05-27-2015, 05:43 AM
Tectak,
First, you're wrong, and second, do huh?
There must be thousands of analytical papers about singing underwater. (https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en...4&as_sdtp=) Ditto everything else you mentioned. Why is speech slurred when drunk? You think that hasn't been looked into? Holy geezum what a world you must live in, where anything that's obvious must also be true.
Anyway, the notion that something isn't right for study is the common cry of thousands of awful poets. It escapes me why you'd offer an exemption to lyrics but not poems—I dunno, maybe you wouldn't. Maybe poems are also like distracted waiters. But that would feel like, to logic burgeon, a false equivalency. Or maybe it's nothing to do with logic at all. Maybe it's just a false premise.
Honestly, I think your resistance to taking lyrics seriously stems from basic snobbery. Lyrics have orders of magnitude greater economic value than poems do, and so you think they're trashy or, to borrow from you again, ignobel.
Bena--I mean the perception of length when listening to the song. I'll explain why it might matter.
I'd like to make the case that there are three inputs into a song: the words, the music, and the melody. When making a top-down approach to studying songs--deriving principles from examples--you end up using melodists terms to describe song parts. I'm not sure why that is, except that perhaps the melody line is the most immediate feature of a song. But words like "verse" and "chorus" mean nothing to the composer, and it's unclear why they should matter to the lyricist.
One of the questions a bottom-up study of lyrics needs to answer is, is there a reason to treat choruses as a useful entity? Evidence in favor of the distinction might include, among other things, that choruses tend to convey a unique category of meaning. If that's true, it might follow that we oay a different kind of attention to chorus-type meaning, such that the perceived length of a chorus is, say, longer.
Saying the same thing in reverse, if choruses dilate perceived time, then they're likely to comprise a distinct clade of meaning. It might be that choruses are more direct in expression, and that something about them signals that they're meant to be understood on the first performance, whereas verses might take repeated hearings before their meaning becomes clear.
Something like that.
ambrosial--did you notice in Every Little Thing that the songwriters, too, seemed to think the choruses were short? The last part of the song could be seen as remedial . . . Maybe?
First, you're wrong, and second, do huh?
There must be thousands of analytical papers about singing underwater. (https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en...4&as_sdtp=) Ditto everything else you mentioned. Why is speech slurred when drunk? You think that hasn't been looked into? Holy geezum what a world you must live in, where anything that's obvious must also be true.
Anyway, the notion that something isn't right for study is the common cry of thousands of awful poets. It escapes me why you'd offer an exemption to lyrics but not poems—I dunno, maybe you wouldn't. Maybe poems are also like distracted waiters. But that would feel like, to logic burgeon, a false equivalency. Or maybe it's nothing to do with logic at all. Maybe it's just a false premise.
Honestly, I think your resistance to taking lyrics seriously stems from basic snobbery. Lyrics have orders of magnitude greater economic value than poems do, and so you think they're trashy or, to borrow from you again, ignobel.
Bena--I mean the perception of length when listening to the song. I'll explain why it might matter.
I'd like to make the case that there are three inputs into a song: the words, the music, and the melody. When making a top-down approach to studying songs--deriving principles from examples--you end up using melodists terms to describe song parts. I'm not sure why that is, except that perhaps the melody line is the most immediate feature of a song. But words like "verse" and "chorus" mean nothing to the composer, and it's unclear why they should matter to the lyricist.
One of the questions a bottom-up study of lyrics needs to answer is, is there a reason to treat choruses as a useful entity? Evidence in favor of the distinction might include, among other things, that choruses tend to convey a unique category of meaning. If that's true, it might follow that we oay a different kind of attention to chorus-type meaning, such that the perceived length of a chorus is, say, longer.
Saying the same thing in reverse, if choruses dilate perceived time, then they're likely to comprise a distinct clade of meaning. It might be that choruses are more direct in expression, and that something about them signals that they're meant to be understood on the first performance, whereas verses might take repeated hearings before their meaning becomes clear.
Something like that.
ambrosial--did you notice in Every Little Thing that the songwriters, too, seemed to think the choruses were short? The last part of the song could be seen as remedial . . . Maybe?