the fiddle). The term derives from the Gaelic puirt-a-beul, meaning 'instrumental tunes from the mouth.' Click here to hear a track of mouth music from Kim's CD, Cattywampus. Although the Gaelic term more commonly refers to instrumental tunes with settings of words, Kim also uses it as an umbrella term to include the many styles of singing instrumental tunes with non-lexical vocables, for example diddling, cantering, canntaireachd, lilting, etc. In the United States, scat singing is a kind of mouth music that's probably familiar to most people. Kim has actually written a Ph.D. about this topic ("Non-lexical Vocables in Scottish Traditional Music, 1980: Christine Knox Chambers). If you want to get into mouth music in depth you may be able to obtain a copy on microfilm from the Edinburgh University library (from the U.S. the main Edinburgh University number is 011-441-31-650-4167). Click here if you would like to read a one-page abstract summarizing Kim's Ph.D. thesis. It's difficult to find commercially recorded examples of mouth music, however one recent compilation is "Celtic Mouth Music," a CD and mini-book produced in 1997 by Ellipsis Arts (516.621.2727). Catharine Ann MacPhee has a track of puirt-a-beul on an album available from Greentrax. If you know of other recent commercial recordings with mouth music, we'd love it if you would email us and let us know about them. There are also two mouth music tracks on Kim's CD, Cattywampus, and two more (one each by Kim and Christa) on their self-titled demo CD, Lintie.

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