The Substrates Inside Speech

1:05 What's good, everybody?Welcome back to love music more.Say the words, I'm fine.Out loud a few different ways.I'm fine.I'm fine, I'm fine.Do you notice how the inflection, the pitch, the stress fundamentally changes the meaning?That's music, the music of language.

1:32 And I'll argue that the boundaries between speech and rap and music are very, very vague.A lot of it's just context.Like I was thinking about on social media, have you seen this where somebody will be givinga speech or doing something interesting and someone will transcribe it.

1:55 So just like I just did, I went up and then I went down with my tone and they could transcribeit on a guitar or bass, MonoNeon did this a ton.And same thing when somebody's really animated and they're speaking, they tend to speakwith some level of rhythm like I'm doing right now.You could play this on drums.But the fundamental meaning of the words that were transmitting is not flat.

2:24 And that's one of the reasons why I love podcasts so much is that you can get across a substrateof meaning that words cannot aka music.And same difference between a painting and a movie, written word and speech, it movesit sings, it lives, it breathes, it dies.Music is a temporal art, a time-based art form.It goes from a beginning to an end.It is a microcosm of somebody's life.

2:57 And inside of it, you have the tension, you have the pitch, you have the rhythm, the stress,the phrasing.And one of the things I love is that different languages have different rhythms.It's one of the hardest things about learning language is you're not just learning the words.You're learning how to play a new instrument in a new culture.

3:16 In the same way that with Japanese, I kind of have to think a little bit differently.I have to access ideas in a different direction.Same idea, same thing that I'm trying to communicate.But you have to come at it from a different sort of brain because the words are all in differentorders and the words mean slightly different things.

3:34 And some things would be weird to say in Japanese and you kind of have to indicate at.And other things are very explicit.And in English, we are very linear.We start here with the subject and then we move to what the subject is doing and thento whom and why and how and we have that particular order.And of course, other languages have different orders.

3:54 And those orders are not just semantics, they're not just these little things.It's the difference between genre.So the translator, the translator is kind of like somebody that's transposing an instrumentor orchestrating where you're not just taking the theme.You're having to figure out, okay, how do I sell this?How do I put this into the cultural and linguistic frame?

4:17 The way that somebody would actually say this natively in this language without losingthe essential music behind it.Isn't that weird?Isn't not also weird the ways that we pace out our sentences.And I think that this is a huge tell of native speaker versus non-native speaker andto my friends that are non-native English speakers that listen to this podcast.

4:46 I, you know, I'm trying to, trying to walk the walk, talk the talk here because it's notall linear.It's not all linear in the sense of everything comes out one after another after another.We kind of think in these little bursts.In the same way that you could picture a jazz drummer, that they're playing a solo.

5:05 Like a phrase, not just a phrase in terms of a sentence, a phrase in terms of a motifand idea, a little musical package.We talk and we think in this way, you know, I'm not reading a script.So that tempo, that dynamic, that phrasing, and also the timbre.

5:28 I talk a lot about timbre across the podcast episodes because it is one of the most impactfuland interesting ways to make something simple work or make something repetitive, interesting.Because if you change something from a really high pitch down to something really somber,you just let it hang in the air for a while.

5:54 Or if you say something like, you know, with a little bit of a smile, just like whatI've talked to some voiceover artists.These are the same things that you can do on a saxophone or on the guitar, the way thatyou hit the string or vibrate the read, loosen or tighten your armature.Those different ideas are analogous to just the way that we speak.And a lot about music comes back to speech and communication.

6:22 We're taking that, we're trying to elevate it.But just like I was saying, where you have the words, that's the meaning.But then there's a thing above it where you're really trying to communicate the emotion,the intensity, the intent.And that's what changes the feeling of, I wrote this, go read it to, I'm really tryingto communicate something to you.The border dissolves.So Diana Deutsch had a speech to song illusion.

6:59 It was discovered in 1995, a spoken phrase repeated unchanging, starts to sound sung.And shout out, UC San Diego, because this is where it's from.And so she had this little phrase, sometimes behave so strangely.And if you start saying it over and over again, it starts to get a certain kind of vibe,sometimes behave so strangely, sometimes behave so strangely, sometimes behave so strangely,

7:25 sometimes behave so strangely, sometimes behave so strangely, sometimes behave so strangely.That's a school we drove version.But one of the things that they found was that the participants, when they would do that,even if it was very, very plain, not as inflected as I was doing, when you would drop a beaton top of it, it would start to feel like song, because it was repetitive, it was repeating,

7:48 it was driving at home, it started to feel like a motif.And then when you took away the beat, people still felt like it was song.Like where is the line?Deutsch said, we don't actually know why the brain hears speech as speech and music as music.And I think there's something there, I think there's something there.I think that, anyway, in the actual like historical record, people did this, like

8:16 Monteverdi, where they would walk around with a notebook and capture speech melodies.It's very similar to composers will transcribe bird song, or Brandon Woodward, one of my buddy'sdrummer.He would transcribe like weird mechanical things, like a washing machine, or something

8:39 that had a strange off kilter rhythm, he would try to find out where it was closeston the grid or on the groove, write it down and then try to play it on drums.And back to the social media stuff, like MonoNeon transcribing the way that somebody speaks,or somebody playing drums or doing fully to a quotable little thing, and you loop it,loop it. I did a bunch of this on my records, Swami's.

9:06 One of the goats, Stephen Sondheim said, and a hundred different people just got off thetrain.He was like the tunes already in it.It comes out of the way that we speak.And I think there's something there too, with like opera and a lot of the traditions andfolk song and everything, there's an energy and emotion and a movement inherent in speech.

9:33 Like I went to a Noh drama in Japan, and it's really interesting to feel like Kabuki'sthe more exaggerated version too, of Japanese speech lending itself towards a certain typeof oratory.Pretty sweet, right?But in the same way, like people would talk about this with operas, I'm not an operaexpert by any means.I think it's super pretty, but I don't know at a time.

10:03 But I do know that it's super different when somebody's singing in French, Italians,Spanish, English, German.Very different vibe.It can be the same melody.And a lot of opera singers, you know, they know them all, because it's more than a lyric.It's a different type of scale, almost.A different framework, different sets of phrases, different sets of myths, of rhythm,of speech, of patterns, of inflection.

10:31 So obviously, there's the line between speech, repetition, into music, rap, and then there'sthe line between speech and poetry.And I took a poetry class in college, and nobody rhymed, you know, it was kind of hardfor me, because I write lyrics, and I like to rhyme, at least a little bit, you know?And there's, it's really hard to say when something becomes a poem, but you can kindof feel it.Or maybe it's the intent.

11:00 It's the same question of like, when does it become music?I don't really know, we could debate it for a while, maybe find a good conversation pitand some very choice marijuana, and we can have that in that conversation and findno answer.But it's an interesting thing to think about, mostly, not because you're going to findan answer, but mostly because it can inform the music that you make, it can inform the

11:26 poetry that you write, it can inform the way that you speak.Just look at the rhythm and isolation, it can inform, it can inform, it can inform.It's a great way to do it, because that also lets me think about the next thing that I'mtrying to say without having to waste additional syllables, like I'm not varying something,but I'm really driving at home, and really it's the equivalent of me saying, um, politicians

11:51 do that crap all the time.Now let me be clear.That was one of my favorite ones, to be able to start with a colon with like, I'm goingto say something important now, and you got to be Obama to be able to pull that off.I also want to think about baby talk, you know, like proto-language.

12:16 I think that's super interesting to about there are different styles of baby talk indifferent cultures, wild, something comedic timing, comedic timing is different in differentcultures.It's also kind of weird, I mean, like it's easy enough to think, okay, people are differentcultures, they're going to find different things funny, but it's like, it can be so such

12:41 a culture shock to listen to comedy and have everyone around you crack up and just belike, I don't get it, I don't see it.Same thing with sarcasm.Like I think sarcasm is a really hard thing for certain cultures, particularly comedyin the United States, or Britain, God, because you can say the word great and mean a wholebunch of different things.

13:03 And yeah, like we talk about Chinese being a pitched language, English certainly is, it'sjust pitch inflected, not pitch meaning in the same way.It's not like we're choosing from different words with different pitches.We are choosing from different meanings with different pitches, which is arguably harderbecause there's this, like again, it's like a cultural substrate, something that we take

13:28 for granted because we're in it.If you're not in it, it can feel incredibly daunting, where it's like, hey, yeah, learn15,000 words, and then also, if you say it a little bit differently, it means somethingopposite.Again, great.To go back to, great, great, but why now, why is this important now?

13:53 I think one of the weirdest things is AI speech, you can see on, you hear it on TikTok,and I do this, probably more than I should, of having it read aloud to me when I'm doingsomething or asking a question, and it is alien.

14:14 It doesn't quite nail it, and there are strange implications, I think, to not just writingconsumption, but over time, where if every call center employee becomes AI, if every socialmedia narration is AI, does the nature of speech change?Does that become an influence?

14:41 Like I talked with Riley, my mastering engineer, awhile back, aboutLANDR and AI mastering, because AI came to mastering way before the rest of the music.And so Riley was dealing with that, and he was basically saying, people are coming tome asking for the sound of the AI mastering.And I think that's such a weird, this is normal, though, also, every time there's technological

15:07 change, every time there's a shift, that becomes part of the musical vocabulary, people copyit, people do it, and then it becomes kind of the default, like, look at auto-tune.But it's a weird thing to be like, it is not just a new tool in that way, it's somethingthat's actually making the choices, and then people get used to those choices.

15:29 So that written sentence versus the sung sentence, just something we're thinking about, particularlywith music, because lyrics, speech, repetition, sampling, rap, all of these things are toolsin the toolkit, and as the artist, you want to have more tools.So to recap, you got the melody, goes up, and it goes down.You got the rhythm, what's stressed, what's unstressed, where's the beat?

16:06 Then you have the tempo, is it rushed, is it like really hurrying along, is it somethingthat's dragging a little bit, and kind of reluctant, things are coming out, but you'reable to feel something out of it, the dynamic, is it a little restrained, maybe a littleintimate, or is it declarative, believe this, now let me be clear.

16:25 And the phrasing, the breath marks, when does the line end, I think this is a reallyinteresting thing, and something that I probably should work on in my own speech, of wheredo you breathe?I get excited, and so I will just, you know, kind of accidentally, like I just did rightthere, interject a breath, where if I was practicing, if I was actually doing a speech, therewouldn't be.

16:49 Maybe that makes it feel more honest because it is, but there's like a weird sense ofwind instruments, like when you're listening to somebody play, I like clarinet, as agood example, especially bass clarinet, because it is a lot of air, and you typicallymic it closer to the body of the clarinet, and so you get a lot of breath.I did this on my record, I had Nicole McCabe play a ton of bass clarinet, and you can hear

17:16 the big like, oh god, I gotta suck it all the air, so I can get that next big note, becauseit's a hard instrument, and I love it, because you have this breathing essence inside ofthe song, you feel the human on the other side, but the breath marks in speech, the breathmarks in wind instruments, the breath marks in poetry are all, it's all the same thing,

17:40 and then the timbre, oh really, oh really, oh really, oh really, oh really, you know,the words are the same, but the music is carrying the social meaning, same as it ever was.If you enjoyed this podcast, I'd invite you to check out the rest, subscribe, got somegreat podcasts, episodes coming up with guests, and also check out my music, if you want

18:08 to hear how my speech translates into my singing and my weird sing-rapping, you can go scoobertdoobert.pizza to hear my music, I also have a sub-stack at lovemusicmore.substack.com,I hope you enjoyed the episode, and I'll see you again next week.