Yada, Yada, Yada

Yada, Yada, Yada

You want those lyrics understood, don't you?

by Joanna Cazden
from Electronic Musician, December 1998

In my column on mic technique, I suggested ways to get your lyrics cleanly into and through your sound equipment. Let's focus now on the words themselves - not in terms of content or lyric-craft, but purely as sound.

Back in elementary school, you were taught that sounds 'represented by letters' come in two main kinds: vowels and consonants. Now that you're a performing musician, it may help to reinterpret those categories according to what signals each type of sound sends into a microphone.

Vowels are, of course, sound waves. They come straight out of the mouth with minimal obstruction, and they ride on a relatively steady stream of air. Different vowels are produced by changing the resonant shape of the mouth, and more subtly by alterations in the tension or stiffness of the "walls" of the mouth. These muscle manipulations show up acoustically as spectrum or timbre changes.

For example, the vowel "ah" involves a relatively vertical mouth posture, with the jaw dropped and tongue and lips relaxed. "Ee" in comparison requires a wider lip position, a higher tongue, and an increased internal tension in the muscles of the mouth and throat, all of which contribute to its more treble-focused, penetrating tone.

Each singer's anatomy, subculture, regional dialect, and personal style can influence their pronunciation, but these normal variations in vowel sounds do not usually interfere with being understood. In fact, speech scientists have noted that the typical pronunciation patterns of English-language rock singing derive from southern Black dialects,  showing the strong influence of blues and early R&B on classic rock.

Now, consider the rest of our language: consonants. A few consonants are  similar to vowels, with dramatic resonance shifts created by greater tongue or lip movements. In these cases, sound may be amplified through the nose as well as the mouth  ("m, n"), or reshaped by lifting the tongue into the mouth resonator ("l, r, y"). 

These consonants, which linguists call "nasals" and "glides" or "liquids,"are favored by both singers and lyricists, because they do not interrupt the continuous flow of sound. These liquid sounds are also relatively easy to record or amplify and rarely require any special adjustments of mic technique or positioning.
 
The majority of consonants, on the other hand, do more than alter the resonant spectrum of the vocal sound. Rather, they are made by valving or constricting the singer's outgoing airstream, with or without a simultaneous stoppage of the vocal sound. These more aggressive consonants are further subdivided into categories according to how and where they are produced.

The simplest division is between voiced and unvoiced consonants:  "t" and "d,"  use identical oral movements, but only "d" includes a vocal tone at the same time. "Sh" versus "zh" and  "th"as in 'three' versus "th" as in 'mother' illustrate the same contrast.  As with vowels and liquid consonants,  the voiced  consonants "b,d,g, z,v,j, and zh" are rarely a problem for singers or sound crews.
 
The problems arise from two more subgroups of unvoiced  consonants.  The sounds "s,f,th, and sh" are produced by an incomplete constriction of the airstream and are termed fricatives, due to the friction or air turbulence created. The term "sibilant" refers to the high-frequency fricatives, typically "s and sh." In contrast, the sounds "t, p, and k," are produced by stopping the flow of air, then suddenly releasing it, and are called plosives  or stops. 

Now comes the meat of the problem. In common American and English speech, unvoiced plosives and fricatives are produced with more air pressure than their voiced counterparts. In fact they are collectively referred to as "high pressure" consonants. This increase of air pressure, either sudden or prolonged, is the bane of sound technicians everywhere.

So dig that those foam balls or dirty socks are not placed over microphones to filter the sound wave - far from it! Their job is to buffer the mic from surges of air pressure, either prolonged (fricatives) or sudden (plosives), and to keep these fluctuations from interfering with a clean recording of the rest of your vocal expression.

So what's a singer to do? You can rely on pop screens and hope for the best. You can shrug, declare your pronunciation to be a non-negotiable aspect of your artistry, and let your words boom and hiss through the sound system with wild and woolly distortion.  You can turn your head away on the most egregious words, so that the mic aims at the corner of your mouth, away from the nastiest blasts of air,  and then leave the rest of the cleanup job to your ever-patient engineer. But keep in mind that each consonant lasts only a few milliseconds. Few engineers can ride the board as fast as your lyrics fly!

Or - here's a lovely trick - you can cheat on your pronunciation so that less air is expressed on these particular sounds. Here's how.

First, hold one hand in front of your mouth, an inch or two away. Say "buh, buh, buh" at normal speaking loudness. You'll feel little spurts of warm air on your hand. Then say "puh, puh, puh," and notice how much more air is expelled on "p." This causes the extra pop or boom that makes engineers nuts.

Now practice saying "p" without pushing out that extra air. (This is, in fact, how "p" is produced in many other languages, including Spanish.)  Once you have the feel of it, practice speaking words and phrases such as "paper, purpose, people, pack it up, pick up the pieces," using the reduced-air-pressure adaptation. Finally, try some song lyrics that have been troublesome.

At first, you may need to go through all of your lyrics, marking "p's" and practicing each phrase, before you get on stage or record that demo. After awhile this technique will become automatic, and you won't need to go over each trouble spot. The same technique can be applied to the other occasional culprits "t, k, ch, and s."

While you're first exploring this unfamiliar technique, be assured that you don't have to use it every time when you're actually in performance. Just softening the explosive "p" when it is emphasized, such as at the beginning of a phrase or in a loud climactic line, can clean things up a lot.

And, you may wonder, why bother? The simple reason is that while a singer's tone, power, melody and emotional expression is carried by vowels, the meaning of the lyrics rides on the consonants. Consonants are like crisp punctuation in the flow of voice, focusing the poetry and storytelling that are part of the magic of song. So treat 'em right, and you'll communicate far  more effectively than before.

A final suggestion

If you find yourself explaining songs because listeners didn't hear the lyrics clearly, clean up your diction by including some tongue-twisters in your regular warm-up routine. Ask for suggestions from the school-age kids in your life or prowl the local  library. There's probably a web site full of them by now! Or learn a classical poem that appeals to you, or a set of comedic limericks.

Whatever text you pick, say it slowly and carefully at first to get all the sounds in. Especially concentrate on the consonants at the ends of words or phrases, which are commonly slurred or dropped.  When you can run through it perfectly from memory, gradually speed up. This will keep your lips and tongue limber, and is a great way to use drive time.

In Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass," the character of Humpty Dumpty proclaims to Alice that "a word means what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less." So go ahead,  be free with your  songwriting, expressing your soul, angst, and wit as you please. But get the meaning into those listening ears & brains, by being that sure your sound technician can process the vowels and consonants along the way.

© Joanna Cazden 1998