The Green Continent is the Continent of Slow Motion, where the piece begins. Its Regions are:
Long Tones.
With each breath, pick a single pitch and
sound it for the breath's duration. Any evolution of the sound should
be slow and continuous.
Repeated Tones.
Pick one pitch, but sound it
several times slowly during a breath.
Slow Trills.
Pick two pitches and alternately sound them several times
for a breath's duration. Tempo should be fairly slow,
but not quite as slow as Repeated Tones.
The Red Continent is the Continent of Unvoiced Sounds. Its Regions are:
Sighs.
Breathe audibly at a natural rate.
Chiffs.
Make rhythmic chuffing, clucking, popping, clicking noises,
anything unvoiced that's short and explosive.
Use the full range of regular and irregular rhythms.
For example, you can do T, P, CH, or K sounds but you should stay away
from S, F and SH.
Other examples: throat or tongue clicks, mouth pops (with lips, fingers or
palms or anything else), coughs.
Whispers.
Make continuous articulated, unvoiced sounds.
Examples: recite poems in a whisper, tell secrets, do spaceship sound
effects, eggs frying, distant machinery, steam heat, windmills.
The Purple Continent is the Continent of Frustrated Communication. Its Regions are:
Aphasia.
Sounds that imitate language, but fail to convey meaning.
Like words, but not words.
Examples: speaking in tongues, uncontrolled stuttering,
dream speech, talking backwards, alien language, Cathy
Berberian's singing in Berio's Visage.
Morse Code.
Rhythmic beeping, and booping noises in
combinations of longer and shorter tones.
Use the same pitch for a whole breath.
Sound like a distant radio signal.
Animal Sounds.
Imagine animals singing.
Try to imitate real animal sounds.
Stay away from bow wow, woof woof.
Try to get a message across (and fail.)
The Yellow Continent is the Continent of Monotonic Pitch. Its Regions are:
Yawns.
Just open your mouth wide and yawn,
pitch sliding from high pitch to low.
Slides.
Start on a pitch near the bottom of your range,
and over the course of a breath slide continuously
upward to near the top of your range.
Scales.
Again, start near the bottom of your range.
But sing discrete pitches, higher and higher,
as far as you can go in a single breath.
The Blue Continent is the Continent of Joining Together, where the piece ends. Once you have entered it you should not leave. It has only one Region:
Coda. Pick any pitch you want and sing it for the duration of a breath. Then pick any pitch that you can hear, other than the one you just sang, and sing it for the duration of a breath. Repeat until you don't hear a different pitch to continue with. Then stop. When the last person stops, the piece ends. (This is a lot like a simplified version of Cardew's The Great Learning, Paragraph Seven.)