Expression is multi-dimensional.
If you hugged your gee-eff and she just locked her hands around your shoulders, said nothing, kept an upright posture, then let go while you were still nuzzling and murmuring and whispering the three magic words (no, not “the game’s on”), you’d think she was either leaving you or mad about something (and then leaving you).
Samewise, imagine that you lent no tonal inflection whatsoever to your workaday speech, but just spoke in a flatline monotone. Your audience would, at best, find you both comical and dull and, at worst, misunderstand – or just plain not understand – what it was you were saying.
Next time you binge Friends (you’re going to, you know it), check out S01E09 (The One Where Underdog Gets Away) at the scene where Chandler tells everyone that, er, Underdog has gotten away (See? I’m being comical and dull. See above). In their rush to leave, and with a turkey in the oven, mind you, Monica barks back to Rachel “got the keys”. Yes, I omitted the punctuation.
When they all return to the apartment that no underemployed twentysomething in Manhattan can afford even living with another underemployed twentysomething, Betty and Veronica get into a whole thang outside the locked door over whether Monica said “Got the keys!” (also sprach Betty) or “Got the keys?” (‘Betty, you ignorant slut’). And it cooks, the turkey, it cooks.
To illustrate her challenge, Rachel recounts Monica’s words by intonating a downward musical pitch that connotes an assertive statement (as to say, “hey Rachel, I’ve got the keys”), and then Monica Rachel’s, with her cadence notes rising like Florida’s pandemic curve, that connotes a question (as to say, “hey Rachel, you got the keys?”).
[ed. I’ll sit here and wait for you to load Netflix, find the episode, drag the scrubber bar to where you think the moment happens, and then listen no less than three times to diagnose Monica’s verbal intention.]
[ed. Lum-dee-dum.]
[ed. Right then.]
I’m no linguist, but I’d guess that one’s elocution in practically every language that people speak marries pitch to words. People schmeople, whales do it. The example above demonstrates the use of tones to clarify meaning for the full sentence. That’s particular to every language. In English, tones and rhythmic pulse are used to articulate punctuation for a full phrase. For example, say the following out loud and notice the difference in pitch, elongation and accent:
“What’s this thing called love? “
“What’s this thing called, love? “
I agree, the second suggests a far more interesting conversation.
Some languages – Mandarin, Thai, Punjabi, there are many others – use tone inflection to set the meaning of not just sentences but individual words (proofpoint: find a native Chinese-speaker and ask her what “ma” means). And at the individual level, we all use volume, pitch, duration and rhythm to add emphasis to our expression, especially at particularly poignant moments (imagine a guy from Jacksonville, FL saying “it’s my constitutional right not to wear a mask even if the government tells me to” metronomically and with absolutely no measurable change on the VU meter. Inconceivable).
Music and words, just like music and movement or music and visual arts or music and intoxicants, go together like golfing and sex (read the About). It’s baked into our behaviour. They’re simply multiple channels of whatever it is we’re trying to communicate. And composers throughout the centuries have been double-barrelling us in Gregorian Chant, the Sequence, Oratorio, Opera, Folk Music, the Concept Album and the Top-40 single to amplify literary meaning with musical devices.
The practice has been around for as long as music hath been writ, so there’s no point in tracing its lineage. But there have been golden ages of its use across a number of places, times and genres. To a music student, you’ll hear no end of analysis of the Renaissance Madrigal, both Italian and later English; some of those silly ditties tried to musicalize every single word, even the prepositions. Mannerism amok.
In latter days, whole petabytes have stored on this topic. From a thumb-raised-one-eye-closed perspective, I’d say <=100% of it has called out the countless times a singer smacks the ceiling of their range on the word ‘High’ (Radiohead, High and Dry), the floor of same on the word ‘Low’ (War, Low Rider), descends a scale on repeating the word ‘Down’ (Nelly Furtado, Turn Off the Light). It’s not that any of these gestures are uninventive, it’s just that they’re painfully obvious to the listener, so I’m not going to labour it.
Others are more, let’s say, clever: Leonard Cohen‘s lovely-but-now-hackneyed Hallelujah uses chords to paint the line
It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth,
It’s a minor fall, it’s a major lift
with a subdominant (i.e., the fourth degree of the key) C-major and then a dominant (fifth degree) D-major in that first line, then an A-minor and C-major for the two lifts in the second line. [ed. If you want a (really @%&#!! boring) primer on this, see My Only Music Theory Post, Promise…]
In that ‘clever’ spirit, 10CC matched the lovingly curated words “flat”, “diminished”, “ninth”, “suspended”, “major”, “minor”, “sharp”, “see” and “sea” of a smartass lyric with their corresponding chords and notes in the vocal melody of I Bought A-Flat Guitar Tutor. Oy. Subtlety was not on offer here; this was an unapologetically cheeky bit of business from the cheekiest band of its day.
The technique is broadly called “word-tone painting” (or, variously, word-painting, tone-painting, or simply word-tone). It’s a 10,000-hour skill and an integral part of great songwriting. Used artfully, it’s a device that can burst the meaning of a song into many touching and moving messages. It can be used to emphasize words or moods, to visualize contexts and scenes, uncover a hidden meaning, or just bleed out a sentiment that the composer wasn’t comfortable exposing in the lyric proper (remember too that most popular songs are collaborations of separate instrumentalists and lyricists, adding to the plural messaging).
Word-tone painting is not to be confused with sound effects (like the cash-drawers at the beginning of Money), nor is it melodrama (where a ‘story’ or some kind of lyrically-forecasted action is told in purely instrumental passages – that’s definitely on my dance card, but later). It’s strictly a musical device, instrument-agnostic, symbiotic of words and music, and part of the composition itself. Call it, if you will, musical onomatopoeia (and please don’t mention Todd Rundgren‘s little fart of a song on that topic).
We’ll commence on the morrow…
