By Cesar Arevalo | Audio Specialist
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Abstract- This document dives into the rhythmic relationship between speech and progressive music genres through the production of a series of short songs built from speeches, official statements, and talks obtained from the daily news between June and July of 2020. The project especially analyses the rhythmic properties of the voice through the composition of songs in a musical genre whose dynamic variety is minimal (Heavy Metal Music), making it the appropriate style to highlight the metric structures of the voice recordings chosen for the project.
The characteristics of progressive metal rhythms such as Technical Metal, Djent, and Prog Metal, among others, are explored in this document through the composition of a series of short songs set up to coincide with the vocal properties of different public figures and characters who participated in the most relevant events worldwide during June and July 2020. These statements have been obtained from international news, using different sources to establish the speeches that are part of the riffs (between 30 and 60 seconds long), among these sources you can find mass media from all over the world, press, articles, and newspapers. Among the considerations for the creation of the pieces, you can find the rhythmic aspects of the voice, tone, and harmony. However, it is worth mentioning that the music has also been created using other references such as movement, the sounds of nature, and onomatopoeias, among other sound sources. This is done to develop ideas for future studies and they only represent a small part of the musical material developed for this article, most of the guitar riffs and songs are based on speeches, press releases, and official notifications.
Although the main aspect to consider for the composition of this music has been the rhythm, for some of the entries the tone and melody were also crucial in the development of the riffs, perhaps the best example of this is the composition based on a research study about some bird species in New Zealand and the characteristics of their communication and regional dialects. Some of these birds are more likely to sing melodies with a clear melodic and musical sense.
The characteristics of progressive metal rhythms such as Technical Metal, Djent, and Prog Metal, among others, are explored in this document through the composition of a series of short songs set up to coincide with the vocal properties of different public figures and characters who participated in the most relevant events worldwide during June and July 2020. These statements have been obtained from international news, using different sources to establish the speeches that are part of the riffs (between 30 and 60 seconds long), among these sources you can find mass media from all over the world, press, articles, and newspapers. Among the considerations for the creation of the pieces, you can find the rhythmic aspects of the voice, tone, and harmony. However, it is worth mentioning that the music has also been created using other references such as movement, the sounds of nature, and onomatopoeias, among other sound sources. This is done to develop ideas for future studies and they only represent a small part of the musical material developed for this article, most of the guitar riffs and songs are based on speeches, press releases, and official notifications.
Although the main aspect to consider for the composition of this music has been the rhythm, for some of the entries the tone and melody were also crucial in the development of the riffs, perhaps the best example of this is the composition based on a research study about some bird species in New Zealand and the characteristics of their communication and regional dialects. Some of these birds are more likely to sing melodies with a clear melodic and musical sense.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Can arrhythmic speech patterns establish the basis for composing musical pieces in the progressive metal genre?
One of the most relevant influences in this project has been the wide research work on topics related to musical illusions, and paradoxes, among others, developed by Diane Deutsch, professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego. Her production has more than 200 publications on the most important curiosities and facts about the perception of music and dialogue.
Among the most relevant studies by this author, we can find “The Illusory Transformation from Speech to Song “Deutsch, D., Henthorn, T., and Lapidis, R. (2016), where she describes through a series of subjective experiments how a series of individuals recognize the musicality of a phrase by repeating a specific passage in a speech.
While working on the edition of her compact disc “Musical Illusions and Paradoxes” (Deutsch 1995) she discovered how one of the phrases she edited seemed to have perfect rhythm and musical tuning, it is from this finding that these interesting studies on the perception of speech and its relationship with music started being developed.
She has produced articles where this type of research is approached from a linguistic perspective (Deutsch 2013), making use of the complex and varied sounds of the Mandarin language and its characteristic use of intonation, its different tones, and how these sounds are perceived by the listener.
Various artists have creatively addressed the relationship between music and dialogue, even though Sammy Rae (a jazz artist mentioned in this document) was not the first singer to explore how dialogue can be musicalized, she is the jazz singer who has made this idea an essential part of her staging. The natural way in which she organizes any phrase, introduction to a song, personal anecdote, or message for the audience, draws attention to the creativity behind the way she turns a sentence into an exquisite series of melodies perfectly tuned and exposed in harmonic contexts proper of the gender (Rae Sammy 2020 & Rae Sammy 2019).
METHODOLOGY
Instrumentation
The instrumentation of the project is relatively simple: The percussion is made up of a drum set and a series of “samples” to emphasize certain passages of the riffs (descending low-frequency Drops, “slides”, reversed cymbals), this instrument has been simulated with the help of Toontrack’s EZ Drummer 2 and some original “samples” from a personal collection used as drums “triggers”; The electric guitar is tuned in Drop A, its lowest note is an A2 (12 caliber string), seeking to give a rather “dark” and “heavy” tone to the sound of each song; the bass follows the same tuning of the electric guitar and practically copies the notes played by this instrument (one or two octaves below), with the difference that the guitar plays fifth chords as usual in rock, and the bass only plays the root note in each passage. This is why the musical analyzes presented in this document use the electric bass sheet music as a reference.
| String | Musical Note |
| 1 | Si |
| 2 | Sol |
| 3 | Re |
| 4 | La |
| 5 | Mi |
| 6 | La |
Guitar Tone
The guitar tone has been created by implementing free plug-ins combined with the application of impulse responses to emulate the amp’s cabins. The head amplifier was LePou’s Le456 plug-in, a great free simulator when it comes to emulating amps for metal and other heavy genres. The distortion has been supported by another free simulator developed by TSE audio, this emulation of the classic “tube screamer Ts808” complements the sound provided by the amplifier very well. Regarding the cabins, Ignite Amps’ Nadir convolver has been applied, another free tool specifically designed to load impulse responses from guitar cabins. The IRs used for the recordings come from an original collection developed in the recording studios of the University of Salford in the city of Manchester, UK. Since the guitar has been overdubbed once (each take is repeated during recording) and panned 100% to the left and right respectively, different impulse responses have been applied for each side, implementing a slightly opaquer sound for the guitar located on the left side of the stereo image.
Audio Mixing
Regarding the audio mix, it is worth highlighting the use of “imagers” and “exciters” to enhance certain frequencies of the guitars, the stereo arrangements of the drums, and the overall sound of each song; as well as the application of “Side Chain” techniques to emphasize the dynamic relationship between the strings and key elements of the percussion such as the kick drum and the snare, an important aspect in the genres related to rock, especially in metal and any heavy music style. The use of Waves’ CLA-2 and FabFilter’s Pro-L has been crucial in improving overall track gain.
Music Composition
The production of this series of short songs begins in May for the celebration of the first crewed Space X mission scheduled for the 28th but held on the 2nd of June due to bad weather conditions. The vocal track is derived from the speech by Space X CEO Elon Musk after the Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission was successful. Musk’s characteristic pauses, rhythm, and intonation provide the perfect setting for introducing the first guitar patterns. In this case, the song’s tempo has been set to 120 bpm to match his voice, without having to change/edit any of its properties. Although the words do not exactly match the beat of the given tempo, these delays are not very noticeable when listening to the piece as a whole.
Assigning a key to the piece reduces the ability to reproduce and emulate the same frequencies, tones, and other aspects of sound and voice. However, this allows us to acquire a greater musicality, which is convenient when supporting the rhythmic patterns of the song from a more harmonic perspective. In the same way, it is possible not to define a key, since it is completely valid to reproduce the tones between the musical notes, and it can be useful to determine how other communication codes are related to the way we speak. In the riff bulletin number 16, we can find a clear example of this idea, since for this tune the music was arranged to match the sounds that birds make when communicating. This riff was composed on the recordings of some bird songs made by Laura Molles (a New Zealand ecologist), an expert in bird dialects, who has presented the results of her research on some species that inhabit her country. Two different approaches were applied to the composition of these riffs: in the first one, the closest note to the frequency emitted by the bird was played as it would normally be, this has been done by even playing the note in different octaves as it can be seen in bar number 14; For the second approach, techniques for guitar performance such as “Bending”, the use of the Whammy bar and pedal effects were applied. This is done to reach the intermediate notes, and denote the intonation and melodic motion of the sounds emitted by these animals (measure number 20).
Among the pieces that denote movement through these musical rhythms, we can find the tune’s numbers 6, 13, and 14. One of the most relevant is the news where Sky Brown, the youngest Olympic competitor in the United Kingdom, publishes the video of the most serious fall of her career along with a few words of support for her fans from her hospital bed. In this song, the stunt movement she performs along with the fall is represented by guitar riffs that mark each key point of her movements, including the use of “Guitar Slides” to represent the moment when the athlete falls to the ground. We can also find the news about the statues being torn down in different places of the world during this period of the year 2020 and some scientific news that allowed us to represent natural phenomena in a musical context.
It should be noted that not only aspects of speech such as hesitation and repetitions have been exemplified in these riffs, but also other types of common sounds in the dialogue such as sighs and fillers. A clear example of this can be found in bulletin number 8, where the stewardess who is telling an anecdote for television, takes time to sigh at the end of her story. This was represented with a descending glissando for the moment she takes a breath, followed by two open chords to represent the moment of sighing. By using this type of chords in the context of metallic music where the guitars have a high gain and a distortion full of harmonics, it is possible to bring the feeling of “relief” caused by the sigh, since it is not common to find many chords compounds in this genre (seventh chords, increased, among others).
The Em7 chord refers to playing the treble strings of the guitar openly (without any fingering), the fundamental and the 5th are not easily perceived when the distortion is so high, the treble notes of the open chord mask the sound of the thicker strings.
RESULTSIt is fascinating to think about how some of these aspects of music and dialogue are also an essential part of the way people (and some animals) communicate regardless of the language. The close relationship between music and speech seems to be closer than we normally think. Diane Deutsch, an expert in illusions, and musical paradoxes, among other memorable auditory studies; provides important outcomes on how people perceive or not the musicality of the speech. While she was tuning and editing the commentary spoken on her CD “Illusions and musical paradoxes” (Diana Deutsch, Musical Illusions, and Paradoxes. Philomel Records, Compact Disc and Booklet, 1995), Deutsch discovered the illusion of “voice to the song”. This event led her to carry out a precise study on this phenomenon and the way in which it is perceived by trained subjects (Deutsch 1997).
When this particular fragment of the recording was repeated, the subjects intuitively identified it as an authentic musical phrase. However, when the fragment of the talk was reproduced without alterations or repetitions, the subjects could not recognize its musicality.
This idea of the musicality of the discourse has been reaffirmed in this project, especially from a rhythmic point of view. After developing more than 10 minutes of music built from official statements and speeches in the mass media, several examples of this phenomenon become evident, at the end of this section you can find the list of all the pieces created for this study.
| Bulletin Riff | Title | Type | Length (min:sec) |
| 1 | Ellon Musk at the Press Conference after successful Crew Dragon Demo-2 launch | Speech | 0:30 |
| 2 | Military deployment ordered by Donald Trump | Speech | 0:35 |
| 3 | Carrie Lam statements on the new national security law for Hong Kong | Speech | 0:35 |
| 4 | Justin Trudeau silent for 20 seconds after being asked about US protests | Speech | 0:46 |
| 5 | US leaving WHO, Trump holding a bible and Dwayne Johnson The rock message | Speech | 0:32 |
| 6 | Sky Brown sends a support message after having the worst fall of her career yet | Speech & Motion | 0:40 |
| 7 | Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announces that New Zealand is now coronavirus free | Speech | 0:33 |
| 8 | Stewardess, Jacquerie Hill, held a conversation about race with Doug Parker AACEO | Speech | 0:35 |
| 9 | Protesters tear down a statue of a slave trader in Bristol | Motion | 0:46 |
| 10 | Cop refuses to obey an order of eviction for a farmer community in Cali Colombia | Speech | 0:40 |
| 11 | The police union leader said: I am not Derek Chauvin | Speech | 0:36 |
| 12 | President of Tanzania, John Magufuli, said prayers have reduced COVID-19 cases | Speech | 0:42 |
| 13 | Monuments and Statues torn down during Balck Lives Matter protests | Motion | 0:55 |
| 14 | X-ray QPO detected in 2007 still going strong. Longest black hole heartbeat so far | Nature & Motion | 0:33 |
| 15 | Lopez Obrador: Not to lie, betray, or steal to prevent Coronavirus | Speech | 0:42 |
| 16 | Laura Molles, New Zealand ecologist: Birds develop regional dialects | Nature & Bird singing | 0:45 |
| 17 | Trump refers to Coronavirus as “Kung Flu” | Speech | 0:49 |
| 18 | Donald Trump says he slowed testing | Speech | 0:39 |
| 19 | Bill Gates’ Coronavirus predictions for the upcoming months | Speech | 0:35 |
| 20 | WHO director: The worst is yet to come | Speech | 0:51 |
| 21 | Nathan Law (Pro-democracy leader) leaves Hong Kong. people are not giving up now | Speech | 0:42 |
CONCLUSIONS
Progressive rock music allows us to approach the “musicalization” of dialogue with an emphasis on rhythm and the metric properties of discourse. The characteristic pauses in speech and some other aspects such as hesitation, dramatic pauses, and the repetition of phrases or words, provide an optimal basis for the construction of these progressive tunes. The musical analysis of these characteristics of dialogue is not limited only to the study of the rhythmic patterns of speech, but also to the tonal, dynamic, and intonation properties of the voice, which can be examined, emulated, and reconstructed through different music writing methodologies. The approach outlined in this document for the development and composition of these songs can be applied not only to spoken discourse but also to the sounds of nature, movement, onomatopoeia, and various sound sources.
Although the methodology for the development of the totality of the music produced for this document has not been described, the most relevant aspects of the composition of these riffs were explained in detail using some of the songs as an example. These descriptions can be easily applied to the study of the rest of the produced pieces and it is also very useful for the development of further songs and riffs.
FURTHER WORKThis type of musical composition could not only be applied to dialogue, but they could also refer to nature sounds and movement, and although music based on discourses in English and Spanish was the foundation of this project, it would be worth analyzing the results of the implementation of these methods applied to other languages. In the same way, a wider variety of nature sounds and forms of communication between other animal species could be used for the composition of this type of music.
The tonal analysis of different languages can bring interesting results on the application of the composition methodologies exposed in this document. Languages with a rich tonal variation, intonation, and timbre such as Mandarin could provide a broader perspective for future studies with a larger focus on the harmonic and tonal aspects of dialogue and its musicality. Diane Deutsch has developed very enriching studies on the properties of this particular language, highlighting its abundance of sounds and peculiarities related to the perception of this tongue.
Although progressive rock has been used for this project, other musical genres such as jazz and electronic music could be considered as well. A clear example of this idea is the work carried out by the singer Sammy Rae, who turns part of her introductory dialogues from her concerts into melodies that seem to preserve the eloquence of her speech in a musical context, making use of characteristic metrics, rhythms, and schemes of Jazz. A work that has inspired part of the material developed for this project.
REFERENCES[1] Deutsch, D., Henthorn, T., and Lapidis, R. (2016) Illusory transformation from speech to song (Chinese translation from Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2011, 129, 2245-2252). Journal of Shenghai Conservatory of Music, 2016, 4, 133-145.
[2] Tierney, A., Dick, F., Deutsch, D., and Sereno, M (2013). Speech versus song: Multiple pitch-sensitive areas revealed by a naturally occurring musical illusion. Cerebral Cortex, 2013, 23, 249-254.
[3] Shen, J., Deutsch, D., and Rayner, K. (2013) On-line perception of Mandarin Tones 2 and 3: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2013, 133, 3016-3029
[4] Peng, G., Deutsch, D., Henthorn, T., Su, D., and Wang, W. S-Y (2013). Language experience influences nonlinguistic pitch perception. Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 2013, 41, 447-467
[5] Deutsch, D., Henthorn, T., and Lapidis, R. (2011) Illusory transformation from speech to song. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2011, 129, 2245-2252
[6] Deutsch, D., Henthorn T. and Dolson, M. (2004) Absolute pitch, speech, and tone language: Some experiments and a proposed framework. Music Perception, 2004, 21, 339-356
[7] Sammy Rae (2020), Sammy Rae – “Denim Jacket” (Live at the Sinclair), Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSzJ87qKU6o (Accessed: 2020/04/11)
[8] Sammy Rae (2019), Sammy Rae & the Friends – Opening Ceremony/”The Feeling” (Rockwood 1.19.19), Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhBIc1MbzQ8 (Accessed: 2020/04/11)
[9] Cesar Arevalo (2020), El Boletín Riffs | Playlist. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ3P2TM1dO0&list=PLeGcZnZq4RNQwmEeACA-h_kFn48jntq9U (Accessed: 2020/07/05)
[10] Cesarte (2020), Bulletin Riffs | Playlist. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dyzF9dL6uc&list=PLlYcG_VrPtQv28VwLLgjwbwQQ8TviDbdU (Accessed: 2020/07/05)
[11] A. Cesar (2019). Semi-virtual chain for guitar amplifiers simulation. Cesound.blog (17/02/2020). Available at: https://cesound.blog/2020/02/17/semi-virtual-amplifiers-simulation-chain/
[12] Deutsch, D. (1995), Musical Illusions and Paradoxes. Philomel Records, Compact Disc and Booklet, 1995.
[13] Deutsch, D. (1997) The tritone paradox: A link between music and speech. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1997, 174-180.
[14] Deutsch, D., Lapidis, R., and Henthorn, T (2008). The speech-to-song illusion. Invited Lay language paper presented at the 156th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2008, November, Miami.
[15] Tierney, A., Dick, F., Deutsch, D., and Sereno, M (2012). Speech versus song: Multiple pitch- sensitive areas revealed by a naturally occurring musical illusion. Cerebral Cortex, 2012.