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To my perception, words in choruses take more time than verse words. I'm trying to figure
(1) if most people experience the length of chorus words as longer than those of verses and
(2) if so, why might chorus words occupy more time?
Ideas?
If my set-up is confusing, lmk
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To be honest I'd never really thought about it until I read this post and then went through a handful of songs to see if it was noticeable. I think I understand what you mean and it is very evident in some songs, although it's definitely not always the case and at the moment I would hesitate to even say that it is the norm. The first thing that your statement presumes is that every song has a chorus which isn't true, it's probably more prevalent in pop music, but even then it's not as prevalent as you may think.
Examples of songs without a chorus would be Jimi Hendrix - Purple Haze, Bob Dylan - Subterranean Homesick Blues and probably Dylan's Shelter from the Storm, although this song does have a refrain and because a chorus is also classed as a refrain then technically this might count as a chorus to some people.
A couple of examples that I've come up with where the words in the chorus seem to be shorter and more rapid than the verses would be The Police - Every Little Thing She Does is Magic, which I would say is noticeably faster in the chorus with the words being sung quicker. The other song I thought of is Steve Miller - The Joker where again the chorus where he sings "I'm a picker, I'm a grinner etc" the words seem to be shorter than the verses. The difference between these two songs however is that in The Police song the chords for the chorus are totally different to the chords for the verses. The verses are all one chord but with a rising bass line and then at the chorus it just alternates between two chords. In the Steve Miller song the chords for the chorus are essentially the same as for the verse but the phrasing becomes different which makes it stand out more which I suppose is the purpose of a chorus in a song, especially if we are talking about pop music. So here we have two different examples of how to make a chorus stand out from the verses, which is what I think is happening when you say that you perceive the words in the chorus to take more time.
I think an example of this would be Bill Withers - Lean On Me, which would be yet another method of distinguishing the chorus from the verses which in this song is even more necessary because the chord sequence is exactly the same throughout the whole song for the verse and chorus. Although saying that I've just looked at it again and I would say that it's only the first verse that is different as regards the phrasing then the remaining verses all have the same phrasing as the chorus apart from the first line which it seems is what really distinguishes the chorus from the rest.
I'll leave it there for the moment just to make sure that I have understood what you were trying to say first. There are other things I could highlight with examples, because I believe that what you are noticing is a just a way of differentiating the chorus from the verse, it seems also that you are looking at it from the point of view of a wordsmith and how it may be possible to play with different words and how to make them longer or shorter, whereas to a musician it is melody and although they are shortening or lengthening phrases they are not thinking in those terms of a technical process.
Hope some of this makes sense.
Mark
 wae aye man ye radgie
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your set up is confusing to me because I don't understand if you mean length of the words (as in syllables) for each, length of the number of measures, or just length in normal every day time.
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(05-21-2015, 06:10 PM)crow Wrote: To my perception, words in choruses take more time than verse words. I'm trying to figure
(1) if most people experience the length of chorus words as longer than those of verses and
(2) if so, why might chorus words occupy more time?
Ideas?
If my set-up is confusing, lmk bena gives three possible interpretations. I don't think your hypothesis works in any of them.
You're the one who first mentioned the dichotomy of strophic versus through-composed forms.
I think it's a false one. They don't exist apart, they exist as complements.
Strophic? Through-composed? (wherever the chorus is, it ain't slower):
Lengthy chorus wordage ain't hapnin' here:
Gilbert and Sullivan's: I am the very Model of a Modern Major General
Why keep coming up with these pronouncements?
Songs/music/poetry/painting/roller-derby etc.
Artists LOVE finding holes and filling them.
"Either/Or" doesn't work.
a brightly colored fungus that grows in bark inclusions
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I was just asking a question, this time. No pronouncement intended.
Apart from this post, the reason I'm trying to take an analytical approach to lyrics is only--and I mean only--because I can't find a paper where someone's already made the attempt. I've looked , but my resources are pretty scant. Any suggestions would be very very welcome.
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(05-26-2015, 01:53 PM)crow Wrote: I was just asking a question, this time. No pronouncement intended.
Apart from this post, the reason I'm trying to take an analytical approach to lyrics is only--and I mean only--because I can't find a paper where someone's already made the attempt. I've looked , but my resources are pretty scant. Any suggestions would be very very welcome. Hi crow,
there is no published paper on the analytical approach to lyrics? Have you considered that there may be a reason for this lack?
I see a candidate for the Ig Nobel Prize here 
Using your logic...burgeoning...how about considering the analytical approach to singing underwater? I cannot find ANYTHING on the subject yet we have all tried it.
I am considering a thesis on Contraryness. Why is it that car keys are always in the same side trouser pocket as the arm you are carrying the Grow-Bag in?
Why do strangers I meet whilst walking never respond in like fashion? I say 'morning they say hello..I say hi, they say good morning etc.
Why are waiters always looking somewhere else?
Why are lyrics slurred longer when you sing them whilst pissed?
Wow..I may never sleep.
Best,
tectak
(05-26-2015, 02:54 PM)tectak Wrote: (05-26-2015, 01:53 PM)crow Wrote: I was just asking a question, this time. No pronouncement intended.
Apart from this post, the reason I'm trying to take an analytical approach to lyrics is only--and I mean only--because I can't find a paper where someone's already made the attempt. I've looked , but my resources are pretty scant. Any suggestions would be very very welcome. Hi crow,
there is no published paper on the analytical approach to lyrics? Have you considered that there may be a reason for this lack?
Using your logic...burgeoning...how about considering the analytical approach to singing underwater? I cannot find ANYTHING on the subject yet we have all tried it. I see a candidate for the Ig Nobel Prize here
I am considering a thesis on Contraryness. Why is it that car keys are always in the same side trouser pocket as the arm you are carrying the Grow-Bag in?
Why do strangers I meet whilst walking never respond in like fashion? I say 'morning they say hello..I say hi, they say good morning etc.
Why are waiters always looking somewhere else?
Why are lyrics slurred longer when you sing them whilst pissed?
Wow..I may never sleep.
Best,
tectak
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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?
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(05-27-2015, 05:43 AM)crow Wrote: 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?
Hi crow
I am sure you are right but I just wasn't aware of anything having not looked very hard. That's me to a tee.
Best,
tectak
ps I didn't realise we were talking singing walruses. I was talking about people. Y'know, people waiters and people carrying Grow bags and people slurring. If we're talking walruses, well, that makes all the difference. Interesting. 
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(05-27-2015, 07:27 AM)tectak Wrote: (05-27-2015, 05:43 AM)crow Wrote: 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?
Hi crow
I am sure you are right but I just wasn't aware of anything having not looked very hard. That's me to a tee.
Best,
tectak
ps I didn't realise we were talking singing walruses. I was talking about people. Y'know, people waiters and people carrying Grow bags and people slurring. If we're talking walruses, well, that makes all the difference. Interesting.
Sorry, but 
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oh, I hope I didn't come across as combative--I was trying to reciprocate tone, not be a lowland swamp douche
A yak is normal.
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(05-27-2015, 10:01 AM)crow Wrote: oh, I hope I didn't come across as combative--I was trying to reciprocate tone, not be a lowland swamp douche
No,crow, you did not...and anyway this post was in the discussion forum where discussions take place. I have moved your 62 lyrics to Miscellaneous where lyrics are to be posted...uncombatively.
Best,
tectak
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