Word Worlds

 

Many of the lyrics in their oblique allusions and way-out metaphors are beginning to sound like real poems.---Leonard Bernstein, Inside Pop, 1966

In Bill Maher's recent interview with Billy Joel, he groused about how some Beatles lyrics didn't make sense.  But they're more about the sound or their percussive value rather than telling a story. These days, it seems everything has to make sense in a linear left-hemisphere fashion. People want stories, not to have to think about things or come to terms with ambiguity.

It's fun to both generate music with AI and to play the spins for people as I'm working out the lyrics. 

For people who have never really tuned into lyrics, they are moved primarily by the overall timbre. On a recent song, Innovationism, with provisional lyrics, they didn't hear the mispronounced words. Listeners might be less likely to spot errors, or in Maher's case, that they are nonsense.

Since "innovationism" is a made-up word, music LLMs can't always parse it and might "hallucinate" other words. AI does, in fact, understand the natural rhythm of the word, which I am using to as the rhythmic seed. 

I like that AI works at the syllabic level, so I can make up even more nonsense words, like "breakthingsfastasism". People won't notice them unless you point them out, because they might be focusing on something else.

AI had a hard time with "Thiel", and required respelling it as the color teal, and it still got it wrong. "Teel" does work, but would have worked automatically in a rhyme with "real" and "reel" and "deal".

The sounds of words matter sometimes. The word "Choctaw" as in "Choctaw Ridge" was used in Sell You a Bridge and didn't bother me, but someone didn't like the sound of it, probably because of its hard percussive consonants (and might sound like "disgust"), but that particular place in Mississippi is central to the lyric, as well as it's inherited meaning from Ode To Billy Joe and it's cultural narratives. I could have used "Ruby Ridge", but that's another can of worms in terms of its own history.

My current process is to put language first in the chain rather than after the music. This becomes the riff that generates the work. With AI-generation, you can remove the vocals, then sing over that, which puts the music first. However, meaning might be more elusive because the lyrics are essentially dummy lyrics. In fact, AI will do this kind of scatting with nonsense syllables and phonemes, in which case you could use that to plug in words. If the meaning of lyrics is more important, time spent on the words is probably the first order of business. AI music makes that more difficult because the phrasing is hardly ever what you want, requiring re-generating the music repeatedly.

From Burning Down the House: "Among the many contrarian aspects of Eno's approach to record production was his inclination to reduce the prominence of vocals and lyrics in the overall musical mix. Generally speaking, he was much more interested in the sound of singing than in the meaning of what was being sung. His own compositional method, which he would later impart to David Byrne, was to record the music first and then sound out the words and melody by singing along repeatedly with the instrumental tracks." (198)

"One of the virtues that contributed to the impact,and influence of Remain in Light was the sheer breadth of its innovation. In addition to relying on Brian Enos methodology of building up tracks in layers from a minimal rhythmic base, David Byrne experimented with an approach to. lyric writing based more on the way words felt and sounded than on what they actually meant, consciously resisting the impulse, as he would liter put it, to “make sense." In the case of "Houses in Motion," Byrne took the title and some of the lyrics from a radio sermon he heard." (270)

There seems to be a certain amount of indifference about certain elements in music. I care that the words are correctly pronounced and not garbled, other people just want the track to move them. Some people don't like the sound of one word and will kill the whole mood, no matter how soulful the vocal is. We all want something different from art. Art is supposed to behave the way we think it should. Who cares if it doesn't make sense, but there are different shades of that obviously.