Woodbridge Ambient Voices
Let’s form an ambient choir from scratch! Everyone is welcome to join this improvisational vocal group as part of Woodbridge Ambient Music Festival 2026.
This relaxed and fun workshop will offer simple, accessible tips and techniques for improvising with your voice as part of a group. The Art Haven will be our safe space to engage in vocal play, and to build confidence in these skills. You don’t need to be a ‘singer’ to take part, just open to using your voice and exploring a beautiful soundworld with others. Participants are then welcome to join a short performance, opening the ‘Tom Rogerson and Friends’ concert in St Mary’s Church in Woodbridge on Saturday evening.
Improvisation is often a key part of an instrumental musician’s training but rarely is this the case for singers. Instrumentalists get together and ‘jam’ but singers can often find this daunting, to say the least, and for many it’s completely intimidating. Not everyone thinks of the voice as an instrument – but it is. It’s a beautiful, versatile, agile and sensitive instrument that we all have, and anyone can play.
We’ll focus on increasing confidence in the ability to improvise, within the context of vocal harmony and create completely new music on the spot. To achieve this we’ll develop a toolkit of techniques and devices that we can mix up, blend and implement in a variety of combinations, so that we feel able to proficiently improvise along with a piece of music. We’ll build confidence in these skills and evolve into creating our own musical soundscapes.
Following the enthusiastic reception to the inaugural Woodbridge Ambient Voices performance at last year’s festival, we’re delighted to have been asked to open Tom Rogerson’s concert in St Mary’s Church on Saturday evening. We’ll sing a short piece based on the techniques covered in the workshop and all participants are warmly invited to join this performance (although it’s not compulsory!).
Tickets are just £10 (plus £1 booking fee). Under 16s and Essential Companions go free.
The Art Haven is fully accessible, including disabled toilet facilities. Parking, including disabled parking, available at nearby Hamblin Road and Woodbridge Station car parks.
Workshop leader – Yula Andrews
Experienced vocalist, choir director and workshop leader, Yula Andrews, studied classical singing from the age of 15. She gained a 1st class degree in vocal performance, specialising in contemporary classical music, from Dartington College of Arts – famed for its pioneering approach to arts education, championing innovative and inter-disciplinary creativity. She founded Suffolk-based choir Pop Chorus in 2012 and runs Community Pop Chorus CIC, bringing singing for wellbeing into local communities and care settings. Yula loosely describes her own singing as ‘jazz’, because there isn’t a genre to describe the blend of jazz/folk/classical/avant-garde/contemporary that she performs. Her favourite activity (and, luckily, also her job) is getting groups of people together and encouraging splendid noises to come out of their faces.
Here’s a little snippet of last year’s singing…
