vocals + electro-music

bbinkovitz

i'm sure anyone who has seen ruori at electro-music has noticed we're very talky. talking in a semi-improvised way over the music is cool and all, but i don't want us to be confined to that. problem is, while i have very little trouble coming up with cheesey pop-style vocals and lyrics and such (i was a prolific composer of horrible pop-country-ballads when i was in elementary school!), i hit a real brick wall when i try to put vocals with more avant-garde music (which is the stuff that really interests me).

the problem i have with the talky style of words + music that we've been using, is that it doesn't seem to be truly integrated. the biggest goal and challenge for me in art in general is to develop something elegant and cohesive.

for those of you who use vocals in your music, how do you get this kind of cohesiveness? how do you judge when you've achieved it? or do you dislike cohesiveness and avoid it?

dewdrop_world · Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 2:09 pm Post subject:

I don't do much with words myself, but check out Paul Lansky's Things She Carried. It's the result of his usual careful thought about aesthetic problems.

James

deknow · Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 2:21 pm Post subject:

...i think that there is another thread about this here somewhere...but i can't seem to find it at the moment.

howard does a beautiful job of integrating vocals into his music. it's a combination of the right words (poetry and music that are rather integrated), and vocoding. the g2 is a great vocoder, but rather expensive. the microkorg is a decent one at a decent price (esp. used).

deknow

Antimon · Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 2:22 pm Post subject:

A few different approaches:

Start working instrumentally, then replace a track with a same-sounding vocal, or mix them together. Don't bother too much about inherent poetic meaning in the text - allow the syllables and music to work together.

Alternate between concentrating on melody/harmony and rythmic/chromatic.

Start with a complete lyric, and build the track around it.

Just realised I've never tried the last... looks like a project!

/Stefan

deknow · Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 2:30 pm Post subject:

Acoustic Interloper · Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 4:54 am Post subject:

My daughter did the words and reading on Ordinary Machinery at http://www.virb.com/dparson , 11 and 1/2 minutes into the piece. We are planning the next one, but a couple things that worked well for that one:

1. The topic was parallel to the intent of the music, i.e., machinery around the house, which was triggered partially by Howard's comment about listening to old washing machines in a thread on minimalism. In other words, there was a coherent (although somewhat non-linear) theme. I think this works better than just verbal imagery that you hear sometimes.

2. Her poetry & lyric writing is much better than mine. I tried writing responses in "call & response" manner to her lines, but my responses sucked so bad that I threw them out & stuck just with her writing. I am slowly getting better at this, have just completed a set of lyrics for a folksong with which I am happy, but I completely rewrote it 3 times, and am still tweaking lyrics as I sing it. For me it means editing, taking a break, rewriting, etc., but in general working harder on getting decent words than I usually do on instrumental, which tends to come more from the gut.

3. The specific technique I used on her reading for this one was William Burrough's "cut up" or "cut & paste" of cutting up written passages at phrase boundaries an rearranging them to say & mean new things. She & I talked about this after I arranged the piece, and she pointed out that her writing has a lot of parallel structure, which lends itself to this. I am thinking about writing a phrase parser for English (I've done such parsers before in grad school) with hooks so you could hook it into a live audio stream of a reading and press a foot controller when you get to the phrase boundaries. This avoids speech recognition as long as you stay with the written word, bu it would give you the ability to cut & paste in real time.

For this specific piece, the goal was to merge the girl with the machinery (as in the story), as Ableton Live looping & meter extraction was useful for that.

I think in general, you can treat spoken word as one more acoustic audio input to be processed, with the added requirement that the words actually convey something. Sometimes the sort of rambling stories that people like Laurie Anderson tell leave me a little cold (although I like her work generally). I think actually turning the spoken stuff into an instrument is more interesting.

bbinkovitz · Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 7:10 am Post subject:

Acoustic Interloper · Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 7:51 am Post subject:

rachmiel · Joined: Jan 03, 2006 Posts: 34 Location: pittsford, ny

Mohoyoho · Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2008 9:02 pm Post subject:

Amy X Neuburg did an improv vocal with us at EM05. Totally off the cuff, she came up and did a kind of Jim Morrison as we improv'd behind her.
Titled, "She Understood the Numbers" you can hear it on this link:
http://www.limitedwave.com/subterraneous/listen.html

I think it works. All three of us listened to one another and tried to create an atmosphere. You have to have the chops and be able to create appropriate lyrics. Amy can do all of that.

iPassenger · Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2008 5:59 am Post subject:

I agree with the vocoder and make it fit comment, by trying to give it a digital/electronic edge to the sound of the vocal... Personally the more artificial and treated it sounds for me the better...pitching down, stretching, filtering, reducing bit rate and sampling rate etc.. Also try to create places for the voices to fit by mixing it in with other sounds in the backghround, so when the voice comes in proper later it isn't so unexpetced.

PCAhype · Joined: Jun 03, 2008 Posts: 5 Location: Pittsburgh, PA

I would say not to worry about whether your lyrics are cheesy or pop-y or whatever. I think as soon as you start worrying about what comes out of your mouth and start forcing your vocals to be something that they're not, THAT's when you lose the cohesiveness that you're searching for.

Plus the more avant-garde or experimental you get in your compositions, the more important it's gonna be that the vocal flows with the music, or you'll lose people. Another problem with the "talky" improv style of vocals is that they are so rarely in the right key. I would say just keep the instrumental playing on a loop, hum out some utterances and syllables that fit with the song, and write to that.

Acoustic Interloper · Posted: Sat Jun 14, 2008 7:25 am Post subject:

x_x · Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2008 11:18 am Post subject:

Jyoti

Rykhaard · Joined: Sep 02, 2007 Posts: 1290 Location: Canada

Acoustic Interloper · Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2008 8:50 am Post subject:

bbinkovitz · Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2008 9:55 am Post subject:

I really enjoyed the "it frightened her"/"it seemed to her" part, with what sounded like a chopping sound (maybe i just have carrots on the brain, lol) as a sort of beat. ableton does make you stick to a grid, which can both increase and hinder creativity. i've been thinking about that recently, as i just started composing with it.

anyway, it was great to meet you too. i tend to have a short attention span but i didn't get bored during your 20-minute song, even though i'd heard it before.

smokris also commented that he thought the banjo was especially appropriate to this year's location.

Acoustic Interloper · Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2008 10:35 am Post subject:

unreadpages · Joined: Aug 23, 2008 Posts: 3 Location: Sydney Australia

Hi,

I think it's largely about theatre because whenever there are intelligible words or phrases there is an image of a human being with a wish to communicate something. Being surrounded by electronic sounds is not a problem, electronic music and theatre go great together. I've tried it with a couple of pieces such as this one:

beautiful:gone
lo-fi URL: http://www.soundclick.com/util/getplayer.m3u?id=6303346&q=lo
hi-fi URL: http://www.soundclick.com/util/getplayer.m3u?id=6303346&q=hi

and also "You just stood there" which is (also) on my page www.soundclick.com/unreadpages

I think vocoder should be used sparingly because in this regard it gives the image of a robot, which has its limitations (sorry robots).

I have just bought a copy of Pierrot Lunaire to study what Schoenberg's approach was to this issue (not electronic I realize)

Cheers

unread pages

CalebWilson · Joined: Sep 21, 2008 Posts: 3 Location: Oz

It really depends on what you mean by avant-garde. If you mean experimental electronic music, then there's a whole bunch of different vocals you could use.

If it's ruff n tuff, then who needs lyrics? Just scream something or sample someone else. I like cutting and pasting conversations so there's a whole bunch of people saying stuff one after another. People don't worry about the lyrics if it's done in an entertaining way.

Take "We want your soul" for example. Simple, dumb lyrics, but robot voices are awesome.

If your doing something more elegant, then personally, I would rattle off a bunch of metrical figures and stuff. Listen to "Polarstern" by Eisbrecher for what I mean. It's in german, but you get the idea.