The Easiest Way To Improve Your Lyrics
Вставка
- Опубліковано 12 жов 2024
- Probably my single best piece of songwriting advice.
Get 40% off an annual plan with Nebula: go.nebula.tv/1...
Watch the full, ad-free version of this video: nebula.tv/vide...
Lyrics are the first thing most people notice, so more than any other aspect of a song, they really need to be perfect. Many great pieces of music have been dragged down by poorly executed lyrics, and while there are, of course, many factors to a great lyric, there's one often-overlooked aspect that regularly causes unprepared songwriters to lose control: The shapes of the words themselves. It sounds simple, and honestly it kind of is, but trust me, really understanding those subtle nuances of sound is an absolute game-changer, and once you know how to think about it, it's one of the easiest ways to make your lyrics better.
Merch: store.nebula.t...
Discord: / discord
Bluesky: bsky.app/profi...
Email: 12tonevideos@gmail.com
Script: tinyurl.com/bd...
And thanks as well to Henry Reich, Jon Hancock, Gene Lushtak, Eugene Bulkin, Oliver, Adam Neely, Dave Mayer, OrionWolfie, David Bartz, CodenaCrow, Arnas, Caroline Simpson, Michael Alan Dorman, Blake Boyd, Charles Gaskell, Tom Evans, David Conrad, Ducky, Nikolay Semyonov, Kenneth Kousen, h2g2guy, Andrew Engel, Peter Brinkmann, naomio, Alex Mole, Betsy, Tonya Custis, Walther, Graeme Lewis, Jake Sand, Jim Hayes, Scott Albertine, Evan Satinsky, Conor Stuart Roe, ZagOnEm, רועי סיני, Brian Miller, Thomas Morgan, Serena Crocker, Adam Ziegenhals, Mark, Amelia Lewis, Justin St John-Brooks, DialMForManning, Andrew Wyld, JD White, Graham Orndorff, gunnito, Foreign Man in a Foreign Land, Kyle Kinkaid, Tom, William Christie, Joyce Orndorff, Isaac Hampton, Mark Mitchell Gloster, Andy Maurer, William Spratley, Don Jennings, Cormag81, Derek Hiemforth, Bryan, Mikeyxote, Milan Durnell, Dan Whitmer, Thel 'Vadam, FAD3 Chaos, Michael Morris, Bill Owens, Martin Romano, George Burgyan, Marc Testart, Carlfish, Matthew Soddy, Flavor Dave, Alin Nica, DraconicDon, Megan Oberfield, morolin, An Oni Moose, Ken Birdwell, Blue 5alamander, Cliff Hudson, JayneOfCanton, Ethan Savaglio, Robert Bailey, Deirdre Saoirse Moen, juneau, Sina Bahram, Ira Kroll, Patrick Minton, Justin Katz, Roahn Wynar, Chuck Dukhoff of The Stagger Lee Archives, Bob D'Errico, Robert Shaw, Donald Murray, David Shlapak, JD, Rennie Allen, Travis Briggs, Claire Postlethwaite, Greyson Erickson, Matt Deeds, Jordan Nordstrom-Young, Strife, Brian Covey, Miles_Naismith, Jay Harris, Sean Murphy, JasperJackal, Tommy Transplant, Wolfgang Giersche, Olaf, Colleen Chapman, ParzivaLore, Gil, d0d63, Jon Purdy, Ken Brown, Colin Kennedy, The Mauses, christopher porto, Billy Abbott, William Wallace, Karel P Kerezman, Ted Trainor, mightstill, Nick Loh, Randy Thomson, rpenguinboy, Antarct, Mikaela, Erika Lee, Vinayak Nagaraj, sandra zarbatany, Aenne Brielmann, Emma Finch, Eric Berg, Michael Dmytriw, Brian Gregory, Klaus, and robert johnston! Your support helps make 12tone even better!
Also, thanks to Jareth Arnold!
Watch the full, ad-free version of this video: nebula.tv/videos/12tone-the-easiest-way-to-improve-your-lyrics
Some additional thoughts/corrections:
1) Honestly if you remember discourse around Unconditionally, there's a good chance it's not about the pronunciation thing, it's about the… questionable staging choices she made while performing it at the AMAs, but that's why I said "initial" conversation in the intro. That aspect of the song's controversy wasn't relevant to my broader point here so I left it out.
2) Technically iambic pentameter isn't a poetic form, it's a metrical pattern used in various poetic forms, but for the point I'm making that distinction isn't relevant enough to justify a more precisely structured sentence.
3) Encore is actually also an example of a more advanced form of prosodic dissonance, emphasizing the second syllable of the title word in order to draw out the apparent rhyme with the rest of the line. If he'd instead accented the first syllable, the rhyme structure wouldn't work. (First-syllable accent is the pronunciation I'd expect, but I couldn't find any interviews of him saying it so I don't know if this a dialect thing or a musical choice.)
I can write in iambic pentameter all day (Shakespeare fan, theatrical composer), rhyming or blank verse, but it's not the easiest to put into 4/4. And for some reason other metric and rhyming schemes are so much more challenging to me. In part I tend to be really hardcore about the meter and accents, though I've loosened up on my "close-enough" rhyming.
Yeah, and singers need to pronounce their lyrics clearer, otherwise you get cats getting frisky with handbags...
One think I'd definitely wanna add 'cause it's become pretty important for me, is that since you're creating all these patterns in writing and the vocal performance, any time you break out of one of those patterns you're creating some kind of emphasis. It definitely pays to stay aware of when and how you're doing that.
One thing I love about Weird Al Yankovic: His prosodic alignment is frequently better than the artists he's parodying, often making his lyrics more catchy/memorable than the originals.
That's true, Weird Al's lyrics are really underrated. People think it's easy to make a parody song, but if you try it, you'll appreciate his work much more.
It’s really easy to make a parody song. All the hard work is done. writing/structuring/arranging the song and the melody, is done, so It’s gonna be catchy and memorable no matter what. My aunt could do what Weird Al does. Hes the definition of a hack and would be no one if he didn’t corner the market on parody songs. “WeLl lETs sEe YoU tRY iT.” Any one who does parody now, even if it’s better than weird Al, is written off as a clone because Weird Al was the first to be known for it. He himself has never contributed an original piece of art worthy of wiping my ass with.
@@codycoyote7046 is this s parody of a good UA-cam comment?
@@rjr6912 recommend one piece of his original art to me, and try not to pretend it’s good while you do.
@@codycoyote7046Weird Al's best songs aren't even his parodies, his originals are even better.
I solved the issue of writing good lyrics by just making instrumental music instead 👍
I swear, sometimes I find the instrumental version of lyrical music actually better.
I was a words guy long before I figured which end of the guitar goes in your mouth to play it, so after 20 years of songwriting I've finally gotten serious about instrumentals. If you can create interesting music without words, big respect. It ain't easy.
If you haven’t already, you should check out 12tone’s video on ‘vibes lyrics’ from a while back.
@@Inverse_to_Chaos Searched the channel for 'vibes' and nothing with that in the title. Link?
@@joeldcanfield_spinhead i believe its about "bad" lyrics and he refers to them as "vibes" lyrics throughout the video
Linguist here, mainly specialized in phonetics. Schwa [ə] is defined as a mid-central vowel (referring to height and place of articulation) and while there's room for _some_ variation, it's not at all at the level you describe around 5:50. Schwa isn't a blanket term for unstressed vowels but rather a specific vowel. In broader phonetic transcriptions its use may be somewhat lax, but that's really the case for _all_ symbols in a broad phonetic transcription since we're doing away with much/all of the allophonic variation in exchange for more consistent and clear transcriptions. Generally speaking though, [ə] is a pretty well-defined vowel sound. It's true that it's typically unstressed in transcriptions of English but that's in part because linguists will, by convention, try to use some of the close-by mid-central vowels for stressed syllables to avoid ambiguity. It's not that schwa is inherently incapable of being stressed.
Thanks for that! Geoff Lindsey has an interesting video explaining to Americans about how schwa doesn't ALWAYS have to be unstressed.
Kind of weird, the Wikipedia article on schwa has this to say:
If a mid-central vowel of a language is not a reduced vowel, or if it may be stressed, it may be more unambiguous to transcribe it with one of the other mid-central vowel letters: ⟨ɘ ɜ⟩ for an unrounded vowel or ⟨ɵ ɞ⟩ for a rounded vowel.
@@BryanLu0 Isn't that pretty much what I said last?
I think what 12tone was going for was that it was unclear which exact _phoneme_ the unstressed second vowel of "syllable" should be because in that position, and specifically in English, all the ones they listed would get realized phonetically as the schwa due to the lack of stress. But shifting the musical accent onto that syllable forces the singer to choose which one it should be when that syllable _is_ stressed.
That said, I do agree that this meaning wouldn't be very clear without prior linguistic knowledge, like the difference between phonemes and their realizations, or the nature of vowel reduction in English.
(Also I do think there's a correct answer to which phoneme it is, courtesy of the related word "syllabic".)
@@alenaadler8242 Yes, this one. ua-cam.com/video/wt66Je3o0Qg/v-deo.html
Since I grew up in the 70s, my go-to example for this is Stevie Nicks putting the stress on "washes" in the second syllable in the song "Dreams" ("when the rain wa-SHES you clean you'll know"). The lesson from back then was that you had to be Stevie Nicks to get away with it and you could really only do it once.
Great topic and thanks for the term "prosodic dissonance" to finally give me the right way to talk about it.
Probably the reason I stopped listening to the song a week after it was released. SO bad. There's always another way. Find it.
Is it a bird? Is it a chair? It's "oi-chaise"
@@joeldcanfield_spinhead that is certainly a take to have on that song
@@hpoz222 I'll eat mediocre pizza or wear mediocre socks. No lasting damage.
But music causes song lyrics to bypass your mental filters, allowing them direct access to your thinking patterns. Songs literally write themselves to your brain.
If there was a shortage, I love music enough that I'd be less choosy. But since there are, by my count, eleventyleven billion new songs per minute, I will, as they say in Texas, go 'head awn and be picky.
The only good thing about this painfully misplaced syllable emphasis is that it led to the mondegreen "When the rainbow shaves you clean, you'll know." 😁
I have a real fondness for lyrics that don't sound too forced to fit the meter. 'Human' by the Killers has an awkward line in the chorus, but the verses are fantastic, so natural. 'Sometimes I get nervous when I see an open door' is so good.
Car Seat Headrests discography is full of that shit. At some points they don’t even care about rhyming or syllables or anything, so it comes off more like melodic spoken word than singing which I really like
The three things every aspiring songwriter I work with does, which are also the three things I first I warn against:
1. Speak like Yoda do not
2. PuTTING the acCENT on the wrong syLLABle
3. Mixing rhymes: none, with internal/imperfect, with perfect. Pick one, any one, and stick.
Can you expand on point 3? I'm not sure how to parse it
Following these three rules will put you miles ahead of 80% of your competition, I am so serious
@@TXWatson Delighted to. It's about rhyme schemes. More detail than you probably need 'cause I don't know you:
Lyrics with no rhyme are just fine. Dwight Yoakam's "Guitars, Cadillacs"-no lines rhyme anywhere.
Perfect rhyme (moon June tune spoon balloon) in a repeating pattern ABCB or ABAB or AAAA or AABB
Internal or other partial rhymes, like "falling/hollow" or "stand/grasp" (see the amazing work of new country singer/songwriter Charlie Crockett who does it so subtly I missed it for a long time.)
Pick ONE and stick to it. Don''t have a verse with the rhyme scheme ABCB and then the next verse has no rhyme, or internal rhymes. Don't do ABAB one verse, ABCB the next.
Only exception I can think of: different scheme between verse/chorus/bridge. But that's still tricky. I wouldn't. Find other words. There's, like, a thousand words in English. Maybe more.
A favorite topic, so more than happy to say more. Always happy to say more. Probably too happy.
@@clementinedanger Your estimate is quite low ;)
@@joeldcanfield_spinhead I was trying to be nice because I like people and I want everyone to succeed but then I remembered that time Jewel, respected singer-songwriter and published poet, confused the words "casualty" and "casualness" and you know what?
4. Know what words mean
14:50 I appreciate the cleverness of the self-deprecation there but I think you're doing a really good job with your videos and I really appreciate them.
When the prosodical stress matches melodic or rhythmic stress, the music speeds up. When it doesn't, things slow down and become less singy and more talky. Pop and folk and rock take advantage of this all the time, but rap takes it to the next level. A rapper's flow is essentially their personal style of going on and off the beat.
"My dad's favorite band, Counting Crows"
jesus, that made me feel old
same, oof
I'm in france and I've sung in many heavy metal bands here that have tried to write lyrics in english and prosodic dissonance is a really common problem. "But it rhymes!" is not enough, it sounds weird and unenglish.
I'm glad to know that my struggle with tonal languages has a counterpart in my own language.
also a problem with many many aspiring rappers. your bars aren’t the problem dude it’s the forced flow, just write the line slightly differently
Yeah, French usually accentuates the final syllable of a word, so the prosody sounds very different from English.
I first noticed this when I got into Vocaloid music and noticed that a lot of English covers have pretty bad misalignment, and it's been a bugbear ever since. And you basically just summarized it in the first two minutes. :P
I hope to make better English vocaloid music I'm sorry.
@@dvp39 It's nothing to do with English Vocaloid music in particular -- but with English *covers* of Japanese songs. This was also when I was in high school; things have gotten better since!
my favorite use of prosody in songwriting is in "Modern major general" (also this is the thing that people writing parodies of that song pretty much always get wrong)-the lyrics are in _really strict_ iambic tetrameter. Like, it never misses. But the lines are pitched like they're trochees: the first syllable of every beat is higher pitched, but it's the unstressed syllable. Experientially, it simultaneously gives the lyrics a very fun bounce while also making them sound monotone. It gives the _impression_ of a person just blathering on monotonously, but doesn't actually force the audience to endure monotonous music. And metatextually, it's an illustration of the character flaw that the song describes: composed with technical perfection, but lacking a comprehension of how to assemble those parts into practical behavior. (Obviously Gilbert and Sullivan were masterful songwriters who totally understood how to make a song do what they want it to, but in-character the major general is failing to project the gravity that he's trying to because he's doing something that's technically incredible but just sounds silly.)
I played the Major General in my school's performance of The Pirates of Penzance, and I really appreciate having this enlightening perspective on a song that I've known so well for so long. Thanks!
Adding to the technical perfection side, let's not forget that each pair of lines ends with a three syllable rhyme. (Which do, sometimes get a little bit slant and are looser on the consonants than vowels. You know, like rhyming "a lot 'o news" with "hypotenuse.)
What, no, I'm not scarred from writing parody lyrics to this melody half a decade ago.
@@SSGranor yeah, and the extent to which the rhymes are strained is even a structural punchline to the running joke of the premise!
There's also something to be said about secondary stress - something like "poisoníng" from War Pigs still stresses a syllable with secondary stress, and Katy could have chosen to do something similar for the word "Un-cən-DISH-ən-Əl / -ə-LEE," putting metrical emphasis on the first or last syllable (if she had wanted to). Given the right context, it could be something like "unconditional-LY" to the rhythm of "so phenomenal-LY" from the refrain to Can't Stop the Feeling! by Justin Timberlake, or "UN-conditional" like the hook from Unbelievable by EMF.
Also, something additional I think works in Katy's favor is that the stressed -TION rhymes with Un-, which does take at least secondary stress.
In speech, I've never heard anyone pronounce "poisoning" with a secondary accent. (I could imagine Christopher Walken! 🙂) Words like that are tricky when writing in iambic pentameter because they follow more of a triplet meter. There are metric schemes that accommodate those words (T'was the Night Before Christmas - all triplets), but War Pigs went with that DA-da-DA-da-DA-da-DA-da rhythm. He made it into a secondary accent, and it fits just fine for that reason. Great song!
@@beenaplumber8379That's strange. I can't think of ever hearing "poisoning" without secondary stress on the final syllable in speech.
@@MNbenMN The primary emphasis is on the 1st syllable. I've never heard emphasis, primary or secondary, on any other syllable. If I say I am Poi-so-NING someone, that's just not how people talk in my experience. Just say it out loud. "I'm poisoning these damn mice!" If the 1st syllable is the secondary emphasis, where is the primary? Have you actually ever heard anyone pronounce it that way in speech? (I'm also from MN.)
@@beenaplumber8379 I'm not saying there is primary stress on the final syllable, nor am I saying there is not primary stress on the first syllable.
@@MNbenMN Ah, I got your primary and secondary mixed up. Still, I don't hear a secondary on the end in speech. If I say the word by itself, I can almost imagine it, but in any non-metered, conversational sentence, I really don't hear it. I don't think it's regional because I think we're both from MN. Well, I've been wrong before.
A stressed schwa is in fact possible, it shows up a lot in Welsh
Love me some linguistics x music,
Edit:
GATHER HERE LINGUISTS WE ARE TALKING ABOUT SCHWA
And gather I shall.
I was a little bothered by his explanation too, but the main point is correct that it's generally a bad idea to accent a schwa syllable in music.
Come gather round linguists, we are talking about schwa
It's a good one to use, but don't take it too far
Its ubiquitous nature has made it a star
And its worth to you is worth gauging.
But if nothing is stressed then it just sounds bizzare!
For the vowels they are a changing!
It's a myth that schwa is never stressed. Americans have no difference between ə and ʌ.
@@wesleybecker834 I'd say most Americans and not all... my COMMA vowel is actually much higher than my STRUT vowel, between KIT and FOOT. I'm probably just an outlier though.
UM-brella, umbr-EL-la, UM-brel-LAH-ELLA-ELLA.
5:38 Common misconception. Schwa actually can be stressed. The misconception arose because, in RP and SSB, any schwas that are stressed are actually pronounced as a slightly different vowel, the strut vowel. Because schwa is never stressed in the most privileged dialects of English, the textbooks claim that it’s never stressed at all. However, many dialects of English, including standard American, do not have the schwa/strut distinction and do have stressed schwa (if you hold your mouth the same way for the ‘u’ of strut and the ‘a’ of affect, then your dialect is one of these, and that ‘u’ is a stressed schwa).
However, it is true that unstressed vowels often sound closer to schwa than their stressed counterparts, at least in English. For more info, see Dr. Geoff Lindsey’s video on the topic.
To me lyric writing has always been kinda like assembling a jigsaw puzzle -- sketch out a few lines so that I know what I'm trying to say, then figure out what parts of them aren't quite fitting together, and find a way to change them so that it slots neatly. And then repeat for the next few lines. Just like with every other kind of writing, unless you're actively aiming for a sense of spontaneous improvisation, the most important part of it is revision.
And beyond that, I've always found it helpful to start writing verses from the middle, and begin the writing process with disjointed lines instead of consecutive ones. That way I can fully create my rules, and figure out where my wriggle room is, before I have to start writing to those rules.
The best use of a long word in a song has to be the 5-syllable Mephistopheles in The Police's "Wrapped Around Your Finger".
Also, anesthetize by Elvis Costello in "Radio Radio".
mf doom with eyjavjallajokul >>>
MF doom methylenedioxymethamphetamine which was a multi syllabic rhyme and a double entendre
kakorrhaphiophobia
5:30 schwa can very much be stressed, in fact, you stress them in your dialect all the time; this is a myth derived from a misinterpretation of RP Phonology, where schwa really is never stressed.
But, while there's nothing about schwa which means it can't be stressed, it is a very common reduction of any other vowel, since it's basically made by just letting your tongue rest motionlessly in your mouth. It's the easiest sound to produce, and thus, it appears often in reduced unstressed positions.
I'd recommend anyone interested watches Dr Geoff Lindsey's video on the matter :)
I just recently noticed how masterfully aligned lyrics and melodies are throughout Sufjan's Carrie & Lowell album. Not only in terms of stressed / unstressed syllables, but also in pitch and rhythm. Like spoken language put into melodies. If I would write songs/lyrics, this is what I'd like to achieve.
Yes! This is one of my pet peeves. English (like every language) has a natural rhythm in its prosody, and a good lyricist leverages it to strengthen the song, rather than ignoring it.
Great video! A fun fact, not a nitpick: The schwa and the letter 'u' in "but" are the same...except the "u" is stressed. No change in vowel quality, only length. English doesn't differentiate vowel length (usually) so i.e "fine and fiine, have the same vowel we would hear as simply, for lack of a better word, "long i' no matter how long it is held. That is why I believe the schwa and the "u" in 'but' shouldn't be differentiated. Heck, Mongolian has the "stressed schwa" sound according the Wikipedia. That wouldn't make since if schwa is always unaccented.
I try to be careful about my lyrics' stresses aligning tightly with my melodies, but sometimes I miss it, especially in sections with faster melodies. In my song "Programming the Soul," I nearly recorded and released it with a bridge lyric that placed the emphasis of the word "punish" on pu-NISH. Thankfully, a friend pointed it out to me, and after some consideration, I swapped the word "punish" out for "indict," which not only allowed for a correctly stressed lyric without shifting my melody or meter, but I think it's also just a stronger lyric now.
Also, I'm looking forward to the many song versions of "What Are You Doing With That Elephant" that are about to flood the internet. A call to arms, fellow songwriters!
Peace :)
Maybe it's just me, but I've never really been put of by prosodic dissonance in songs, even such a clear example as Unconditionally. Never thought twice about the odd stress of the syllable. Like, I notice it, but to me it just feels like it "adds spice," as you put it in the video.
Same! I never would've guessed it was something people got heated about, even considering academics.
Good video on a very interesting topic. It is making me feel old, though, that the most obvious example of prosodic dissonance that comes to my mind is not even mentioned, probably because of how old and dusty it is: from Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams", the line "When the rain washES you clean you'll know". Great song, but I always felt it was kind of a weird little artifact of imperfection that was left in there intentionally for some reason.
Two great studies I've always thought about this with in opposite senses are David Byrne and Gojira. Almost everything from the Talking Heads feels natural from a stress perspective, because Byrne does a great job tweaking melodies to flow with the words. On the flip side it always baffled me how Gojira always manages to make awkwardly pronounced lyrics still carry the full weight of the words. Interesting to hear a deep dive like this into the subject.
As a native speaker of a language that always places word stress on the first syllable (yes, foreigners love that /s), word stresses in English are really hard to wrap my head around. For example, it didn't even occur to me that the word "unconditionally" is pronounced incorrectly in that song. Now I hear it of course, but only after you said it.
Hungarian? Finnish? Either way, I can say that as an English speaker, studying Greek and Hebrew were really hard for me because the stresses don't follow a pattern half as predictable as English or Spanish. Any syllable can be stressed, and the consonants and vowels don't help. So I know how you feel. At least Greek marks its accents, Hebrew just leaves me hanging.
@@liamannegarner8083 Czech. All our words are stressed on the first syllable and because of this we don't really understand the concept of word stress. When we study a language like English, we need to learn this as an entirely new concept (just like articles, we also don't have those). And it's usually pretty neglected in our schools so most people have a very monotonous accent in English.
@@liamannegarner8083 Russian is my bane for this reason...especially because the o sounds totally different if it's accented or not...
I'm a native English speaker and I never picked up on it either. I still don't, really! Like, logically I understand why it can be considered incorrect, but to my ear it sounds fine. I had no idea people got heated about it at any point like 12tone mentions!
11:54 "And that's not just a weird elephant-based hypothetical" never have a stranger sequence of words made smile so much.
Listening to the video while on the bus and I clicked back to the video just in time for UA-cam to show me this comment exactly while Corey says it😂😂😂 1:a million chances
I'm not a songwriter, but it intrigues me when melodies are sort of based on vocal intonations. A great example is John Cale's setting of Dylan Thomas' poem, "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night." You can find both Cale's setting as well as a recording of Thomas reading his poem online.
Nothing Is Safe! Love that you referenced one of my favorite songs.
The brilliant 1960s comedic singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer played wonderful games with bending and breaking the rules of musical prosody, often self-referentially or with heavy lampshading. Here's a great example from his song "The Folk Song Army":
"The tune don't have to be clever
And it don't matter if you put a couple extra syllables into a line
It sounds more ethnic if it ain't good English
And it don't even gotta rhyme (excuse me, rhyne)"
I always see this as choosing how to compromise. You can preserve the melody by accenting the 'wrong' word or syllable, compromising the language. Or you can do the opposite by moving words or syllables to match accents. I see it as choosing which should be preserved, the melody or the language.
Mind you, I have vocal training. If you don't want sounds melding together, you have to clearly pronounce your consonants. Vowels give words meaning, consonants give them structure. Kinda. You know what I'm getting at.
NOFX has some really good examples of “prosodic dissonance”
Love Taylor Swift and love her song Wildest Dreams but the lyric where she sings "...say you'll see me UH-gain..." always catches my ear and takes me out of the moment.
This has long been one of my pet peeves in songs and I'm glad to see I'm not the only one. People I talk to about this either don't get it or don't care. In regards to rhyming long words, Stephen Sondheim was great at making really clever rhymes, sometimes with more than one word.
About a month ago I released a 7-minute video on exactly this subject, with similar content and structure to the first half of this video. I opened with the Katy Perry song "Unconditionally", and then came back to it at the end after a quick summary about different forms of accent (the same four categories you mention here: contour, pitch, dynamics, and meter). One thing that immediately came up in the comments section of my video was that, if going into more depth on this subject, it would be great to cover more details about vowel sounds. I'm glad to see you were able to go into more depth in the areas recommended in the comments section of my video! If this video is inspired my mine though, it wouldn't hurt to mention that somewhere. ua-cam.com/video/y3ryXU_RYuw/v-deo.htmlsi=mgmi8ErAYv6qMlpE
Update: If you have any rationale about why my responses to other comments here are being deleted, that would also be great to know, too!
Using repetition and other forms of expectation to get away with crazy things can be wild. Skip to a later section in a particularly complex and progressive track and you may be lost in noise, listen from the start and it makes perfect sense.
There's an unimaginable amount of ways to do it, but let's take harmony, pure chromaticism sounds way different when it relates to something more harmonically structured. A simple 4 note descending line often sounds like just that, maybe you hear it as aeolian borrowing from phrygian on the 2nd lowest note, or something, but it's not strongly implied at all. But when that line is calling back to a chromatic descent that was present (or could've been present) in some colorful chords before, you feel that connection.
Even just having played a droning note before it totally gives it a context that makes you feel so much more than just chromaticism.
Suddenly it's a tritone to a 4th to a major 3rd to a minor 3rd, and you practically fill in the gaps around that involuntarily in many cases, especially if it seems to hint at harmony particularly familiar to us, especially especially if it's very neat like very conventional functional harmony.
This can also be used to defy expectations really effectively, btw., as there's usually multiple ways to fill in those gaps, and these sparse sections that make you fill in gaps can be used as transitions between sections that fill those gaps differently. Super effective way to keep riff based tracks varied!
You can think of using atonal blur stuff to fill sonic gaps if you like, something really cool I don't hear often enough. Atonal noisy rumble bass, for example, super cool but incredibly rare. I guess partially cause it's such a pain to mix loud in my experience, you're basically choosing to add mud. Such clustered freqs down low get really warbly, especially if you highlight a narrow band, can be amazing but be wary.
15:50 "Music theory… is about identifying tools and understanding their impact."
Thanks for that lucid statement❤; even years of study may lead to a less useful definition of the term, and to mis-applying other functions of the intellect to one's work with it, rendering it less effective (/efficient) in helping to write music or critique it.
As a hobbyist linguist and music writer you have once again made the best video
6:30 “shwa Witda shwa”…this makes me too happy. Unlike Kid Rock’s recording output.
For what it's worth, Dr Geoff Lindsey's channel has a video taking issue in detail with the idea that schwa is never stressed.
Awesome video! If I may add another wrinkle having to so with the vocal lines themselves (which iirc, youre a guitarist as your main instrument, so I wouldn't expect you to just know this), another aspect that can affect pronunciation and accented syllables are the way a singer needs to modify a vowel for their range. This is especially relevant for classical/operatic style vocals, but it's also highly applicable for modern vocals. You can spot a well-trained singer by how they adjust their vowel shapes slightly to navigate their range (for example, testosterone influenced voices tend to like more closed vowels for high notes like 'oo' and 'oh'), and the best songwriters tend to take the "singability" of the word into account as they polish the song. So for example, a brighter "aa" on a higher note may be adjusted slightly to more of an "ah" or even an "oh" inside the singer's mouth, but you rarely notice without extensive training. Sometimes that ease of delivery is intentionally ignored for emotional effect, but especially for musicians performing for hours every night, those little adjustments are huge. However, that can also subtly impact the listener's perception of the lyric. Also, mad respect for including Clipping in here - Daveed Diggs is an absolute master of lyrical meter!
I certainly picked up a lot of useful tips from this vid.
Thanks a lot.
Edit: Looking at the USA, UK, Canada, and (to a lesser extent) Australia, where lots of pop and rock artists are born/raised in, there will be differences in how words are stressed or defined, and where a stressed first syllable sounds off to Brits, it sounds perfectly natural for Americans and Canadians. I’d even say the Beatles, based on their choice of words in lyrics, are one of the most English-sounding artists to succeed globally, and nobody bothered to point out the dissonance.
5:43 the schwa can and does exist both in stressed and unstressed syllables, in English and in other languages which have it, and is not defined by this common placement in English. Why it has a name and other vowel phonemes don't I don't know, but it's just as much its own speech sound as any other; if schwas only came from unstressed syllables, stressing them intentionally would presumably result in the expected sound/s based on spelling, but of course if you say "UH-oh" rather than "uh-OH" it doesn't come out as "oo-oh" or something like that.
Also, the schwa is only that first example sound, the "soft I" sound is again its own phoneme; these two are written with an upside-down lowercase e and a small capital i respectively in the IPA, the notation system used in linguistics to describe pronunciation consistently. The final example sound is just an e, either [e] or [ε] (I admittedly can't tell the difference between these), and is the default sound E makes in most other languages.
11:31 Lovely montage
I agree with you on the label “one hit wonder”. I have a suspicion it’s mostly used by people who haven’t had a hit themselves. It’s ridiculing someone’s efforts to capture lightning in a bottle a second time.
Paul Simon is rightly renowned for his prosodically impeccable lyrics, but it took him a little while to get there. "The Sound of Silence" was an early S&G composition, and I'll bet he later winced a bit at "because a vision softLY creePING." I don't think he would have written that line a few years later. (Eventually, his lyrical mastery was so firmly established that in "Duncan" he rhymes "chowder" with "New England" and almost gets away with it.)
Here's one more option everyone forgets: silence. Works well at the end, to emphasize what comes after.
Unfortunately, it stands out so prominently that you can't really use it in more than one song. So use it wisely.
This is 101 stuff, but it's something I've always known and couldn't explain. Thanks!
What's interesting is how peripheral stuff can change how much something like this bothers you. Like, I've never been bothered by that Katy Perry song because, even though I notice the weird pronunciation, I think her voice and the production sound good and convey the emotion she's trying to sell, and even the dissonance kinda works as a unique hook, something that helps an otherwise standard ballad stick in your brain.
To use another Max Martin tune, it's like "I Want It That Way" by the Backstreet Boys - the lyrics don't necessarily scan properly or make much sense, but that very weirdness is what makes the song memorable.
How bad are the sharpie fumes?! Those always give me terrible headaches. 🤧😶🌫️
11:30 fine example of variations of a sentence and discussion of use in a lyric, music expression: what are you doing with that elephant? Oh so many possibilities🐘🍴🎈
Great explanation but slightly disappointed that there was no mention of Motorcycle Emptiness by Manic Street Preachers.
But sometimes the dissonance is part of the process. A literary friend of ours once set our group a limerick writing challenge. Mine was littered with dissonances ending with a reference to a hippo-pot-AY-mus. My wife still laughs at it.
I would like to have your take on Dylan's lyrics and melodies. :) Great work as usual!
I haven’t watched your content for a long time (I’m sorry🤫) but, whenever i do, I’m never disappointed at the quality of the content I receive
😚👌 awesome (as always) 😉👍
The greatest lyric of all time:
"Drugs are good they make you do things that you know you not should"
- Drugs Are Good, NOFX
There’s no shortage of examples. The overwhelming majority of famous misheard lyrics I can think of come down to either prosodic dissonance, or moraic dissonance, where someone tries to cram a “heavy” syllable (usually involving clusters or diphthongs) into too short of a note.
One of my favorite examples is Eminem's song "You gon' learn"
The end of the second verse says "it ain't even worth dissing someone so offbeat that they can't even figure out where their words should hit the kick and the snare"
And of course the last phrase is off the beat and awkward 😂
I look at "Unconditionally" this way - she's simply back phrasing so much that you no longer know where the actual beat is being felt. If you wrote quarter rest, eight-eight quarter quarter whole, using G D G C | B it would work. But back phrase that, and you get what she's after. What does the word mean? It means forgiving things. I think it was on purpose, to lure you into being forgiving, to listen unconditionally.
Here's the thing about Ozzy: weird stuff in his lyrics won't bother me because I could never understand what he sang. The lyrics to Crazy Train are actually impressive. Maybe by the time I can understand the lyrics, it won't bother me
@9:40 repetition legitimizes
I hate how ever since that video, every time I hear the word "repetition" I start saying "repetition legitimizes" over and over for a good 10 or 15 minutes 🥲
@@VladVzqz What video is that?
This is amazing!
I disagree with many examples you gave of supposed prosidic dissonance.
Like, 4:28; "inebriated" doesn't have the wrong syllable emphasized. It's stressed beats are "e" and "a". You pronounce it as in-E-bri-A-ted, not IN-e-BRI-a-TED. It has two stressed syllables surrounded by unstressed syllables, so putting one of the stressed syllables on a strong beat IS the natural and correct way to do it.
Similarly, 7:32, "it's in the past" isn't accented; faster delivery doesn't mean accent, and if anything, it gives less temporal emphasis on these shorted syllables. "Don't", "think", and "past", the three important words in that sentence, each have a full beat of space given to them. I have literally no idea how you came to the conclusion that the shortened notes that reduces the space for emphasis are somehow "accented" compared to the strong quarter-note delivery on the other lyrics.
9:08, again, it doesn't accent the wrong syllable. You say POI-son-ING, not poi-SON-ing. Both "poi" and "ing" are emphasized. Black Sabbath is correct; it feels like every example of a multi-syllabic word you give, you literally say the exactly incorrect thing.
For "unconditionally" -- the word itself makes it awkward. Speaking it out loud, I feel the syllables to be UN-con-DI-tion-al-LY, which would be effectively two trochees followed by an iamb, or alternatively, an "iamb" where the first "weak" syllable is silence (using the basis that iambic pentameter can have a line begin on a stressed syllable and then be followed by iambs), another iamb (con-DI), followed by an anapest (tion-al-LY). The way Katy Perry does it is awkward since it puts stress on "tion" where there isn't syllabic stress.
thank you I thought I was braindead for hearing these as perfectly correct
Great video topic. Overlaps with something Adam Neely talks about in his recent Q+A video.
positions by ariana grande messes with this! "i'm just hoping i don't re......... -peat history"
Where are you from, eh? The word I get caught up on with some of my buddies' accents is "forward." I pronounce both of those syllables literally, with the emphasis on the first syllable ("FOR-ward," or, really, "FOR-word," like that), but my New Englander friends kind of crunch the second syllable into the first one, almost like they're saying "ford," just with a bit of an extension on it. But they don't pronounce it with the W sound, which I think I'm hearing you leave out as well. Or else they'll say "FOE-word," like that.
Fun topic. I’m not a fan of Katy Perry’s music, but I didn’t think anything about her pronunciation of the word unconditionally. I did react negatively to the prosodic dissonance. However, it might be worth pointing out that I listen to lots of extreme metal with unintelligible lyrics are performed by guttural screams, so many I don’t mind much dissonance, even syllabic. As a songwriter, I know the battle between words and rhythm. Sometimes we want a word, even though it’s not gonna fit most naturally with the melody or rhythm, but I think music allows us that freedom as opposed to adhering to normal speech patterns in interpersonal communication.
Ozymandias mentioned!
I had fun when I discovered you could sing royal without using a single consonant. Maybe I shouldn't because consonants are the opposite of dissonants aren't they?
Very helpful, thanks! I've decided that if I want to take song-writing seriously, I really need to improve my poetry theory, so to speak. Lyrics are very important to me, so this type of pronunciation stretching come off badly to me. Also, am I imagining things, or is there way more mispronunciation in rock/pop than in country music? I feel like country lyrics are generally much easier to understand. The number of times when I have been legitimately surprised to find out what the lyrics of a rock/pop song actually say (even for songs I've heard many times) is disconcerting.
That Light in the Attic sketch is choice.
Interesting Keppie Coutts from How to write songs also just published the same video. Both are great.
Do check out the scene with a number of famous Shakespearean actors on how to stress "to be or not to be that is the question". the 10th version is done by then Prince Charles.
4:16 Actually, strangely enough English does have "meter". English is a stress timed language, which means the time between stressed syllables is regular.
I WALKed the DOG
I was WALKing the DOG
I will have WALKed the DOG
I will have been WALKing the DOG (I'll've been)
The black lotus for "rarely do it" made me go *what*
The 7-11 sign drawn when he says "convenience"!
My "solution" is: I write lyrics first and then music. I hammer the music around the words like a smith dresses up a knight in armour.
i think guilty gear music would be a cool case study for a lot of these concepts since Naoki is Japanese while singing english lyrics. Kinda feels like Daisuke writes with this in mind and uses it to the music's advantage
also persona (although their lyricist speaks english)
I just can’t forget how she did that hiccuping K for the line “kiss me” from ET. I laugh every time I hear that. 😂
I always thought uncondi SHUN AHHHH LEEEEE was really nice and catchy tbh and that basically is how we pronounce it? It's just everything's stressed because she's yell singing which is cool
5:32 /ə/ can actually be stressed, but you'll see it commonly mistranscibed as /ʌ/. E.g. Ugly, buzz, does, because, gonna
10:25 ah yes... man. exactly what I thought he was going to say.
God bless you for the clipping. reference
I have literally never heard 'Unconditionally' as weird, and it baffles me that people dog-piled on it so hard. I just was brought up being told that criticising people's pronunciation of words was rude, I guess 🤷♀️
Alanis Morissette would like a word...
Schwa is not limited to unstressed syllables, infact you speaking General American English are proving that point. You are saying your "strut" vowels as Schwa, and stressing them. Schwa is also stressed all over the place in Mandarin Chinese, aswell as many other languages. Its a common misconceptions built on the differences between American and RP English. In RP the "strut" vowel is not the Schwa, and Americans, looking for ways to know when to write the RP "strut" and the RP schwa, use the general rule of thumb that RP has no stressed schwas; Which is still untrue and often causes mistakes when Americans transcribe English into the IPA.
TL;DR Schwa can be stressed, infact you stress that vowel all the time. Nothing on the IPA says "This vowel cannot be stressed" or vice versa.
For further information check out Geoff Lindsey's channel, he has a great video about it.
Edit: Schwa does not change it's sound based on circumstance, those are different vowels. Schwa is defined as the vowel sound made by putting your tongue in the exact center of your mouth (sorta, mouth structure is complex but that's the most simple way of saying it) and blowing air out of your mouth, usually when that mouth is unrounded at the lips. Nothing about that description says it cannot be stressed, nor that it will sound different based on different circumstances. You actually described, with your 'ih' and 'eh' examples, the near-close front unrounded vowel and the open-mid front unrounded vowel.
I'm actually a little disappointed, you usually do good research for your videos and they are of high quality with good information but this was section was not and just pushed these common misconceptions further.
Final note: In your example of "So damn beautiful" he is accenting a schwa. You're so damn beauti*ful*. That ful is a schwa vowel, and he is accenting it, both musically and linguistically.
Tbh this is a very commonly parroted misconception, even amongst linguists, it's going to be hard to discern that it's not true for a non-linguist.
I swear you've made the short version of this point off-handedly in at least one other video. I must have watched it years ago, yet I still think about it every time it's relevant to what I do. Still no good lyrics written, though...
At 4:16, I felt like I was almost done watching the video, and got shocked when I looked at the time progress
🎶You've got to AC-CEN-tuate the postiive...🎶
The most egregious instance of this for me is in Olivia Rodrigo's good 4 u: "on the FLOOR of my bedROOM"
Thanks for this
*Finally* someone talks about putting the wrong emphASis on the wrong syllABle!
Am I imagining things or did you end that video with "keep ON rocking" as a further example of prosodic dissonance?
Prosodic dissonance is why I cringe at a lot of English haiku. The two basic rhythms of haiku are 1+2+3 1+2+3+4 1+2+3 and 1+2+3 +2+3+4 1+2+3 with a strong accent on beat one and a lesser accent on beat three. This is extremely simplified, of course, and there are tons of exceptions, but it helps to know the rules before you break them.
@2:04-2:06 -- Envelope Face?
So many uses of "repetition" and yet no 12tone portrait of Adam Neely