Speech to song with iZotope and Ableton

A while back I saw this viral video of Amber Wagner giving a motivational speech in her car. As you can tell from the video’s title, she uses extremely NSFW language.

Beyond its inspirational value, Amber’s speech is appealingly musical. I grabbed the audio and filed it away. Then during my morning commute this week, I was making a beat using using samples of my kids splashing around in the bath. I tried out Amber’s speech on top and it fit well, so I pulled a non-sweary excerpt and looped it up. Here’s the result:

I processed Amber’s voice with iZotope Nectar and Ableton’s vocoder. I also filled out the harmony with bass sampled from “Haitian Fight Song” by Charles Mingus and piano from “Thelonious” by Thelonious Monk.

Continue reading

Repetition defines music

Musical repetition has become a repeating theme of this blog. Seems appropriate, right? This post looks at a book by Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, called On Repeat: How Music Plays The Mind. It investigates the reasons why we love repetition in music. You can also read long excerpts at Aeon Magazine.

Here’s the nub of Margulis’ argument:

The simple act of repetition can serve as a quasi-magical agent of musicalisation. Instead of asking: ‘What is music?’ we might have an easier time asking: ‘What do we hear as music?’ And a remarkably large part of the answer appears to be: ‘I know it when I hear it again.’

Continue reading

Wow chicka wah-wah

Say “oooh” as in “noodle.” Then say “aaah” as in “park.” When you say “oooh” your mouth is more closed, with less resonating space and a smaller opening. This configuration blocks the higher overtones of your voice. When you say “aaah” your jaw and lips open, creating more resonating space and letting more high overtones through. Now glide from one to the other. The resulting “ooohaaaah” is the sound the wah-wah pedal is named for. By selectively filtering an electronic instrument’s overtones, the pedal can make it sound more vocal. It’s only two vowel sounds out of the dozens your mouth is capable of producing, but it’s a start toward making a more human tone.

Here’s a documentary about the wah:

Cry Baby: The Pedal That Rocks The World from Joey Tosi on Vimeo.

Continue reading