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Composition: Poetry, Rap, & Songwriting

Owned by Nathan Wailes
Last updated: Aug 20, 2018
11 min read

Child pages

  • I'm throwing these all together for now b/c I think they're related.

Table of contents


  • Wikipedia - Musical techniques
    • I should go through this and create sections on my wiki for the techniques I'd like to learn more about (eg syncopation, etc).



  • Hakiko Hirata - Poco Piano (Website)
    • Hakiko Hirata - Poco Piano (YouTube)
    • Summaries
      1. Musical Pulse
      2. Meter
      3. Rhythm
      4. Melody = reflection of our vocal inflections
      5. The 7-note Western Scale"
      6. Can different keys have different colors?
      7. Music with Codes
      8. Minor Scales
      9. Other scales, e.g. Whole-tone scale, and pentatonic scale
      10. Harmony
      11. Diatonicism vs. Chromaticism
      12. Chromaticism as a Vehicle of Self-expression
      13. Emancipation of Dissonance
      14. Texture
      15. Talking about Music
      16. Claudio Arrau Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 3 (Full)



Songwriting



Producers



Books



Misc




Algorithmic Composition

2012.07 - Notacon 9 - Code That Sounds Good: Intro to Algorithmic Composition
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkcafN7zKjc
- She gives a brief overview of the tools you can use; she highly recommends MIDI
- She then goes into music theory, discussing what rhythm is, what meter is, what pitch and key are
~23:00 - 26:00 she says she does twelve-tone music, and explains the idea of a "tone row" and the four allowed manipulations of the tone row in that style of music: prime, retrograde, inversion, retrograde inversion.




- note that the Beatles make EXTENSIVE use of stereo: they really pull apart the instruments into the two sides. I can listen to pretty much ANY music with only one earbud, but I can't listen at ALL to the Beatles, because their music is so heavily divided into two channels. That may be an effect that has contributed in a subtle way to the effect their songs have on people.

- from reading about math I've learned the concept of "entropy" in any information signal, which is the rate of change (i think). Basically, it's how much information is in a signal. This has made me pay attention to how much songs change and how much they stay the same, and I've noticed that there seems to be a "sweet spot" where you repeat an idea enough for people to get it and enjoy it, but don't repeat it to the point where they get sick of it. I was listening to Pandora and had a live version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" come on that is like 5 minutes long, and I just got sick of it halfway through because it was so repetitive. This seems to connect with something I've noticed about good actors: they add all kinds of interesting movements and gestures and accents and ways of behaving that are interesting to look at. It's like decorating a Christmas tree. You should add an easy-to-see pattern of decoration for people who are new to the tree (or new to the film, or new to the song), but it may be a good idea to add a lot of subtle details that people can pay attention to when they look more closely at what you've made.


Questions:

- Is there any way to have a song use more of the opening riff of Michael Jackson's Human Nature without ruining the effect of the riff? In other words, is the reason it sounds so good that it 

Classical Music

General structure

Symphonies

  • David Bratman - An Introduction to Symphonic Form

    • The best resource on symphonic form I have ever seen is a CD-ROM of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, with the commentary and other material written by musicologist Robert Winter. It was published by a software company called Voyager, and came in both PC and Mac versions. Unfortunately I believe it's out of print, but you may be able to find it in some libraries. It contained essays, illustrated with musical examples, on the symphony's background and construction; plus a full performance with a running written/visual commentary pointing out significant features and showing one's location in the work. A number of other works, with commentaries by Winter or others, were also issued by Voyager.

      The BBC keeps a large archive of 45-minute programs, each discussing a classical work in some detail. The quality varies -- I don't think the one on "Romeo and Juliet" is very clear or helpful, but the one on Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony is excellent, for instance -- but I've found them well worth listening to.

      There are a number of books discussing symphonic form and providing examples. The Symphony and the Symphonic Poem by Earl V. Moore and Theodore E. Heger is the easiest and clearest to use. It consists of a series of charts outlining the form of masterworks. It's been out of print for many years, but can be found in some music libraries, or perhaps used-book stores.



Beethoven

- he makes heavy use of variation in volume; this may be a potential source of innovation in house music. House music does it already right now, but its variation in volume isn't nearly as varied as Beethoven's.
- he makes use of delaying / changing the tempo. This could also be a source of innovation in house music. House music already involves pauses and can transition from one tempo to another, but I'm not sure it's being used as systematically as Beethoven uses it.
- he makes use of switching your attention between the voices in the song. For example, listen to the Moonlight Sonata. This seems like a big source of potential innovation in house music. Again, it's already being done, but I don't think it's being done as systematically.

Beethoven's 5th Symphony
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRgXUFnfKIY
- He can increase or decrease the perceived intensity of a moment by manipulating the number of instruments playing the idea of that moment; this kind of addresses a question I'd had about house music that is played in a club: I'd noticed that when a song I loved came on I would want it to be more intense, but that if they just raised the volume it would make it too loud to hear without hurting my ears. So I started to wonder how they could make it more intense without raising the volume. I think there are probably a number of ways to do it. Regarding the 5th: it seems that each new instrument adds a different "voice" (different frequency of sound) and increases the volume.
- He repeats the first part twice, then seems to go and do new stuff. And he plays with the idea of "short-short-short-long". It's like he takes apart the original riff and slightly modifies different parts of it, then makes new parts of the song based on each of those slight modifications. So for example he'll have the strings play "short-short-short-short" in a way that reminds you of the original riff, but the last note won't be held and he won't drop the note down on the last note.

Mozart - Symphony No. 25 In G Minor, K. 183; 1st Movement(from Amadeus soundtrack)
- The song changes its tempo to match the intensity of the moment; it goes really fast when it's doing an energetic part of the song, and slows down a LOT when it shifts to a less-energetic part of the song. You couldn't change the tempo this much in a house-music song.
- It repeatedly returns to a main theme, just like in pop music nowadays. At the end he does a darker-sounding variation of the main theme, just like better pop music tends to vary its chorus slightly to keep it from getting too repetitive.
- Q: Why can Mozart have different hooks from modern pop songs? What is it about the structure of modern pop songs that prevents them from using the kinds of hooks that older types of music use?





Electronic Music



- They often pick random words to fill in the lyrics; my guess is that they want to use the human voice as one of the instruments in the song, but they don't want people to get distracted by the actual meaning of the words that the human voice is saying, so they just pick words that won't evoke too much meaning. Eg Audio,Video,Disco by Justice


How to Make Electronic Music
IGN Forum - What programs do electronic artists use?
http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/what- ... 168460604/

HowToMakeElectronicMusic.com
http://howtomakeelectronicmusic.com/how ... e-to-start

YouTube - FL Studio Tutorials (FL Studio is apparently used by Afrojack)
http://www.youtube.com/user/ste1438

Idea: Many house songs involve giving one theme, and then a second theme, and then having them come together in a climax. Try putting things into each sub-theme that don't make much sense, but sound great when the two themes come together. It'll be like when a movie uses foreshadowing, throwing out details at the beginning of a movie that don't seem important, but later take on a lot of meaning.


Songwriting

Repetition

  • What do people consider an acceptable amount of repetition between different songs? Are different characteristics of a song more likely to be OK'd by the audience if they're held constant across songs? For example, most bands hold the instruments they use constant between their different songs & albums, and their audiences tend not to care (afaik). But melodies don't seem OK to hold constant. And I remember a famous mash-up of two of Nickelback's songs that showed that the timing/structure of the two songs were exactly the same, which may have been a no-no. On the other hand, both songs became popular, so maybe it was ok; what's the right answer?
  • This issue came up when I was thinking about Justice's follow-up to their incredibly-popular initial album "Cross"; a lot of their fans were disappointed that they had changed their sound so much. So my question is, how could Justice have struck the right balance between keeping their sound similar enough to keep their fans happy but different enough to not seem unimaginatively repetitive? It seems like a band could be actually creating a new genre in the act of coming out with a bunch of albums that follow a new set of rules.


Tip: Keep the volume down when you're editing the music; it'll help you from getting exhausted.



Things I've Learned

  • Good songs often include two or more pleasant musical ideas (riffs) that are combined in a way to make their combined effect greater than the sum of their parts.
  • people grow to like a person's particular voice when they associate that voice with good lyrics/melodies
  • when people listen to a song for the first time it's a very different experience from later listens b/c they don't know what is yet to come. eg imo depeche mode's "World in My Eyes" starts off not-so-great, but it pulls out some awesome riffs later on.
  • Better songs often build up some tension and reach some kind of climax, a lot like a movie or a play.
  • certain instruments have characteristics that seem like they may limit the potential usefulness of the instrument in different situations; any instrument that has a long onset time for its sound may be less useful in songs that require instruments to be able to jump in and out of the melody. i noticed this while thinking about how bagpipes and those arabic flute things are used in songs








Analysis of Particular Songs/Artists:

Gorillaz - Demon Days
- I love this album. It's the only album I've ever heard that used really deep bass notes as an integral part of its songs. Listening to this album on a summer night in a car with a good sound system and the bass boosted is amazing.

O Green World
- The different voices (the person singing the main lyrics, the backup singers, the guitar-sounding instrument, the drums, etc) are mixed to be the same volume, so your attention is constantly being pulled from one to the other. In most other songs that I've heard there's usually a dominant voice.


Billy Joel:

Quote:
A.G.: Is songwriting hard for you?

B.J.: Yeah, I relate to Beethoven. I write backward — I write the music first and then I write the words. Most people write the words first and then they write the music. Keith Richards was explaining his method of songwriting. He calls it “vowel movement.” They come up with a riff, and it’s like sounds, and whatever sound . . . like “start me up” — “up” works because it has a consonant at the end of it, but if you go “take me home,” it wouldn’t have worked. I kind of subscribe to that. It has to sound right sometimes even more than being a poetic lyric. It’s a struggle to fit words onto music, and I want it to be really, really good, so I take a long time. I love having written, but I hate writing. So then I go through postpartum depression, and it’s: “Ugh, I gotta start all over again? Where am I going to get the” — what do you call it? Sitzfleisch?

Source: Billy Joel on Not Working and Not Giving Up Drinking



Air (French band)
- These guys use a lot of unusual instruments/effects/voices, which I think makes their music sound more exotic than it otherwise would. This makes me suspect that other bands could benefit from making slight departures from the normal range of instruments. That reminds me that the Beatles did the same thing (iirc).
- They don't say a lot of lyrics per second/minute of music. You should come up with a measure of songs' information content that measures the number of words per second of spoken lyrics.

Adele - Rolling In The Deep

There are three main "ideas" in the song that get repeated 2-3 times.

Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody
- lon


2012 - Psy - Gangnam Style
Thoughts:
- You don't even understand what he's saying, but it's still entertaining.
- The only reason this song became popular is the video; this seems similar to how The Lonely Island's songs got popular.
- The video has a lot of seemingly-totally-random things in it; it's constantly throwing new information at you. And you can watch the video over and over and discover new things each time. It's a lot like a Christmas tree in that sense.


Song Ideas:

- Why can't more songs have the extended format that you see in Elton John's "Love Lies Bleeding" and Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody"? I think there's a big opportunity here.

- use the opening bars from Jamiroquai's "Everyday" (off the Travelling Without Moving album)

- make a song where a bunch of different instruments / basic riffs are repeating but on slightly different frequencies, and fade them in and out depending on whether they're in-line with the "main" beat. I got this idea from making a video where the video was kind of out of line with the accompanying song for most of it, but then at the climax of the song / video they come into the same frequency (the movie cuts to different shots on the beat), and it was pretty cool. It happened totally by chance.

Always Something There to Remind Me
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... Ae31FFHbo#!
- I LOVE the intro riff to this song, and I LOVE the way the video adds wedding bells and a weird down-pitch ominous sound. I'd be interested in making a new song centered solely around the opening riff's musical idea. I also love the way the opening sound to the music video has a lot going on simultaneously (riff, wedding bells, ominous sound) but it doesn't grate against my ears.

Michael Jackson - Human Nature
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgmbYALa0no
- I LOVE the opening riff to this song, and would love to make a remix that focuses solely on that idea.

- listening to Kanye use kids on "We Don't Care", it occurred to me you could just push that to the extreme and have the kids rapping. They'd need to sound innocent otherwise it'd be like Lil' Bow Wow
- it could be funny to make a rap song where you spend the whole time rapping about how you're such a terrible rapper.

I'd really like to hear more songs that have two or more musical ideas presented separately at first, where they may not make much sense, and then the ideas are presented at the same time and they sound great together.
Cake - Open Book: The opening part doesn't sound very melodic, but maybe if you combined it with something else it would suddenly make more sense.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZglPsuXFuk

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