We Did It Joe

 

I have been very interested in the "music of language" ("speech melody") since hearing Steve Reich's Different Trains, which used audio of interviews given about the events pre and post World War II.

When I first saw the clip of Kamala Harris' phone call to Joe Biden congratulating him on their win, I thought it had a musical quality, and here it is transcribed:

It is almost perfectly in the key of Eb and it didn't take long to find a chord progression to fit with it.

The beats on which certain syllables fall create coherence in language. If you displace a syllable it either makes it unintelligible or changes the meaning. 

The "we did it Joe" line is clearly rhythmic. The word "we" falling on an upbeat is a less "royal" we. A royal "we" would fall on a downbeat and sounds arrogant and boastful: "WE did it...not you"

Sometimes phrases can fall on the second beat of a bar, and if used without a comma, can sound more like "Joey did it." If you repeat this one bar it almost sounds like a Motown-era backgound vocal: Joey did it, yes he did."

Very often what I do with these spoken melodies captured in the wild is to swap out the words with something else. Language then becomes the "egg".

Here's the quick-and-dirty ditty: https://youtu.be/zlMZJbO3D_4