The Resonant Bodies Festival — Tuesday through Thursday next week at Roulette, in Brooklyn — is an annual highlight because it gives some of the world’s most adventurous vocal artists full freedom to program their sets: three per night, 30 minutes per set.

In conversations with six of this year’s nine vocalists, they revealed their approaches to this wide-open opportunity. These are edited excerpts.

Tuesday

Jane Sheldon

I’ve always been a bit suspicious of the vocal recital, which is practically criminal for a classically trained singer to say. But Resonant Bodies invites artists to blow it up a little. Lucy [Dhegrae, the festival’s founder and director] knew I’d begun to compose music with proper seriousness, rather than just fiddling around. She said the festival would be a good place to create a work longer than anything I’d done up to this point.