Working Hollywood: Wolves can warble too

How would one sing if one were a wolf? That’s the question Edie Lehmann Boddicker set out to answer on “Alpha and Omega.”

“They sent me drawings of what the animated wolves might look like,” said Lehmann Boddicker, 53, who works as a vocal contractor, sort of a casting agent for singers. “The drawings were really hysterical. They were just such specific characters that you could almost tell which one was country and punk and rock ‘n’ roll.”

Music — whether howled by wolves or played by concert pianists — has always come naturally to Lehmann Boddicker. The daughter of Hungarian refugees, she was 3 years old when her perfect pitch revealed itself.

“My parents discovered that I could be in the next room, and my dad would play a series of notes on the keyboard, and I could name off the notes that he was playing,” she said. “So that became the parlor game. Dad would just put his elbows and knees and anything on the piano, and I would list off the notes.”

Lehmann Boddicker began piano lessons at 3½. When she was 8, her family moved from Grand Island, N.Y., to Los Angeles, and she began studying with Lillian Steuber, then head of the USC piano department.

“I was a very reluctant concert pianist, but I loved R&B music, and I loved to sing. I found an outlet for singing at church,” said Lehmann Boddicker, whose father was a Baptist preacher. A composer spotted her talents, and she began singing with Madonna, Aretha Franklin and Quincy Jones. From there, she transitioned into working as a vocal contractor on films including 2006’s “Ice Age: The Meltdown” and 2008’s “Horton Hears a Who!”

“Every singer is equipped or should be equipped to be a vocal contractor,” she said. “To be a vocal contractor means that you help the composer find the singers that he or she needs for that particular job — the film, TV show, CD, commercial or whatever. And by virtue of knowing the voices in town, you are able to cast the right people for the jobs.”

Songs with wolves: Before Lehmann Boddicker could find singers for “Alpha and Omega,” she needed to find a sound. “What the filmmakers wanted was for me to workshop the sounds that these wolves might make if they were singing,” she said. “So I went in with a male singer and we experimented singing in a howling style — taking it way out on that limb and then bringing it back to normal singing and trying to find out what would work best for this particular film.... We did country, jazz, rock and R&B versions.”

The fantastic nine: “What I tried to do is cast the singer according to the voice of the actor or the actress who’s playing the part,” Lehmann Boddicker explained. “So the singing timbre or tone quality would match the speaking timbre, and the age would be close to the age. And you have to find a singer whose voice sits at the same place as where the actor’s voice sits, so … you really couldn’t tell at which point the actor was singing or not singing. … I hired, I think, five women and four men to sing, and I tried to capture every different timbre with the singers. So the filmmakers were able to find what they needed out of those nine people.”

Certain lupine tendencies: Lehmann Boddicker discovered that not all howls are created equal. “I Googled all kinds of wolf noises and sounds,” she said. “The difference between a female howl and a male howl is not much. Howls are different in terms of why they’re howling. We didn’t go really deeply into that, although we could have.... The vowels were a very important part of this session too. We ended up altering our vowels just a bit to more howl-like, wolf-like vowels. Instead of like doing ‘oos,’ we started with ‘owoo.’ We just wanted to find something that would keep us in that species, and we really had fun.”

The call of the wild: “I call what I do stunt singing, because I want to try anything and everything with my voice,” Lehmann Boddicker said. “There’s no sound that’s too weird or too out-of-this-world or too ugly or too ethereal.... I run a tight ship but I insist on humor and having fun doing what we’re doing. Who could not? I mean, my children ask, ‘What did you do today, Mommy?’ ‘I howled like a wolf!’ You know, how great is that?”

Calendar@latimes.com