If you put a limerick to music, you might end up with something that feels like this (two phrases of four bars of 3/4. Then two phrases of two bars, etc):

1 2 *3* 4
1 2 *3* 4
1 *2*
3 *4*
1 2 *3* 4

Looking at it that way, the lyrical rhymes always come at 50% of the way through a phrase. You'd put the musical punctuation there, too (e.g. the resolution back to I on the *3* of the last line. But is that the right mental model? Or do these rhymes/
crises actually come at the start of a phrase? If so then a musical limerick really looks like this (four phrases of two bars of 3/4. Then four phrases of one bar, etc, where a rhyme always begins alternate phrases):

1 2
*1* 2
1 2
*1* 2
1
*1*
1
*1*
1 2
*1* 2

Thanks!
Steve

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 6:12:41 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

If you put a limerick to music, you might end up with something that feels like this (two phrases of four bars of 3/4. Then two phrases of two bars, etc):

1 2 *3* 4
1 2 *3* 4
1 *2*
3 *4*
1 2 *3* 4

Looking at it that way, the lyrical rhymes always come at 50% of the way through a phrase. You'd put the musical punctuation there, too (e.g. the resolution back to I on the *3* of the last line. But is that the right mental model? Or do these rhymes/

crises actually come at the start of a phrase? If so then a musical limerick really looks like this (four phrases of two bars of 3/4. Then four phrases of one bar, etc, where a rhyme always begins alternate phrases):

1 2
*1* 2
1 2
*1* 2
1
*1*
1
*1*
1 2
*1* 2

Thanks!
Steve

I should explain why I'm asking. I'm trying to develop a model of the current practice (particularly in pop songs) of where lyrical rhymes (and musical rhymes, including resolutions) tend to go with respect to time units. Getting a proper understanding
of (the hierarchy of) time units themselves is of course critical to this, and I'm not sure I'm even there, yet. But in looking closely at a bunch of songs, I am glimpsing vague patterns that these "crises", or inflection points, occur at 0%, 50%, and 75&
of the way through what I believe to be a "phrase" (a musical phrase; not necessarily a lyrical one). I've also been looking into prosody with little success, but I used the limerick form in my question because it seems to nicely span both worlds.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 9:11:18 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 6:12:41 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

If you put a limerick to music, you might end up with something that feels like this (two phrases of four bars of 3/4. Then two phrases of two bars, etc):

1 2 *3* 4
1 2 *3* 4
1 *2*
3 *4*
1 2 *3* 4

Looking at it that way, the lyrical rhymes always come at 50% of the way through a phrase. You'd put the musical punctuation there, too (e.g. the resolution back to I on the *3* of the last line. But is that the right mental model? Or do these rhymes/

crises actually come at the start of a phrase? If so then a musical limerick really looks like this (four phrases of two bars of 3/4. Then four phrases of one bar, etc, where a rhyme always begins alternate phrases):

1 2
*1* 2
1 2
*1* 2
1
*1*
1
*1*
1 2
*1* 2

Thanks!
Steve

I should explain why I'm asking. I'm trying to develop a model of the current practice (particularly in pop songs) of where lyrical rhymes (and musical rhymes, including resolutions) tend to go with respect to time units. Getting a proper understanding

of (the hierarchy of) time units themselves is of course critical to this, and I'm not sure I'm even there, yet. But in looking closely at a bunch of songs, I am glimpsing vague patterns that these "crises", or inflection points, occur at 0%, 50%, and 75&
of the way through what I believe to be a "phrase" (a musical phrase; not necessarily a lyrical one). I've also been looking into prosody with little success, but I used the limerick form in my question because it seems to nicely span both worlds.

I don't know how this fits in, but I hear the limeric as an AABA in 12/8
four measures long with the 3 As and 1 B measure. with the B measure being two phrases each one half the length of the A phrase rhythmically.

I can see the phrase being described as three beats long, but not in 3/4. I find that confusing. Instead I could see:

Beat Beat Rime Rest,
Beat Beat Rime Rest,
beat rime, beat rime,
beat beat Rime Rest.

If I understand why, you are doing this to create a model for longer phrases in pop tunes or various other lengths of phrases and different rhyme patterns so I think that a method of describing the phrases has to be universal both to compound and complex
meter as well as to fit into different phrase lenght etc.

That is why I am going to the basic elementary ways of describing the rhythm with Long/short but adding the Rhyme (shortened to Rime as its the same number of characters as beat and rest)

I don't know how my three elements will work or if it will work for all forms you may find but I think some sort of basic simple organization is the best way to attack the rhyming patterns at least until you start to see regular patterns. I think that
you will find recurring and logical patterns although I also think you will have some songs that have unique logical patterns and maybe even a few more art song type of patterns.

As you get more samples, I think that it might be easier to test organizational notation that might work better.

To arrive at my model, I started with

Short short long----
short short long ----
and then it fell apart when the rhyming pattern was cut into half the number of beats.

Then I decided to add the Beat and rhyme words for the third phrase and came up with
beat rime beat rime

and then put it into the final model.

I don't know if this is any help at all, but as I understand more precisely what you are working with, I hope to do better! lol

LJS
element7music.com

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Tuesday, December 22, 2015 at 3:03:59 PM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 9:11:18 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 6:12:41 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

If you put a limerick to music, you might end up with something that feels like this (two phrases of four bars of 3/4. Then two phrases of two bars, etc):

1 2 *3* 4
1 2 *3* 4
1 *2*
3 *4*
1 2 *3* 4

Looking at it that way, the lyrical rhymes always come at 50% of the way through a phrase. You'd put the musical punctuation there, too (e.g. the resolution back to I on the *3* of the last line. But is that the right mental model? Or do these

rhymes/crises actually come at the start of a phrase? If so then a musical limerick really looks like this (four phrases of two bars of 3/4. Then four phrases of one bar, etc, where a rhyme always begins alternate phrases):

1 2
*1* 2
1 2
*1* 2
1
*1*
1
*1*
1 2
*1* 2

Thanks!
Steve

I should explain why I'm asking. I'm trying to develop a model of the current practice (particularly in pop songs) of where lyrical rhymes (and musical rhymes, including resolutions) tend to go with respect to time units. Getting a proper

understanding of (the hierarchy of) time units themselves is of course critical to this, and I'm not sure I'm even there, yet. But in looking closely at a bunch of songs, I am glimpsing vague patterns that these "crises", or inflection points, occur at 0%
, 50%, and 75& of the way through what I believe to be a "phrase" (a musical phrase; not necessarily a lyrical one). I've also been looking into prosody with little success, but I used the limerick form in my question because it seems to nicely span both
worlds.

I don't know how this fits in, but I hear the limeric as an AABA in 12/8
four measures long with the 3 As and 1 B measure. with the B measure being two phrases each one half the length of the A phrase rhythmically.

I can see the phrase being described as three beats long, but not in 3/4. I find that confusing. Instead I could see:

Beat Beat Rime Rest,
Beat Beat Rime Rest,
beat rime, beat rime,
beat beat Rime Rest.

If I understand why, you are doing this to create a model for longer phrases in pop tunes or various other lengths of phrases and different rhyme patterns so I think that a method of describing the phrases has to be universal both to compound and

complex meter as well as to fit into different phrase lenght etc.

That is why I am going to the basic elementary ways of describing the rhythm with Long/short but adding the Rhyme (shortened to Rime as its the same number of characters as beat and rest)

I don't know how my three elements will work or if it will work for all forms you may find but I think some sort of basic simple organization is the best way to attack the rhyming patterns at least until you start to see regular patterns. I think that

you will find recurring and logical patterns although I also think you will have some songs that have unique logical patterns and maybe even a few more art song type of patterns.

As you get more samples, I think that it might be easier to test organizational notation that might work better.

To arrive at my model, I started with

Short short long----
short short long ----
and then it fell apart when the rhyming pattern was cut into half the number of beats.

Then I decided to add the Beat and rhyme words for the third phrase and came up with
beat rime beat rime

and then put it into the final model.

I don't know if this is any help at all, but as I understand more precisely what you are working with, I hope to do better! lol

LJS
element7music.com

Thank you, LJ, your simplification into landmarks such as beats, rimes, rests, and so on is a good one. I'll use that going forward to analyze examples.

One other example I have right now is this little piece of mine: http://voices.azurewebsites.net/my_music/score/limerick_001.png. Bars 1-9 could be interpreted as a limerick in 4/4. I have fitted a limerick to that, and both the lyrical rhymes and the
increased liveliness of the music do give me the impression that the phrase frequency is increasing on the third "line". In bars 1-9 (bar 1 is of course a pickup bar) of that piece, I hear this:

beat beat rime beat
beat beat rime rest
beat rime beat rime
beat beat rime rest

If the model is that a phrase contains one rime, then this matches your analysis of the limerick form in that the rime (or musical emphasis, or stress) comes at the halfway mark in a phrase. Then there's this example:

[*draw the *queen of ][*diamonds, boy * she'll][*beat you *if she's ][*able; * you know the]
[*queen of *hearts is ][*always * your best][*bet. * ][* * Now it]
[*seems to *me some ][*fine things * have been][*laid up-*on your ][*table. * But you]
[*only *want the][*ones that *you can't][*get *][*Des- *]

A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%
A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%

Exiting that chunk of music with a rhyme at the halfway mark sounds correct, and balanced. Ending with a 75% rhyme, I don't know if it would, yet if you consider A and B to be one long unit, then the 75% rhymes come close to 50% of the composite unit. On
the other hand, if A and B really are one unit then the rimeB rhymes are appearing at 75%. Anyway, I was just curious to know if anyone knew the "rules" (aka the common practice and what patterns have been found to work). Understanding the psychology is
not crucial, but would be nice. :)

I'll keep looking at examples as I come across them. But FWIW, a lot of pop songs seem to rhyme right at the border between the end of one phrase and the start of another. That's where my 0% value came from.

Thanks!
Steve

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Wednesday, December 23, 2015 at 7:07:03 PM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Wednesday, December 23, 2015 at 6:43:37 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Tuesday, December 22, 2015 at 3:03:59 PM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 9:11:18 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 6:12:41 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

If you put a limerick to music, you might end up with something that feels like this (two phrases of four bars of 3/4. Then two phrases of two bars, etc):

1 2 *3* 4
1 2 *3* 4
1 *2*
3 *4*
1 2 *3* 4

Looking at it that way, the lyrical rhymes always come at 50% of the way through a phrase. You'd put the musical punctuation there, too (e.g. the resolution back to I on the *3* of the last line. But is that the right mental model? Or do these

rhymes/crises actually come at the start of a phrase? If so then a musical limerick really looks like this (four phrases of two bars of 3/4. Then four phrases of one bar, etc, where a rhyme always begins alternate phrases):

1 2
*1* 2
1 2
*1* 2
1
*1*
1
*1*
1 2
*1* 2

Thanks!
Steve

I should explain why I'm asking. I'm trying to develop a model of the current practice (particularly in pop songs) of where lyrical rhymes (and musical rhymes, including resolutions) tend to go with respect to time units. Getting a proper

understanding of (the hierarchy of) time units themselves is of course critical to this, and I'm not sure I'm even there, yet. But in looking closely at a bunch of songs, I am glimpsing vague patterns that these "crises", or inflection points, occur at 0%
, 50%, and 75& of the way through what I believe to be a "phrase" (a musical phrase; not necessarily a lyrical one). I've also been looking into prosody with little success, but I used the limerick form in my question because it seems to nicely span both
worlds.

I don't know how this fits in, but I hear the limeric as an AABA in 12/8 four measures long with the 3 As and 1 B measure. with the B measure being two phrases each one half the length of the A phrase rhythmically.

I can see the phrase being described as three beats long, but not in 3/4. I find that confusing. Instead I could see:

Beat Beat Rime Rest,
Beat Beat Rime Rest,
beat rime, beat rime,
beat beat Rime Rest.

If I understand why, you are doing this to create a model for longer phrases in pop tunes or various other lengths of phrases and different rhyme patterns so I think that a method of describing the phrases has to be universal both to compound and

complex meter as well as to fit into different phrase lenght etc.

That is why I am going to the basic elementary ways of describing the rhythm with Long/short but adding the Rhyme (shortened to Rime as its the same number of characters as beat and rest)

I don't know how my three elements will work or if it will work for all forms you may find but I think some sort of basic simple organization is the best way to attack the rhyming patterns at least until you start to see regular patterns. I think

that you will find recurring and logical patterns although I also think you will have some songs that have unique logical patterns and maybe even a few more art song type of patterns.

As you get more samples, I think that it might be easier to test organizational notation that might work better.

To arrive at my model, I started with

Short short long----
short short long ----
and then it fell apart when the rhyming pattern was cut into half the number of beats.

Then I decided to add the Beat and rhyme words for the third phrase and came up with
beat rime beat rime

and then put it into the final model.

I don't know if this is any help at all, but as I understand more precisely what you are working with, I hope to do better! lol

LJS
element7music.com

Thank you, LJ, your simplification into landmarks such as beats, rimes, rests, and so on is a good one. I'll use that going forward to analyze examples.

One other example I have right now is this little piece of mine: http://voices.azurewebsites.net/my_music/score/limerick_001.png. Bars 1-9 could be interpreted as a limerick in 4/4. I have fitted a limerick to that, and both the lyrical rhymes and

the increased liveliness of the music do give me the impression that the phrase frequency is increasing on the third "line". In bars 1-9 (bar 1 is of course a pickup bar) of that piece, I hear this:

beat beat rime beat
beat beat rime rest
beat rime beat rime
beat beat rime rest

If the model is that a phrase contains one rime, then this matches your analysis of the limerick form in that the rime (or musical emphasis, or stress) comes at the halfway mark in a phrase. Then there's this example:

[*draw the *queen of ][*diamonds, boy * she'll][*beat you *if she's ][*able; * you know the]
[*queen of *hearts is ][*always * your best][*bet. * ][* * Now it]
[*seems to *me some ][*fine things * have been][*laid up-*on your ][*table. * But you]
[*only *want the][*ones that *you can't][*get *][*Des- *]

A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%
A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%

Exiting that chunk of music with a rhyme at the halfway mark sounds correct, and balanced. Ending with a 75% rhyme, I don't know if it would, yet if you consider A and B to be one long unit, then the 75% rhymes come close to 50% of the composite unit.

On the other hand, if A and B really are one unit then the rimeB rhymes are appearing at 75%. Anyway, I was just curious to know if anyone knew the "rules" (aka the common practice and what patterns have been found to work). Understanding the psychology
is not crucial, but would be nice. :)

I'll keep looking at examples as I come across them. But FWIW, a lot of pop songs seem to rhyme right at the border between the end of one phrase and the start of another. That's where my 0% value came from.

Thanks!
Steve

As a related sidelight:

In my music classes when the kids are mostly beginners especially at upper elementary and higher, I would teach them to SolFa on the pentatonic scale and Ta-TiTi Kodaly rhythmic or 1+2+3+4+ notation (depending on the students and how far along in my

elementary studies I were at the time. And I usually taught them music as if they were a composer once they developed basic skills

I had many variations but in general I would have them either individually or in groups, have them select a poem and recite it to a beat. They were free to put the emphasis where they liked but they had to syl-la-bi-cate the poem first and then

practice saying the lyrics as a chant (or a rap depending upon the demographic and student interests.

Then when they knew it, one or some of the students would draw a line over the syllable that landed on the beat. And you can probably figure out the rest. As they did this I also had them put a wavy line or a "Z" when there was a beat without a

syllable. (the wavy line would eventually turn out to be a rest and the Z is just the way the Kodaly kids learn to represent a quarter rest.

Most of their poems wound up to be combinations of quarters and eights so then I went to long/short to get the regular quarter and 8th rhythms in the pboem. WIth the line above the beats, if there was no short/short, that already was the Kodaly symbol

for a Ta or quarter note. and if there was a short short, then they drew a line over the second note and connected the tops and that was the symbol for the TiTi or two eight notes.

The ones that had triplet meters, or syncopation, gave me an excuse to teach them how to vary it to show how to notate it and it worked great. It also allowed me to progress to FORM when they looked at where the rhymes landed and I had them start to

group the phrases into measures and the measures into an actual form chart.

Then for the more advanced students or higher level grades, I would sometimes have them sing pentatonic melodies to the words and notate them in SolFa. I enjoyed it and most of the time, so did the kids.

Your examples just reminded me of that so I thought I would remember and share it with you.

But when left to their own devices almost all the poems turned out to be rhyming at the end of the phrase. Of course with the younger students, all their rhymes were nursery rhymes so most followed the pattern of:

Mary had a little lamb,
Its Fleece was white as SNOW.
Every where that Mary went,
Her lamb was sure to GO.

Most poems seem to follow this same pattern as it has to do with couplets. So I am thinking that couplets might be the center of your investigating how the lyrics are put together.

One thing that I notices when I did the same thing as above with a Blues theme, is that the couplet is the basis of the Blues tunes but the first part of the Couplet is used twice, AA then the second part is the Rhyme that completes the B part of the

couplet. with the A being the question, and the B is the answer and it is in an AAB form for the lyrics and thus the music.

Which brings up the lyrics of the Blues genre. Which are usually AAB but can also have other models as well. Had you thought to put the Blues form and rhyming scheme into your study?

Talk to you more about it later.

LJS

Yes, couplets, good point. So if we say that "Mary" is a two-phrase couplet (instead of four lines of text), which I like btw, then here's how I hear it with just the landmarks shown:

[beat][beat] [beat][beat] [beat][beat] [rime][rest]
[beat][beat] [beat][beat] [beat][beat] [rime][rest]

So that puts the stress spotlight (the lyrical rhyme) at the three-quarter mark through the phrase. That matches Desperado, and Desperado uses same-length phrases, but interleaved couplets. But it doesn't match the limerick (which puts rhymes at the
halfway mark, in two different-length types of phrase). Very interesting. This is what I'd seen, though: 50% and 75% (and 0%) placements. Still don't know why, but I'm happy with the additional examples, and chance to process. :) Btw, I'm also seeing a
tendency in songs to put the musical resolution in the same place as the lyrical rhyme. That may be an obvious practice.

Also, that's very interesting about the Blues form. On my TODO list was an item to do a "detour" analysis of some Blues forms (incl 12-bar). Btw, I don't know what the proper term nor theory is for a "detour", I'm sure there is one, but I just made that
word up. Lemme do a bit of that analysis here, and that should serve to illustrate what I mean by a detour:

So, let's say you've just composed this little bit of music (which, to use the term that you reminded me of, is a couplet):

I
[I] hate to see that [I] evening sun go [I] down. [I] It
[V] makes me think I'm [IV7] on my last go [I] round [I]

It's great, it works. It should: it's just the primary chords in common cadence. But let's say that you now want it to be longer. This is true of lots of songs, you just find that you're resolving, giving up the goods, too early. You want to hold onto
that lovely suspense a bit longer for the enjoyment of the listener. So, you insert a detour (you insert it into the chain so that it fits front and back). And, having added a detour, you rinse and repeat until the music is long and/or suspenseful enough.
In this case, we could begin by adding 8 bars in anticipation of the result being more "even" and balanced, or we could try just adding 4 bars to begin with just to see how that feels.

So let's say we insert a 4-bar detour right at the end of the first line. We can then tweak that last I to an I7 if we like, and a couple other tweaks. And you get this (notice how what we spliced in fits without needing major surgery to what was already
there).

I
[I] hate to see that [I] evening sun go [I] down. [I7] I
[IV] hate to see that [IV] evening sun go [I] down. [I] It
[V] makes me think I'm [IV7] on my last go [I] round [V7]

And that works of course, too, b/c it's a variant of 12-bar blues. The fact that the first two lines share the same melody and lyrics is ok: they have different harmony. The false lyrical rhyme between "down" and "down" doesn't spoil things, because of
that (and because we eventually get a true rhyme). If we make the first two lines identical in harmony, melody, AND lyrics, then that doesn't sound anywhere near as artful (although you'd get away with it if you performed it with enough soul).

So, really, my mental model is that the Blues form example is actually a regular old couplet extended with a 4-bar detour.

-Steve

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Wednesday, December 23, 2015 at 6:43:37 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Tuesday, December 22, 2015 at 3:03:59 PM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 9:11:18 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 6:12:41 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

If you put a limerick to music, you might end up with something that feels like this (two phrases of four bars of 3/4. Then two phrases of two bars, etc):

1 2 *3* 4
1 2 *3* 4
1 *2*
3 *4*
1 2 *3* 4

Looking at it that way, the lyrical rhymes always come at 50% of the way through a phrase. You'd put the musical punctuation there, too (e.g. the resolution back to I on the *3* of the last line. But is that the right mental model? Or do these

rhymes/crises actually come at the start of a phrase? If so then a musical limerick really looks like this (four phrases of two bars of 3/4. Then four phrases of one bar, etc, where a rhyme always begins alternate phrases):

1 2
*1* 2
1 2
*1* 2
1
*1*
1
*1*
1 2
*1* 2

Thanks!
Steve

I should explain why I'm asking. I'm trying to develop a model of the current practice (particularly in pop songs) of where lyrical rhymes (and musical rhymes, including resolutions) tend to go with respect to time units. Getting a proper

understanding of (the hierarchy of) time units themselves is of course critical to this, and I'm not sure I'm even there, yet. But in looking closely at a bunch of songs, I am glimpsing vague patterns that these "crises", or inflection points, occur at 0%
, 50%, and 75& of the way through what I believe to be a "phrase" (a musical phrase; not necessarily a lyrical one). I've also been looking into prosody with little success, but I used the limerick form in my question because it seems to nicely span both
worlds.

I don't know how this fits in, but I hear the limeric as an AABA in 12/8 four measures long with the 3 As and 1 B measure. with the B measure being two phrases each one half the length of the A phrase rhythmically.

I can see the phrase being described as three beats long, but not in 3/4. I find that confusing. Instead I could see:

Beat Beat Rime Rest,
Beat Beat Rime Rest,
beat rime, beat rime,
beat beat Rime Rest.

If I understand why, you are doing this to create a model for longer phrases in pop tunes or various other lengths of phrases and different rhyme patterns so I think that a method of describing the phrases has to be universal both to compound and

complex meter as well as to fit into different phrase lenght etc.

That is why I am going to the basic elementary ways of describing the rhythm with Long/short but adding the Rhyme (shortened to Rime as its the same number of characters as beat and rest)

I don't know how my three elements will work or if it will work for all forms you may find but I think some sort of basic simple organization is the best way to attack the rhyming patterns at least until you start to see regular patterns. I think

that you will find recurring and logical patterns although I also think you will have some songs that have unique logical patterns and maybe even a few more art song type of patterns.

As you get more samples, I think that it might be easier to test organizational notation that might work better.

To arrive at my model, I started with

Short short long----
short short long ----
and then it fell apart when the rhyming pattern was cut into half the number of beats.

Then I decided to add the Beat and rhyme words for the third phrase and came up with
beat rime beat rime

and then put it into the final model.

I don't know if this is any help at all, but as I understand more precisely what you are working with, I hope to do better! lol

LJS
element7music.com

Thank you, LJ, your simplification into landmarks such as beats, rimes, rests, and so on is a good one. I'll use that going forward to analyze examples.

One other example I have right now is this little piece of mine: http://voices.azurewebsites.net/my_music/score/limerick_001.png. Bars 1-9 could be interpreted as a limerick in 4/4. I have fitted a limerick to that, and both the lyrical rhymes and the

increased liveliness of the music do give me the impression that the phrase frequency is increasing on the third "line". In bars 1-9 (bar 1 is of course a pickup bar) of that piece, I hear this:

beat beat rime beat
beat beat rime rest
beat rime beat rime
beat beat rime rest

If the model is that a phrase contains one rime, then this matches your analysis of the limerick form in that the rime (or musical emphasis, or stress) comes at the halfway mark in a phrase. Then there's this example:

[*draw the *queen of ][*diamonds, boy * she'll][*beat you *if she's ][*able; * you know the]
[*queen of *hearts is ][*always * your best][*bet. * ][* * Now it]
[*seems to *me some ][*fine things * have been][*laid up-*on your ][*table. * But you]
[*only *want the][*ones that *you can't][*get *][*Des- *]

A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%
A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%

Exiting that chunk of music with a rhyme at the halfway mark sounds correct, and balanced. Ending with a 75% rhyme, I don't know if it would, yet if you consider A and B to be one long unit, then the 75% rhymes come close to 50% of the composite unit.

On the other hand, if A and B really are one unit then the rimeB rhymes are appearing at 75%. Anyway, I was just curious to know if anyone knew the "rules" (aka the common practice and what patterns have been found to work). Understanding the psychology
is not crucial, but would be nice. :)

I'll keep looking at examples as I come across them. But FWIW, a lot of pop songs seem to rhyme right at the border between the end of one phrase and the start of another. That's where my 0% value came from.

Thanks!
Steve

As a related sidelight:

In my music classes when the kids are mostly beginners especially at upper elementary and higher, I would teach them to SolFa on the pentatonic scale and Ta-TiTi Kodaly rhythmic or 1+2+3+4+ notation (depending on the students and how far along in my
elementary studies I were at the time. And I usually taught them music as if they were a composer once they developed basic skills

I had many variations but in general I would have them either individually or in groups, have them select a poem and recite it to a beat. They were free to put the emphasis where they liked but they had to syl-la-bi-cate the poem first and then practice
saying the lyrics as a chant (or a rap depending upon the demographic and student interests.

Then when they knew it, one or some of the students would draw a line over the syllable that landed on the beat. And you can probably figure out the rest. As they did this I also had them put a wavy line or a "Z" when there was a beat without a syllable.
(the wavy line would eventually turn out to be a rest and the Z is just the way the Kodaly kids learn to represent a quarter rest.

Most of their poems wound up to be combinations of quarters and eights so then I went to long/short to get the regular quarter and 8th rhythms in the pboem. WIth the line above the beats, if there was no short/short, that already was the Kodaly symbol
for a Ta or quarter note. and if there was a short short, then they drew a line over the second note and connected the tops and that was the symbol for the TiTi or two eight notes.

The ones that had triplet meters, or syncopation, gave me an excuse to teach them how to vary it to show how to notate it and it worked great. It also allowed me to progress to FORM when they looked at where the rhymes landed and I had them start to
group the phrases into measures and the measures into an actual form chart.

Then for the more advanced students or higher level grades, I would sometimes have them sing pentatonic melodies to the words and notate them in SolFa. I enjoyed it and most of the time, so did the kids.

Your examples just reminded me of that so I thought I would remember and share it with you.

But when left to their own devices almost all the poems turned out to be rhyming at the end of the phrase. Of course with the younger students, all their rhymes were nursery rhymes so most followed the pattern of:

Mary had a little lamb,
Its Fleece was white as SNOW.
Every where that Mary went,
Her lamb was sure to GO.

Most poems seem to follow this same pattern as it has to do with couplets. So I am thinking that couplets might be the center of your investigating how the lyrics are put together.

One thing that I notices when I did the same thing as above with a Blues theme, is that the couplet is the basis of the Blues tunes but the first part of the Couplet is used twice, AA then the second part is the Rhyme that completes the B part of the
couplet. with the A being the question, and the B is the answer and it is in an AAB form for the lyrics and thus the music.

Which brings up the lyrics of the Blues genre. Which are usually AAB but can also have other models as well. Had you thought to put the Blues form and rhyming scheme into your study?

Talk to you more about it later.

LJS

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Thursday, December 24, 2015 at 8:33:22 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Thursday, December 24, 2015 at 6:11:21 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Wednesday, December 23, 2015 at 7:07:03 PM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Wednesday, December 23, 2015 at 6:43:37 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Tuesday, December 22, 2015 at 3:03:59 PM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 9:11:18 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 6:12:41 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

If you put a limerick to music, you might end up with something that feels like this (two phrases of four bars of 3/4. Then two phrases of two bars, etc):

1 2 *3* 4
1 2 *3* 4
1 *2*
3 *4*
1 2 *3* 4

Looking at it that way, the lyrical rhymes always come at 50% of the way through a phrase. You'd put the musical punctuation there, too (e.g. the resolution back to I on the *3* of the last line. But is that the right mental model? Or do

these rhymes/crises actually come at the start of a phrase? If so then a musical limerick really looks like this (four phrases of two bars of 3/4. Then four phrases of one bar, etc, where a rhyme always begins alternate phrases):

1 2
*1* 2
1 2
*1* 2
1
*1*
1
*1*
1 2
*1* 2

Thanks!
Steve

I should explain why I'm asking. I'm trying to develop a model of the current practice (particularly in pop songs) of where lyrical rhymes (and musical rhymes, including resolutions) tend to go with respect to time units. Getting a proper

understanding of (the hierarchy of) time units themselves is of course critical to this, and I'm not sure I'm even there, yet. But in looking closely at a bunch of songs, I am glimpsing vague patterns that these "crises", or inflection points, occur at 0%
, 50%, and 75& of the way through what I believe to be a "phrase" (a musical phrase; not necessarily a lyrical one). I've also been looking into prosody with little success, but I used the limerick form in my question because it seems to nicely span both
worlds.

I don't know how this fits in, but I hear the limeric as an AABA in 12/8
four measures long with the 3 As and 1 B measure. with the B measure being two phrases each one half the length of the A phrase rhythmically.

I can see the phrase being described as three beats long, but not in 3/4. I find that confusing. Instead I could see:

Beat Beat Rime Rest,
Beat Beat Rime Rest,
beat rime, beat rime,
beat beat Rime Rest.

If I understand why, you are doing this to create a model for longer phrases in pop tunes or various other lengths of phrases and different rhyme patterns so I think that a method of describing the phrases has to be universal both to compound

and complex meter as well as to fit into different phrase lenght etc.

That is why I am going to the basic elementary ways of describing the rhythm with Long/short but adding the Rhyme (shortened to Rime as its the same number of characters as beat and rest)

I don't know how my three elements will work or if it will work for all forms you may find but I think some sort of basic simple organization is the best way to attack the rhyming patterns at least until you start to see regular patterns. I

think that you will find recurring and logical patterns although I also think you will have some songs that have unique logical patterns and maybe even a few more art song type of patterns.

As you get more samples, I think that it might be easier to test organizational notation that might work better.

To arrive at my model, I started with

Short short long----
short short long ----
and then it fell apart when the rhyming pattern was cut into half the number of beats.

Then I decided to add the Beat and rhyme words for the third phrase and came up with
beat rime beat rime

and then put it into the final model.

I don't know if this is any help at all, but as I understand more precisely what you are working with, I hope to do better! lol

LJS
element7music.com

Thank you, LJ, your simplification into landmarks such as beats, rimes, rests, and so on is a good one. I'll use that going forward to analyze examples.

One other example I have right now is this little piece of mine: http://voices.azurewebsites.net/my_music/score/limerick_001.png. Bars 1-9 could be interpreted as a limerick in 4/4. I have fitted a limerick to that, and both the lyrical rhymes

and the increased liveliness of the music do give me the impression that the phrase frequency is increasing on the third "line". In bars 1-9 (bar 1 is of course a pickup bar) of that piece, I hear this:

beat beat rime beat
beat beat rime rest
beat rime beat rime
beat beat rime rest

If the model is that a phrase contains one rime, then this matches your analysis of the limerick form in that the rime (or musical emphasis, or stress) comes at the halfway mark in a phrase. Then there's this example:

[*draw the *queen of ][*diamonds, boy * she'll][*beat you *if she's ][*able; * you know the]
[*queen of *hearts is ][*always * your best][*bet. * ][* * Now it] [*seems to *me some ][*fine things * have been][*laid up-*on your ][*table. * But you]
[*only *want the][*ones that *you can't][*get *][*Des- *]

A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%
A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%

Exiting that chunk of music with a rhyme at the halfway mark sounds correct, and balanced. Ending with a 75% rhyme, I don't know if it would, yet if you consider A and B to be one long unit, then the 75% rhymes come close to 50% of the composite

unit. On the other hand, if A and B really are one unit then the rimeB rhymes are appearing at 75%. Anyway, I was just curious to know if anyone knew the "rules" (aka the common practice and what patterns have been found to work). Understanding the
psychology is not crucial, but would be nice. :)

I'll keep looking at examples as I come across them. But FWIW, a lot of pop songs seem to rhyme right at the border between the end of one phrase and the start of another. That's where my 0% value came from.

Thanks!
Steve

As a related sidelight:

In my music classes when the kids are mostly beginners especially at upper elementary and higher, I would teach them to SolFa on the pentatonic scale and Ta-TiTi Kodaly rhythmic or 1+2+3+4+ notation (depending on the students and how far along in

my elementary studies I were at the time. And I usually taught them music as if they were a composer once they developed basic skills

I had many variations but in general I would have them either individually or in groups, have them select a poem and recite it to a beat. They were free to put the emphasis where they liked but they had to syl-la-bi-cate the poem first and then

practice saying the lyrics as a chant (or a rap depending upon the demographic and student interests.

Then when they knew it, one or some of the students would draw a line over the syllable that landed on the beat. And you can probably figure out the rest. As they did this I also had them put a wavy line or a "Z" when there was a beat without a

syllable. (the wavy line would eventually turn out to be a rest and the Z is just the way the Kodaly kids learn to represent a quarter rest.

Most of their poems wound up to be combinations of quarters and eights so then I went to long/short to get the regular quarter and 8th rhythms in the pboem. WIth the line above the beats, if there was no short/short, that already was the Kodaly

symbol for a Ta or quarter note. and if there was a short short, then they drew a line over the second note and connected the tops and that was the symbol for the TiTi or two eight notes.

The ones that had triplet meters, or syncopation, gave me an excuse to teach them how to vary it to show how to notate it and it worked great. It also allowed me to progress to FORM when they looked at where the rhymes landed and I had them start

to group the phrases into measures and the measures into an actual form chart.

Then for the more advanced students or higher level grades, I would sometimes have them sing pentatonic melodies to the words and notate them in SolFa. I enjoyed it and most of the time, so did the kids.

Your examples just reminded me of that so I thought I would remember and share it with you.

But when left to their own devices almost all the poems turned out to be rhyming at the end of the phrase. Of course with the younger students, all their rhymes were nursery rhymes so most followed the pattern of:

Mary had a little lamb,
Its Fleece was white as SNOW.
Every where that Mary went,
Her lamb was sure to GO.

Most poems seem to follow this same pattern as it has to do with couplets. So I am thinking that couplets might be the center of your investigating how the lyrics are put together.

One thing that I notices when I did the same thing as above with a Blues theme, is that the couplet is the basis of the Blues tunes but the first part of the Couplet is used twice, AA then the second part is the Rhyme that completes the B part of

the couplet. with the A being the question, and the B is the answer and it is in an AAB form for the lyrics and thus the music.

Which brings up the lyrics of the Blues genre. Which are usually AAB but can also have other models as well. Had you thought to put the Blues form and rhyming scheme into your study?

Talk to you more about it later.

LJS

Yes, couplets, good point. So if we say that "Mary" is a two-phrase couplet (instead of four lines of text), which I like btw, then here's how I hear it with just the landmarks shown:

[beat][beat] [beat][beat] [beat][beat] [rime][rest]
[beat][beat] [beat][beat] [beat][beat] [rime][rest]

So that puts the stress spotlight (the lyrical rhyme) at the three-quarter mark through the phrase. That matches Desperado, and Desperado uses same-length phrases, but interleaved couplets. But it doesn't match the limerick (which puts rhymes at the

halfway mark, in two different-length types of phrase). Very interesting. This is what I'd seen, though: 50% and 75% (and 0%) placements. Still don't know why, but I'm happy with the additional examples, and chance to process. :) Btw, I'm also seeing a
tendency in songs to put the musical resolution in the same place as the lyrical rhyme. That may be an obvious practice.

Also, that's very interesting about the Blues form. On my TODO list was an item to do a "detour" analysis of some Blues forms (incl 12-bar). Btw, I don't know what the proper term nor theory is for a "detour", I'm sure there is one, but I just made

that word up. Lemme do a bit of that analysis here, and that should serve to illustrate what I mean by a detour:

So, let's say you've just composed this little bit of music (which, to use the term that you reminded me of, is a couplet):

I
[I] hate to see that [I] evening sun go [I] down. [I] It
[V] makes me think I'm [IV7] on my last go [I] round [I]

It's great, it works. It should: it's just the primary chords in common cadence. But let's say that you now want it to be longer. This is true of lots of songs, you just find that you're resolving, giving up the goods, too early. You want to hold

onto that lovely suspense a bit longer for the enjoyment of the listener. So, you insert a detour (you insert it into the chain so that it fits front and back). And, having added a detour, you rinse and repeat until the music is long and/or suspenseful
enough. In this case, we could begin by adding 8 bars in anticipation of the result being more "even" and balanced, or we could try just adding 4 bars to begin with just to see how that feels.

So let's say we insert a 4-bar detour right at the end of the first line. We can then tweak that last I to an I7 if we like, and a couple other tweaks. And you get this (notice how what we spliced in fits without needing major surgery to what was

already there).

I
[I] hate to see that [I] evening sun go [I] down. [I7] I
[IV] hate to see that [IV] evening sun go [I] down. [I] It
[V] makes me think I'm [IV7] on my last go [I] round [V7]

And that works of course, too, b/c it's a variant of 12-bar blues. The fact that the first two lines share the same melody and lyrics is ok: they have different harmony. The false lyrical rhyme between "down" and "down" doesn't spoil things, because

of that (and because we eventually get a true rhyme). If we make the first two lines identical in harmony, melody, AND lyrics, then that doesn't sound anywhere near as artful (although you'd get away with it if you performed it with enough soul).

So, really, my mental model is that the Blues form example is actually a regular old couplet extended with a 4-bar detour.

-Steve

Oh, and of course, that 12 bar blues example is another one (like the limerick) where the rhymes come at the halfway point in the phrase. I guess what I'm looking for is something like a theory that say "lyrical rhymes and musical resolutions always

come at the 50% mark in a phrase, you just have to look at the phrases in the right way." The theory would have to account for why the phrases in Desperado (for example) appear to be twice as long as the theory requires. :)

Well, some accommodations have to be made for various forms of the songs themselves in the overall sense. You can't compare apples and oranges except in the context of something like Fruits and non fruits. You can't compare forms in the same manner. If
you compare a Sonata Allegro form with the same criteria as a Rondo, even though they may contain some parts that may be related or used in a different way.

By the same token, the Blues is a specific form as is a limerick, as is the AB or ABAB form of Mary had a....

IT would be cool if there were written or it would be cool to write some poetry that would merge the three mentioned into something like a Rondo or Sonata-Allegro form and set it to music, but I don't know of any that would actually do that. (hmm, it
could be an interesting project to arrange multi form poetry rhymes into a Rondo and see how it plays out}

But the Form, with poetry would have to have different classifications based upon the rhyming schemes. i.e. Couplets, Limericks, Blues for example. AND your study may come up with additional forms based upon your research and methods of analysis. At this
moment, Christmas AM, I can't think of any others but they must exist someplace. (Merry Christmas btw)

Have you looked into the arrangements of rhyming schemes in something like the Shakespeare Sonnets)

Oh, have to go. Just heard reindeer footsteps on our roof. Time for family Santa time.

Later.
LJSe

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Thursday, December 24, 2015 at 6:11:21 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Wednesday, December 23, 2015 at 7:07:03 PM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Wednesday, December 23, 2015 at 6:43:37 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Tuesday, December 22, 2015 at 3:03:59 PM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 9:11:18 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 6:12:41 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

If you put a limerick to music, you might end up with something that feels like this (two phrases of four bars of 3/4. Then two phrases of two bars, etc):

1 2 *3* 4
1 2 *3* 4
1 *2*
3 *4*
1 2 *3* 4

Looking at it that way, the lyrical rhymes always come at 50% of the way through a phrase. You'd put the musical punctuation there, too (e.g. the resolution back to I on the *3* of the last line. But is that the right mental model? Or do

these rhymes/crises actually come at the start of a phrase? If so then a musical limerick really looks like this (four phrases of two bars of 3/4. Then four phrases of one bar, etc, where a rhyme always begins alternate phrases):

1 2
*1* 2
1 2
*1* 2
1
*1*
1
*1*
1 2
*1* 2

Thanks!
Steve

I should explain why I'm asking. I'm trying to develop a model of the current practice (particularly in pop songs) of where lyrical rhymes (and musical rhymes, including resolutions) tend to go with respect to time units. Getting a proper

understanding of (the hierarchy of) time units themselves is of course critical to this, and I'm not sure I'm even there, yet. But in looking closely at a bunch of songs, I am glimpsing vague patterns that these "crises", or inflection points, occur at 0%
, 50%, and 75& of the way through what I believe to be a "phrase" (a musical phrase; not necessarily a lyrical one). I've also been looking into prosody with little success, but I used the limerick form in my question because it seems to nicely span both
worlds.

I don't know how this fits in, but I hear the limeric as an AABA in 12/8
four measures long with the 3 As and 1 B measure. with the B measure being two phrases each one half the length of the A phrase rhythmically.

I can see the phrase being described as three beats long, but not in 3/4. I find that confusing. Instead I could see:

Beat Beat Rime Rest,
Beat Beat Rime Rest,
beat rime, beat rime,
beat beat Rime Rest.

If I understand why, you are doing this to create a model for longer phrases in pop tunes or various other lengths of phrases and different rhyme patterns so I think that a method of describing the phrases has to be universal both to compound and

complex meter as well as to fit into different phrase lenght etc.

That is why I am going to the basic elementary ways of describing the rhythm with Long/short but adding the Rhyme (shortened to Rime as its the same number of characters as beat and rest)

I don't know how my three elements will work or if it will work for all forms you may find but I think some sort of basic simple organization is the best way to attack the rhyming patterns at least until you start to see regular patterns. I think

that you will find recurring and logical patterns although I also think you will have some songs that have unique logical patterns and maybe even a few more art song type of patterns.

As you get more samples, I think that it might be easier to test organizational notation that might work better.

To arrive at my model, I started with

Short short long----
short short long ----
and then it fell apart when the rhyming pattern was cut into half the number of beats.

Then I decided to add the Beat and rhyme words for the third phrase and came up with
beat rime beat rime

and then put it into the final model.

I don't know if this is any help at all, but as I understand more precisely what you are working with, I hope to do better! lol

LJS
element7music.com

Thank you, LJ, your simplification into landmarks such as beats, rimes, rests, and so on is a good one. I'll use that going forward to analyze examples.

One other example I have right now is this little piece of mine: http://voices.azurewebsites.net/my_music/score/limerick_001.png. Bars 1-9 could be interpreted as a limerick in 4/4. I have fitted a limerick to that, and both the lyrical rhymes and

the increased liveliness of the music do give me the impression that the phrase frequency is increasing on the third "line". In bars 1-9 (bar 1 is of course a pickup bar) of that piece, I hear this:

beat beat rime beat
beat beat rime rest
beat rime beat rime
beat beat rime rest

If the model is that a phrase contains one rime, then this matches your analysis of the limerick form in that the rime (or musical emphasis, or stress) comes at the halfway mark in a phrase. Then there's this example:

[*draw the *queen of ][*diamonds, boy * she'll][*beat you *if she's ][*able; * you know the]
[*queen of *hearts is ][*always * your best][*bet. * ][* * Now it] [*seems to *me some ][*fine things * have been][*laid up-*on your ][*table. * But you]
[*only *want the][*ones that *you can't][*get *][*Des- *]

A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%
A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%

Exiting that chunk of music with a rhyme at the halfway mark sounds correct, and balanced. Ending with a 75% rhyme, I don't know if it would, yet if you consider A and B to be one long unit, then the 75% rhymes come close to 50% of the composite

unit. On the other hand, if A and B really are one unit then the rimeB rhymes are appearing at 75%. Anyway, I was just curious to know if anyone knew the "rules" (aka the common practice and what patterns have been found to work). Understanding the
psychology is not crucial, but would be nice. :)

I'll keep looking at examples as I come across them. But FWIW, a lot of pop songs seem to rhyme right at the border between the end of one phrase and the start of another. That's where my 0% value came from.

Thanks!
Steve

As a related sidelight:

In my music classes when the kids are mostly beginners especially at upper elementary and higher, I would teach them to SolFa on the pentatonic scale and Ta-TiTi Kodaly rhythmic or 1+2+3+4+ notation (depending on the students and how far along in my

elementary studies I were at the time. And I usually taught them music as if they were a composer once they developed basic skills

I had many variations but in general I would have them either individually or in groups, have them select a poem and recite it to a beat. They were free to put the emphasis where they liked but they had to syl-la-bi-cate the poem first and then

practice saying the lyrics as a chant (or a rap depending upon the demographic and student interests.

Then when they knew it, one or some of the students would draw a line over the syllable that landed on the beat. And you can probably figure out the rest. As they did this I also had them put a wavy line or a "Z" when there was a beat without a

syllable. (the wavy line would eventually turn out to be a rest and the Z is just the way the Kodaly kids learn to represent a quarter rest.

Most of their poems wound up to be combinations of quarters and eights so then I went to long/short to get the regular quarter and 8th rhythms in the pboem. WIth the line above the beats, if there was no short/short, that already was the Kodaly

symbol for a Ta or quarter note. and if there was a short short, then they drew a line over the second note and connected the tops and that was the symbol for the TiTi or two eight notes.

The ones that had triplet meters, or syncopation, gave me an excuse to teach them how to vary it to show how to notate it and it worked great. It also allowed me to progress to FORM when they looked at where the rhymes landed and I had them start to

group the phrases into measures and the measures into an actual form chart.

Then for the more advanced students or higher level grades, I would sometimes have them sing pentatonic melodies to the words and notate them in SolFa. I enjoyed it and most of the time, so did the kids.

Your examples just reminded me of that so I thought I would remember and share it with you.

But when left to their own devices almost all the poems turned out to be rhyming at the end of the phrase. Of course with the younger students, all their rhymes were nursery rhymes so most followed the pattern of:

Mary had a little lamb,
Its Fleece was white as SNOW.
Every where that Mary went,
Her lamb was sure to GO.

Most poems seem to follow this same pattern as it has to do with couplets. So I am thinking that couplets might be the center of your investigating how the lyrics are put together.

One thing that I notices when I did the same thing as above with a Blues theme, is that the couplet is the basis of the Blues tunes but the first part of the Couplet is used twice, AA then the second part is the Rhyme that completes the B part of the

couplet. with the A being the question, and the B is the answer and it is in an AAB form for the lyrics and thus the music.

Which brings up the lyrics of the Blues genre. Which are usually AAB but can also have other models as well. Had you thought to put the Blues form and rhyming scheme into your study?

Talk to you more about it later.

LJS

Yes, couplets, good point. So if we say that "Mary" is a two-phrase couplet (instead of four lines of text), which I like btw, then here's how I hear it with just the landmarks shown:

[beat][beat] [beat][beat] [beat][beat] [rime][rest]
[beat][beat] [beat][beat] [beat][beat] [rime][rest]

So that puts the stress spotlight (the lyrical rhyme) at the three-quarter mark through the phrase. That matches Desperado, and Desperado uses same-length phrases, but interleaved couplets. But it doesn't match the limerick (which puts rhymes at the

halfway mark, in two different-length types of phrase). Very interesting. This is what I'd seen, though: 50% and 75% (and 0%) placements. Still don't know why, but I'm happy with the additional examples, and chance to process. :) Btw, I'm also seeing a
tendency in songs to put the musical resolution in the same place as the lyrical rhyme. That may be an obvious practice.

Also, that's very interesting about the Blues form. On my TODO list was an item to do a "detour" analysis of some Blues forms (incl 12-bar). Btw, I don't know what the proper term nor theory is for a "detour", I'm sure there is one, but I just made

that word up. Lemme do a bit of that analysis here, and that should serve to illustrate what I mean by a detour:

So, let's say you've just composed this little bit of music (which, to use the term that you reminded me of, is a couplet):

I
[I] hate to see that [I] evening sun go [I] down. [I] It
[V] makes me think I'm [IV7] on my last go [I] round [I]

It's great, it works. It should: it's just the primary chords in common cadence. But let's say that you now want it to be longer. This is true of lots of songs, you just find that you're resolving, giving up the goods, too early. You want to hold onto

that lovely suspense a bit longer for the enjoyment of the listener. So, you insert a detour (you insert it into the chain so that it fits front and back). And, having added a detour, you rinse and repeat until the music is long and/or suspenseful enough.
In this case, we could begin by adding 8 bars in anticipation of the result being more "even" and balanced, or we could try just adding 4 bars to begin with just to see how that feels.

So let's say we insert a 4-bar detour right at the end of the first line. We can then tweak that last I to an I7 if we like, and a couple other tweaks. And you get this (notice how what we spliced in fits without needing major surgery to what was

already there).

I
[I] hate to see that [I] evening sun go [I] down. [I7] I
[IV] hate to see that [IV] evening sun go [I] down. [I] It
[V] makes me think I'm [IV7] on my last go [I] round [V7]

And that works of course, too, b/c it's a variant of 12-bar blues. The fact that the first two lines share the same melody and lyrics is ok: they have different harmony. The false lyrical rhyme between "down" and "down" doesn't spoil things, because of

that (and because we eventually get a true rhyme). If we make the first two lines identical in harmony, melody, AND lyrics, then that doesn't sound anywhere near as artful (although you'd get away with it if you performed it with enough soul).

So, really, my mental model is that the Blues form example is actually a regular old couplet extended with a 4-bar detour.

-Steve

Oh, and of course, that 12 bar blues example is another one (like the limerick) where the rhymes come at the halfway point in the phrase. I guess what I'm looking for is something like a theory that say "lyrical rhymes and musical resolutions always come
at the 50% mark in a phrase, you just have to look at the phrases in the right way." The theory would have to account for why the phrases in Desperado (for example) appear to be twice as long as the theory requires. :)

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On Friday, December 25, 2015 at 7:26:01 AM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Thursday, December 24, 2015 at 8:33:22 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Thursday, December 24, 2015 at 6:11:21 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Wednesday, December 23, 2015 at 7:07:03 PM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Wednesday, December 23, 2015 at 6:43:37 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Tuesday, December 22, 2015 at 3:03:59 PM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 9:11:18 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 6:12:41 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

If you put a limerick to music, you might end up with something that feels like this (two phrases of four bars of 3/4. Then two phrases of two bars, etc):

1 2 *3* 4
1 2 *3* 4
1 *2*
3 *4*
1 2 *3* 4

Looking at it that way, the lyrical rhymes always come at 50% of the way through a phrase. You'd put the musical punctuation there, too (e.g. the resolution back to I on the *3* of the last line. But is that the right mental model? Or do

these rhymes/crises actually come at the start of a phrase? If so then a musical limerick really looks like this (four phrases of two bars of 3/4. Then four phrases of one bar, etc, where a rhyme always begins alternate phrases):

1 2
*1* 2
1 2
*1* 2
1
*1*
1
*1*
1 2
*1* 2

Thanks!
Steve

I should explain why I'm asking. I'm trying to develop a model of the current practice (particularly in pop songs) of where lyrical rhymes (and musical rhymes, including resolutions) tend to go with respect to time units. Getting a proper

understanding of (the hierarchy of) time units themselves is of course critical to this, and I'm not sure I'm even there, yet. But in looking closely at a bunch of songs, I am glimpsing vague patterns that these "crises", or inflection points, occur at 0%
, 50%, and 75& of the way through what I believe to be a "phrase" (a musical phrase; not necessarily a lyrical one). I've also been looking into prosody with little success, but I used the limerick form in my question because it seems to nicely span both
worlds.

I don't know how this fits in, but I hear the limeric as an AABA in 12/8
four measures long with the 3 As and 1 B measure. with the B measure being two phrases each one half the length of the A phrase rhythmically.

I can see the phrase being described as three beats long, but not in 3/4. I find that confusing. Instead I could see:

Beat Beat Rime Rest,
Beat Beat Rime Rest,
beat rime, beat rime,
beat beat Rime Rest.

If I understand why, you are doing this to create a model for longer phrases in pop tunes or various other lengths of phrases and different rhyme patterns so I think that a method of describing the phrases has to be universal both to compound

and complex meter as well as to fit into different phrase lenght etc.

That is why I am going to the basic elementary ways of describing the rhythm with Long/short but adding the Rhyme (shortened to Rime as its the same number of characters as beat and rest)

I don't know how my three elements will work or if it will work for all forms you may find but I think some sort of basic simple organization is the best way to attack the rhyming patterns at least until you start to see regular patterns. I

think that you will find recurring and logical patterns although I also think you will have some songs that have unique logical patterns and maybe even a few more art song type of patterns.

As you get more samples, I think that it might be easier to test organizational notation that might work better.

To arrive at my model, I started with

Short short long----
short short long ----
and then it fell apart when the rhyming pattern was cut into half the number of beats.

Then I decided to add the Beat and rhyme words for the third phrase and came up with
beat rime beat rime

and then put it into the final model.

I don't know if this is any help at all, but as I understand more precisely what you are working with, I hope to do better! lol

LJS
element7music.com

Thank you, LJ, your simplification into landmarks such as beats, rimes, rests, and so on is a good one. I'll use that going forward to analyze examples.

One other example I have right now is this little piece of mine: http://voices.azurewebsites.net/my_music/score/limerick_001.png. Bars 1-9 could be interpreted as a limerick in 4/4. I have fitted a limerick to that, and both the lyrical rhymes

and the increased liveliness of the music do give me the impression that the phrase frequency is increasing on the third "line". In bars 1-9 (bar 1 is of course a pickup bar) of that piece, I hear this:

beat beat rime beat
beat beat rime rest
beat rime beat rime
beat beat rime rest

If the model is that a phrase contains one rime, then this matches your analysis of the limerick form in that the rime (or musical emphasis, or stress) comes at the halfway mark in a phrase. Then there's this example:

[*draw the *queen of ][*diamonds, boy * she'll][*beat you *if she's ][*able; * you know the]
[*queen of *hearts is ][*always * your best][*bet. * ][* * Now it] [*seems to *me some ][*fine things * have been][*laid up-*on your ][*table. * But you]
[*only *want the][*ones that *you can't][*get *][*Des- *]

A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%
A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%

Exiting that chunk of music with a rhyme at the halfway mark sounds correct, and balanced. Ending with a 75% rhyme, I don't know if it would, yet if you consider A and B to be one long unit, then the 75% rhymes come close to 50% of the

composite unit. On the other hand, if A and B really are one unit then the rimeB rhymes are appearing at 75%. Anyway, I was just curious to know if anyone knew the "rules" (aka the common practice and what patterns have been found to work). Understanding
the psychology is not crucial, but would be nice. :)

I'll keep looking at examples as I come across them. But FWIW, a lot of pop songs seem to rhyme right at the border between the end of one phrase and the start of another. That's where my 0% value came from.

Thanks!
Steve

As a related sidelight:

In my music classes when the kids are mostly beginners especially at upper elementary and higher, I would teach them to SolFa on the pentatonic scale and Ta-TiTi Kodaly rhythmic or 1+2+3+4+ notation (depending on the students and how far along in

my elementary studies I were at the time. And I usually taught them music as if they were a composer once they developed basic skills

I had many variations but in general I would have them either individually or in groups, have them select a poem and recite it to a beat. They were free to put the emphasis where they liked but they had to syl-la-bi-cate the poem first and then

practice saying the lyrics as a chant (or a rap depending upon the demographic and student interests.

Then when they knew it, one or some of the students would draw a line over the syllable that landed on the beat. And you can probably figure out the rest. As they did this I also had them put a wavy line or a "Z" when there was a beat without a

syllable. (the wavy line would eventually turn out to be a rest and the Z is just the way the Kodaly kids learn to represent a quarter rest.

Most of their poems wound up to be combinations of quarters and eights so then I went to long/short to get the regular quarter and 8th rhythms in the pboem. WIth the line above the beats, if there was no short/short, that already was the Kodaly

symbol for a Ta or quarter note. and if there was a short short, then they drew a line over the second note and connected the tops and that was the symbol for the TiTi or two eight notes.

The ones that had triplet meters, or syncopation, gave me an excuse to teach them how to vary it to show how to notate it and it worked great. It also allowed me to progress to FORM when they looked at where the rhymes landed and I had them start

to group the phrases into measures and the measures into an actual form chart.

Then for the more advanced students or higher level grades, I would sometimes have them sing pentatonic melodies to the words and notate them in SolFa. I enjoyed it and most of the time, so did the kids.

Your examples just reminded me of that so I thought I would remember and share it with you.

But when left to their own devices almost all the poems turned out to be rhyming at the end of the phrase. Of course with the younger students, all their rhymes were nursery rhymes so most followed the pattern of:

Mary had a little lamb,
Its Fleece was white as SNOW.
Every where that Mary went,
Her lamb was sure to GO.

Most poems seem to follow this same pattern as it has to do with couplets. So I am thinking that couplets might be the center of your investigating how the lyrics are put together.

One thing that I notices when I did the same thing as above with a Blues theme, is that the couplet is the basis of the Blues tunes but the first part of the Couplet is used twice, AA then the second part is the Rhyme that completes the B part of

the couplet. with the A being the question, and the B is the answer and it is in an AAB form for the lyrics and thus the music.

Which brings up the lyrics of the Blues genre. Which are usually AAB but can also have other models as well. Had you thought to put the Blues form and rhyming scheme into your study?

Talk to you more about it later.

LJS

Yes, couplets, good point. So if we say that "Mary" is a two-phrase couplet (instead of four lines of text), which I like btw, then here's how I hear it with just the landmarks shown:

[beat][beat] [beat][beat] [beat][beat] [rime][rest]
[beat][beat] [beat][beat] [beat][beat] [rime][rest]

So that puts the stress spotlight (the lyrical rhyme) at the three-quarter mark through the phrase. That matches Desperado, and Desperado uses same-length phrases, but interleaved couplets. But it doesn't match the limerick (which puts rhymes at

the halfway mark, in two different-length types of phrase). Very interesting. This is what I'd seen, though: 50% and 75% (and 0%) placements. Still don't know why, but I'm happy with the additional examples, and chance to process. :) Btw, I'm also seeing
a tendency in songs to put the musical resolution in the same place as the lyrical rhyme. That may be an obvious practice.

Also, that's very interesting about the Blues form. On my TODO list was an item to do a "detour" analysis of some Blues forms (incl 12-bar). Btw, I don't know what the proper term nor theory is for a "detour", I'm sure there is one, but I just made

that word up. Lemme do a bit of that analysis here, and that should serve to illustrate what I mean by a detour:

So, let's say you've just composed this little bit of music (which, to use the term that you reminded me of, is a couplet):

I
[I] hate to see that [I] evening sun go [I] down. [I] It
[V] makes me think I'm [IV7] on my last go [I] round [I]

It's great, it works. It should: it's just the primary chords in common cadence. But let's say that you now want it to be longer. This is true of lots of songs, you just find that you're resolving, giving up the goods, too early. You want to hold

onto that lovely suspense a bit longer for the enjoyment of the listener. So, you insert a detour (you insert it into the chain so that it fits front and back). And, having added a detour, you rinse and repeat until the music is long and/or suspenseful
enough. In this case, we could begin by adding 8 bars in anticipation of the result being more "even" and balanced, or we could try just adding 4 bars to begin with just to see how that feels.

So let's say we insert a 4-bar detour right at the end of the first line. We can then tweak that last I to an I7 if we like, and a couple other tweaks. And you get this (notice how what we spliced in fits without needing major surgery to what was

already there).

I
[I] hate to see that [I] evening sun go [I] down. [I7] I
[IV] hate to see that [IV] evening sun go [I] down. [I] It
[V] makes me think I'm [IV7] on my last go [I] round [V7]

And that works of course, too, b/c it's a variant of 12-bar blues. The fact that the first two lines share the same melody and lyrics is ok: they have different harmony. The false lyrical rhyme between "down" and "down" doesn't spoil things,

because of that (and because we eventually get a true rhyme). If we make the first two lines identical in harmony, melody, AND lyrics, then that doesn't sound anywhere near as artful (although you'd get away with it if you performed it with enough soul).

So, really, my mental model is that the Blues form example is actually a regular old couplet extended with a 4-bar detour.

-Steve

Oh, and of course, that 12 bar blues example is another one (like the limerick) where the rhymes come at the halfway point in the phrase. I guess what I'm looking for is something like a theory that say "lyrical rhymes and musical resolutions always

come at the 50% mark in a phrase, you just have to look at the phrases in the right way." The theory would have to account for why the phrases in Desperado (for example) appear to be twice as long as the theory requires. :)

Well, some accommodations have to be made for various forms of the songs themselves in the overall sense. You can't compare apples and oranges except in the context of something like Fruits and non fruits. You can't compare forms in the same manner. If

you compare a Sonata Allegro form with the same criteria as a Rondo, even though they may contain some parts that may be related or used in a different way.

By the same token, the Blues is a specific form as is a limerick, as is the AB or ABAB form of Mary had a....

IT would be cool if there were written or it would be cool to write some poetry that would merge the three mentioned into something like a Rondo or Sonata-Allegro form and set it to music, but I don't know of any that would actually do that. (hmm, it

could be an interesting project to arrange multi form poetry rhymes into a Rondo and see how it plays out}

But the Form, with poetry would have to have different classifications based upon the rhyming schemes. i.e. Couplets, Limericks, Blues for example. AND your study may come up with additional forms based upon your research and methods of analysis. At

this moment, Christmas AM, I can't think of any others but they must exist someplace. (Merry Christmas btw)

Have you looked into the arrangements of rhyming schemes in something like the Shakespeare Sonnets)

Oh, have to go. Just heard reindeer footsteps on our roof. Time for family Santa time.

Later.
LJSe

Merry Christmas, LJ, and all at rec.music.theory! :)

Re: sonnets, yes I did jot down some thoughts about them a couple weeks ago, but that was to examine their meter rather than their rhymes. Here's a copy-paste of my notes (these should be best viewed in a monospace font, btw, so copying this stuff into
Notepad should do the trick).

Finish with some thoughts on Iambic pentameter. A good example of iambic pentemeter is Shakespeare's twelfth sonnet, which is usually read like this, with just a short pause of arbitrary length between lines.

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM
When I do count the clock that tells the time,

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM
And see the brave day sunk in hid'eous night;

This is of course classic verse, and great stuff, and there's even some music to the series of five pulses (two syllables per pulse), which are known as iambs. But, if it were music, then I think it would defy the intuition of the listener. And, a band
trying to play it would be driven crazy by its lack of any consistent and predictable protocol for dividing up time. I can think of three ways in which iambic pentameter like this could be made playable as music.

[2]
When

[1 2][1 2] [1 2] [1 2] [1 2][1 2][1 2][1 2]
I do count the clock that tells the time, and

The first way is this example above, which uses two beats per bar. And that agrees with the iambs in the original version. Notice how using a pickup beat for "When", and moving "and" to the end of the previous line, means we still have the stress on the
first beat. There are eight bars to the line here (but still only five iambs of syllables, so this is not octameter), with the pivot in the same place we always see it: right in the center of the phrase. The price we pay for that is marking time for a
good few beats, but that's not a problem: it's a very common practice in popular songs. Two beats per bar isn't extremely common, though, so let's try four.

[4]
When

[1 2 3 4] [1 2 3 4] [1 2 3 4][1 2 3 4]
I do count the clock that tells the time, and

This is the second way. The only real difference between this treatment and the previous one is that the number of times we stress a word per line goes down from five to three.

[Aside: we could actually bump that number up to four by making use of that unused beat 1 in bar 4. And, for all we know, Shakespeare meant this to be in 4/4 and he might have tried a nice "Hey!" on that very beat. But he probably decided it interfered
too much with the gravitas of the sonnet. ;)]

But in any case, I would hazard a guess that for every person who prefers the esthetics of the iambic version, at least as many would prefer the esthetics of the stress-per-four-beats version. I think I do.


A third way of setting iambic pentameter to music is to give it two beats per bar but eliminate the arbitrary (although, natural) pause at the end of lines. The musicians would be fine with that, but the singer would have no place to breathe in an
endless stream of syllables. Also, I suspect some listeners would find the grouping of bars in fives to be unusual enough that it'd interfere with their enjoyment. On the other hand, we could look to Paul Desmond's "Take Five" for a counter-argument.
That's a very well-known jazz piece in 5/4 time that has a huge and adoring audience (myself included). Grouping beats into fives is certainly unusual, and defies our intuition built from marching and dancing to music, but it's certainly something you
can develop a liking for. So maybe that's true of grouping bars into fives, too.

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On Saturday, December 26, 2015 at 4:03:11 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Saturday, December 26, 2015 at 10:28:10 AM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Friday, December 25, 2015 at 6:23:11 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Friday, December 25, 2015 at 7:26:01 AM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Thursday, December 24, 2015 at 8:33:22 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Thursday, December 24, 2015 at 6:11:21 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Wednesday, December 23, 2015 at 7:07:03 PM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Wednesday, December 23, 2015 at 6:43:37 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Tuesday, December 22, 2015 at 3:03:59 PM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 9:11:18 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 6:12:41 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

If you put a limerick to music, you might end up with something that feels like this (two phrases of four bars of 3/4. Then two phrases of two bars, etc):

1 2 *3* 4
1 2 *3* 4
1 *2*
3 *4*
1 2 *3* 4

Looking at it that way, the lyrical rhymes always come at 50% of the way through a phrase. You'd put the musical punctuation there, too (e.g. the resolution back to I on the *3* of the last line. But is that the right mental model?

Or do these rhymes/crises actually come at the start of a phrase? If so then a musical limerick really looks like this (four phrases of two bars of 3/4. Then four phrases of one bar, etc, where a rhyme always begins alternate phrases):

1 2
*1* 2
1 2
*1* 2
1
*1*
1
*1*
1 2
*1* 2

Thanks!
Steve

I should explain why I'm asking. I'm trying to develop a model of the current practice (particularly in pop songs) of where lyrical rhymes (and musical rhymes, including resolutions) tend to go with respect to time units. Getting a

proper understanding of (the hierarchy of) time units themselves is of course critical to this, and I'm not sure I'm even there, yet. But in looking closely at a bunch of songs, I am glimpsing vague patterns that these "crises", or inflection points,
occur at 0%, 50%, and 75& of the way through what I believe to be a "phrase" (a musical phrase; not necessarily a lyrical one). I've also been looking into prosody with little success, but I used the limerick form in my question because it seems to
nicely span both worlds.

I don't know how this fits in, but I hear the limeric as an AABA in 12/8
four measures long with the 3 As and 1 B measure. with the B measure being two phrases each one half the length of the A phrase rhythmically.

I can see the phrase being described as three beats long, but not in 3/4. I find that confusing. Instead I could see:

Beat Beat Rime Rest,
Beat Beat Rime Rest,
beat rime, beat rime,
beat beat Rime Rest.

If I understand why, you are doing this to create a model for longer phrases in pop tunes or various other lengths of phrases and different rhyme patterns so I think that a method of describing the phrases has to be universal both to

compound and complex meter as well as to fit into different phrase lenght etc.

That is why I am going to the basic elementary ways of describing the rhythm with Long/short but adding the Rhyme (shortened to Rime as its the same number of characters as beat and rest)

I don't know how my three elements will work or if it will work for all forms you may find but I think some sort of basic simple organization is the best way to attack the rhyming patterns at least until you start to see regular

patterns. I think that you will find recurring and logical patterns although I also think you will have some songs that have unique logical patterns and maybe even a few more art song type of patterns.

As you get more samples, I think that it might be easier to test organizational notation that might work better.

To arrive at my model, I started with

Short short long----
short short long ----
and then it fell apart when the rhyming pattern was cut into half the number of beats.

Then I decided to add the Beat and rhyme words for the third phrase and came up with
beat rime beat rime

and then put it into the final model.

I don't know if this is any help at all, but as I understand more precisely what you are working with, I hope to do better! lol

LJS
element7music.com

Thank you, LJ, your simplification into landmarks such as beats, rimes, rests, and so on is a good one. I'll use that going forward to analyze examples.

One other example I have right now is this little piece of mine: http://voices.azurewebsites.net/my_music/score/limerick_001.png. Bars 1-9 could be interpreted as a limerick in 4/4. I have fitted a limerick to that, and both the lyrical

rhymes and the increased liveliness of the music do give me the impression that the phrase frequency is increasing on the third "line". In bars 1-9 (bar 1 is of course a pickup bar) of that piece, I hear this:

beat beat rime beat
beat beat rime rest
beat rime beat rime
beat beat rime rest

If the model is that a phrase contains one rime, then this matches your analysis of the limerick form in that the rime (or musical emphasis, or stress) comes at the halfway mark in a phrase. Then there's this example:

[*draw the *queen of ][*diamonds, boy * she'll][*beat you *if she's ][*able; * you know the]
[*queen of *hearts is ][*always * your best][*bet. * ][* * Now it]
[*seems to *me some ][*fine things * have been][*laid up-*on your ][*table. * But you]
[*only *want the][*ones that *you can't][*get *][*Des- *]

A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%
A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%

Exiting that chunk of music with a rhyme at the halfway mark sounds correct, and balanced. Ending with a 75% rhyme, I don't know if it would, yet if you consider A and B to be one long unit, then the 75% rhymes come close to 50% of the

composite unit. On the other hand, if A and B really are one unit then the rimeB rhymes are appearing at 75%. Anyway, I was just curious to know if anyone knew the "rules" (aka the common practice and what patterns have been found to work). Understanding
the psychology is not crucial, but would be nice. :)

I'll keep looking at examples as I come across them. But FWIW, a lot of pop songs seem to rhyme right at the border between the end of one phrase and the start of another. That's where my 0% value came from.

Thanks!
Steve

As a related sidelight:

In my music classes when the kids are mostly beginners especially at upper elementary and higher, I would teach them to SolFa on the pentatonic scale and Ta-TiTi Kodaly rhythmic or 1+2+3+4+ notation (depending on the students and how far

along in my elementary studies I were at the time. And I usually taught them music as if they were a composer once they developed basic skills

I had many variations but in general I would have them either individually or in groups, have them select a poem and recite it to a beat. They were free to put the emphasis where they liked but they had to syl-la-bi-cate the poem first and

then practice saying the lyrics as a chant (or a rap depending upon the demographic and student interests.

Then when they knew it, one or some of the students would draw a line over the syllable that landed on the beat. And you can probably figure out the rest. As they did this I also had them put a wavy line or a "Z" when there was a beat

without a syllable. (the wavy line would eventually turn out to be a rest and the Z is just the way the Kodaly kids learn to represent a quarter rest.

Most of their poems wound up to be combinations of quarters and eights so then I went to long/short to get the regular quarter and 8th rhythms in the pboem. WIth the line above the beats, if there was no short/short, that already was the

Kodaly symbol for a Ta or quarter note. and if there was a short short, then they drew a line over the second note and connected the tops and that was the symbol for the TiTi or two eight notes.

The ones that had triplet meters, or syncopation, gave me an excuse to teach them how to vary it to show how to notate it and it worked great. It also allowed me to progress to FORM when they looked at where the rhymes landed and I had them

start to group the phrases into measures and the measures into an actual form chart.

Then for the more advanced students or higher level grades, I would sometimes have them sing pentatonic melodies to the words and notate them in SolFa. I enjoyed it and most of the time, so did the kids.

Your examples just reminded me of that so I thought I would remember and share it with you.

But when left to their own devices almost all the poems turned out to be rhyming at the end of the phrase. Of course with the younger students, all their rhymes were nursery rhymes so most followed the pattern of:

Mary had a little lamb,
Its Fleece was white as SNOW.
Every where that Mary went,
Her lamb was sure to GO.

Most poems seem to follow this same pattern as it has to do with couplets. So I am thinking that couplets might be the center of your investigating how the lyrics are put together.

One thing that I notices when I did the same thing as above with a Blues theme, is that the couplet is the basis of the Blues tunes but the first part of the Couplet is used twice, AA then the second part is the Rhyme that completes the B

part of the couplet. with the A being the question, and the B is the answer and it is in an AAB form for the lyrics and thus the music.

Which brings up the lyrics of the Blues genre. Which are usually AAB but can also have other models as well. Had you thought to put the Blues form and rhyming scheme into your study?

Talk to you more about it later.

LJS

Yes, couplets, good point. So if we say that "Mary" is a two-phrase couplet (instead of four lines of text), which I like btw, then here's how I hear it with just the landmarks shown:

[beat][beat] [beat][beat] [beat][beat] [rime][rest]
[beat][beat] [beat][beat] [beat][beat] [rime][rest]

So that puts the stress spotlight (the lyrical rhyme) at the three-quarter mark through the phrase. That matches Desperado, and Desperado uses same-length phrases, but interleaved couplets. But it doesn't match the limerick (which puts rhymes

at the halfway mark, in two different-length types of phrase). Very interesting. This is what I'd seen, though: 50% and 75% (and 0%) placements. Still don't know why, but I'm happy with the additional examples, and chance to process. :) Btw, I'm also
seeing a tendency in songs to put the musical resolution in the same place as the lyrical rhyme. That may be an obvious practice.

Also, that's very interesting about the Blues form. On my TODO list was an item to do a "detour" analysis of some Blues forms (incl 12-bar). Btw, I don't know what the proper term nor theory is for a "detour", I'm sure there is one, but I

just made that word up. Lemme do a bit of that analysis here, and that should serve to illustrate what I mean by a detour:

So, let's say you've just composed this little bit of music (which, to use the term that you reminded me of, is a couplet):

I
[I] hate to see that [I] evening sun go [I] down. [I] It
[V] makes me think I'm [IV7] on my last go [I] round [I]

It's great, it works. It should: it's just the primary chords in common cadence. But let's say that you now want it to be longer. This is true of lots of songs, you just find that you're resolving, giving up the goods, too early. You want to

hold onto that lovely suspense a bit longer for the enjoyment of the listener. So, you insert a detour (you insert it into the chain so that it fits front and back). And, having added a detour, you rinse and repeat until the music is long and/or
suspenseful enough. In this case, we could begin by adding 8 bars in anticipation of the result being more "even" and balanced, or we could try just adding 4 bars to begin with just to see how that feels.

So let's say we insert a 4-bar detour right at the end of the first line. We can then tweak that last I to an I7 if we like, and a couple other tweaks. And you get this (notice how what we spliced in fits without needing major surgery to what

was already there).

I
[I] hate to see that [I] evening sun go [I] down. [I7] I
[IV] hate to see that [IV] evening sun go [I] down. [I] It
[V] makes me think I'm [IV7] on my last go [I] round [V7]

And that works of course, too, b/c it's a variant of 12-bar blues. The fact that the first two lines share the same melody and lyrics is ok: they have different harmony. The false lyrical rhyme between "down" and "down" doesn't spoil things,

because of that (and because we eventually get a true rhyme). If we make the first two lines identical in harmony, melody, AND lyrics, then that doesn't sound anywhere near as artful (although you'd get away with it if you performed it with enough soul).

So, really, my mental model is that the Blues form example is actually a regular old couplet extended with a 4-bar detour.

-Steve

Oh, and of course, that 12 bar blues example is another one (like the limerick) where the rhymes come at the halfway point in the phrase. I guess what I'm looking for is something like a theory that say "lyrical rhymes and musical resolutions

always come at the 50% mark in a phrase, you just have to look at the phrases in the right way." The theory would have to account for why the phrases in Desperado (for example) appear to be twice as long as the theory requires. :)

Well, some accommodations have to be made for various forms of the songs themselves in the overall sense. You can't compare apples and oranges except in the context of something like Fruits and non fruits. You can't compare forms in the same

manner. If you compare a Sonata Allegro form with the same criteria as a Rondo, even though they may contain some parts that may be related or used in a different way.

By the same token, the Blues is a specific form as is a limerick, as is the AB or ABAB form of Mary had a....

IT would be cool if there were written or it would be cool to write some poetry that would merge the three mentioned into something like a Rondo or Sonata-Allegro form and set it to music, but I don't know of any that would actually do that. (hmm,

it could be an interesting project to arrange multi form poetry rhymes into a Rondo and see how it plays out}

But the Form, with poetry would have to have different classifications based upon the rhyming schemes. i.e. Couplets, Limericks, Blues for example. AND your study may come up with additional forms based upon your research and methods of analysis.

At this moment, Christmas AM, I can't think of any others but they must exist someplace. (Merry Christmas btw)

Have you looked into the arrangements of rhyming schemes in something like the Shakespeare Sonnets)

Oh, have to go. Just heard reindeer footsteps on our roof. Time for family Santa time.

Later.
LJSe

Merry Christmas, LJ, and all at rec.music.theory! :)

Re: sonnets, yes I did jot down some thoughts about them a couple weeks ago, but that was to examine their meter rather than their rhymes. Here's a copy-paste of my notes (these should be best viewed in a monospace font, btw, so copying this stuff

into Notepad should do the trick).

Finish with some thoughts on Iambic pentameter. A good example of iambic pentemeter is Shakespeare's twelfth sonnet, which is usually read like this, with just a short pause of arbitrary length between lines.

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM
When I do count the clock that tells the time,

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM
And see the brave day sunk in hid'eous night;

This is of course classic verse, and great stuff, and there's even some music to the series of five pulses (two syllables per pulse), which are known as iambs. But, if it were music, then I think it would defy the intuition of the listener. And, a

band trying to play it would be driven crazy by its lack of any consistent and predictable protocol for dividing up time. I can think of three ways in which iambic pentameter like this could be made playable as music.

[2]
When

[1 2][1 2] [1 2] [1 2] [1 2][1 2][1 2][1 2]
I do count the clock that tells the time, and

The first way is this example above, which uses two beats per bar. And that agrees with the iambs in the original version. Notice how using a pickup beat for "When", and moving "and" to the end of the previous line, means we still have the stress

on the first beat. There are eight bars to the line here (but still only five iambs of syllables, so this is not octameter), with the pivot in the same place we always see it: right in the center of the phrase. The price we pay for that is marking time
for a good few beats, but that's not a problem: it's a very common practice in popular songs. Two beats per bar isn't extremely common, though, so let's try four.

[4]
When

[1 2 3 4] [1 2 3 4] [1 2 3 4][1 2 3 4]
I do count the clock that tells the time, and

This is the second way. The only real difference between this treatment and the previous one is that the number of times we stress a word per line goes down from five to three.

[Aside: we could actually bump that number up to four by making use of that unused beat 1 in bar 4. And, for all we know, Shakespeare meant this to be in 4/4 and he might have tried a nice "Hey!" on that very beat. But he probably decided it

interfered too much with the gravitas of the sonnet. ;)]

But in any case, I would hazard a guess that for every person who prefers the esthetics of the iambic version, at least as many would prefer the esthetics of the stress-per-four-beats version. I think I do.

A third way of setting iambic pentameter to music is to give it two beats per bar but eliminate the arbitrary (although, natural) pause at the end of lines. The musicians would be fine with that, but the singer would have no place to breathe in an

endless stream of syllables. Also, I suspect some listeners would find the grouping of bars in fives to be unusual enough that it'd interfere with their enjoyment. On the other hand, we could look to Paul Desmond's "Take Five" for a counter-argument.
That's a very well-known jazz piece in 5/4 time that has a huge and adoring audience (myself included). Grouping beats into fives is certainly unusual, and defies our intuition built from marching and dancing to music, but it's certainly something you
can develop a liking for. So maybe that's true of grouping bars into fives, too.

If I am reading this correctly, you are putting it to meter but with interpretation. That is OK but for the purposes of classification, I don't see the rhyming scheme in any way I can relate it to the topic of discussion. By that I mean, How are the

lines arranged according to the rhyming schemes? Wouldn't you need several lines to see if there is a pattern? or some comparison of form?

Maybe there is not a rhyming scheme, in which case, there would not be a way to use them in the rhyming scheme analysis. Am I missing something?

ljs

You're right, I wandered away from the strict topic of lyrical rhyming there. However, I do feel that getting a proper understanding and model of (the hierarchy of) time units themselves (in both music and verse) is a prerequisite to developing a model

of the time unit at which rhymes should occur. :) I just pasted that in because that was the only thing that I had on sonnets. However, what I pasted in is perhaps in the service of my original question because it does support the 50% theory. You can see
the rhyming scheme in the first 4 lines of sonnet 12:

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white;

If you subscribe to my meter interpretations then, as I say above, "the pivot [is] in the same place we always see it: right in the center of the phrase." I was using a different term ("pivot") a couple weeks ago, but that's the "crisis" or "stress

point" or "rhyming point" or whatever that I talk about in this thread. And here it's at 50% of the way through the phrase as we've seen in several examples now. Note that, whether each pair of lines rhymes or each alternate line rhymes, I'm not focusing
on. I'm focusing on the pivot, or crisis, or spotlight in a phrase where the lyrical rhyme and/or musical effect (e.g. resolution) has greatest effect.

But this thread's been great, I'm seeing some interesting commonality between examples, even if I don't yet have the grand universal theory I'm after. :)

Lemme just underline that thought, again, because I do feel that this is important. During my recent efforts to answer my question, I kept coming across things that said "rhymes appear at the ends of lines". That does seem to be the common belief and yet
it doesn't seem to be true. When you write out a poem or a song then, yes, rhymes do often appear at the end of lines of text. But the text and the beats of music don't match 1:1. If you only write down lyrics with respect to the text, then you also put
line breaks in the wrong place with respect to the bars, too. So looking at text is a poor tool for understanding rhythm and rhyme; that seems plain. All the examples I've given above are meant to show how to write down the text with respect to the
rhythm, and then see where the rhymes/effects appear. And, despite folks saying that limericks and sonnets (etc) rhyme at the end of the line (which a naive glance at a limerick, or the four lines of sonnet above would suggest), in fact they rhyme at the
50% mark of the "line" if you recognize that a big chunk of the "line" is silent. I find that really interesting, and I didn't come across anything that pointed that fact out in my research travels, but of course maybe I didn't travel to the right places.
:) But that's why I came here. :)

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Saturday, December 26, 2015 at 10:28:10 AM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Friday, December 25, 2015 at 6:23:11 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Friday, December 25, 2015 at 7:26:01 AM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Thursday, December 24, 2015 at 8:33:22 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Thursday, December 24, 2015 at 6:11:21 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Wednesday, December 23, 2015 at 7:07:03 PM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Wednesday, December 23, 2015 at 6:43:37 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Tuesday, December 22, 2015 at 3:03:59 PM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 9:11:18 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 6:12:41 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

If you put a limerick to music, you might end up with something that feels like this (two phrases of four bars of 3/4. Then two phrases of two bars, etc):

1 2 *3* 4
1 2 *3* 4
1 *2*
3 *4*
1 2 *3* 4

Looking at it that way, the lyrical rhymes always come at 50% of the way through a phrase. You'd put the musical punctuation there, too (e.g. the resolution back to I on the *3* of the last line. But is that the right mental model? Or

do these rhymes/crises actually come at the start of a phrase? If so then a musical limerick really looks like this (four phrases of two bars of 3/4. Then four phrases of one bar, etc, where a rhyme always begins alternate phrases):

1 2
*1* 2
1 2
*1* 2
1
*1*
1
*1*
1 2
*1* 2

Thanks!
Steve

I should explain why I'm asking. I'm trying to develop a model of the current practice (particularly in pop songs) of where lyrical rhymes (and musical rhymes, including resolutions) tend to go with respect to time units. Getting a

proper understanding of (the hierarchy of) time units themselves is of course critical to this, and I'm not sure I'm even there, yet. But in looking closely at a bunch of songs, I am glimpsing vague patterns that these "crises", or inflection points,
occur at 0%, 50%, and 75& of the way through what I believe to be a "phrase" (a musical phrase; not necessarily a lyrical one). I've also been looking into prosody with little success, but I used the limerick form in my question because it seems to
nicely span both worlds.

I don't know how this fits in, but I hear the limeric as an AABA in 12/8
four measures long with the 3 As and 1 B measure. with the B measure being two phrases each one half the length of the A phrase rhythmically.

I can see the phrase being described as three beats long, but not in 3/4. I find that confusing. Instead I could see:

Beat Beat Rime Rest,
Beat Beat Rime Rest,
beat rime, beat rime,
beat beat Rime Rest.

If I understand why, you are doing this to create a model for longer phrases in pop tunes or various other lengths of phrases and different rhyme patterns so I think that a method of describing the phrases has to be universal both to

compound and complex meter as well as to fit into different phrase lenght etc.

That is why I am going to the basic elementary ways of describing the rhythm with Long/short but adding the Rhyme (shortened to Rime as its the same number of characters as beat and rest)

I don't know how my three elements will work or if it will work for all forms you may find but I think some sort of basic simple organization is the best way to attack the rhyming patterns at least until you start to see regular patterns.

I think that you will find recurring and logical patterns although I also think you will have some songs that have unique logical patterns and maybe even a few more art song type of patterns.

As you get more samples, I think that it might be easier to test organizational notation that might work better.

To arrive at my model, I started with

Short short long----
short short long ----
and then it fell apart when the rhyming pattern was cut into half the number of beats.

Then I decided to add the Beat and rhyme words for the third phrase and came up with
beat rime beat rime

and then put it into the final model.

I don't know if this is any help at all, but as I understand more precisely what you are working with, I hope to do better! lol

LJS
element7music.com

Thank you, LJ, your simplification into landmarks such as beats, rimes, rests, and so on is a good one. I'll use that going forward to analyze examples.

One other example I have right now is this little piece of mine: http://voices.azurewebsites.net/my_music/score/limerick_001.png. Bars 1-9 could be interpreted as a limerick in 4/4. I have fitted a limerick to that, and both the lyrical

rhymes and the increased liveliness of the music do give me the impression that the phrase frequency is increasing on the third "line". In bars 1-9 (bar 1 is of course a pickup bar) of that piece, I hear this:

beat beat rime beat
beat beat rime rest
beat rime beat rime
beat beat rime rest

If the model is that a phrase contains one rime, then this matches your analysis of the limerick form in that the rime (or musical emphasis, or stress) comes at the halfway mark in a phrase. Then there's this example:

[*draw the *queen of ][*diamonds, boy * she'll][*beat you *if she's ][*able; * you know the]
[*queen of *hearts is ][*always * your best][*bet. * ][* * Now it]
[*seems to *me some ][*fine things * have been][*laid up-*on your ][*table. * But you]
[*only *want the][*ones that *you can't][*get *][*Des- *]

A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%
A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%

Exiting that chunk of music with a rhyme at the halfway mark sounds correct, and balanced. Ending with a 75% rhyme, I don't know if it would, yet if you consider A and B to be one long unit, then the 75% rhymes come close to 50% of the

composite unit. On the other hand, if A and B really are one unit then the rimeB rhymes are appearing at 75%. Anyway, I was just curious to know if anyone knew the "rules" (aka the common practice and what patterns have been found to work). Understanding
the psychology is not crucial, but would be nice. :)

I'll keep looking at examples as I come across them. But FWIW, a lot of pop songs seem to rhyme right at the border between the end of one phrase and the start of another. That's where my 0% value came from.

Thanks!
Steve

As a related sidelight:

In my music classes when the kids are mostly beginners especially at upper elementary and higher, I would teach them to SolFa on the pentatonic scale and Ta-TiTi Kodaly rhythmic or 1+2+3+4+ notation (depending on the students and how far

along in my elementary studies I were at the time. And I usually taught them music as if they were a composer once they developed basic skills

I had many variations but in general I would have them either individually or in groups, have them select a poem and recite it to a beat. They were free to put the emphasis where they liked but they had to syl-la-bi-cate the poem first and

then practice saying the lyrics as a chant (or a rap depending upon the demographic and student interests.

Then when they knew it, one or some of the students would draw a line over the syllable that landed on the beat. And you can probably figure out the rest. As they did this I also had them put a wavy line or a "Z" when there was a beat without

a syllable. (the wavy line would eventually turn out to be a rest and the Z is just the way the Kodaly kids learn to represent a quarter rest.

Most of their poems wound up to be combinations of quarters and eights so then I went to long/short to get the regular quarter and 8th rhythms in the pboem. WIth the line above the beats, if there was no short/short, that already was the

Kodaly symbol for a Ta or quarter note. and if there was a short short, then they drew a line over the second note and connected the tops and that was the symbol for the TiTi or two eight notes.

The ones that had triplet meters, or syncopation, gave me an excuse to teach them how to vary it to show how to notate it and it worked great. It also allowed me to progress to FORM when they looked at where the rhymes landed and I had them

start to group the phrases into measures and the measures into an actual form chart.

Then for the more advanced students or higher level grades, I would sometimes have them sing pentatonic melodies to the words and notate them in SolFa. I enjoyed it and most of the time, so did the kids.

Your examples just reminded me of that so I thought I would remember and share it with you.

But when left to their own devices almost all the poems turned out to be rhyming at the end of the phrase. Of course with the younger students, all their rhymes were nursery rhymes so most followed the pattern of:

Mary had a little lamb,
Its Fleece was white as SNOW.
Every where that Mary went,
Her lamb was sure to GO.

Most poems seem to follow this same pattern as it has to do with couplets. So I am thinking that couplets might be the center of your investigating how the lyrics are put together.

One thing that I notices when I did the same thing as above with a Blues theme, is that the couplet is the basis of the Blues tunes but the first part of the Couplet is used twice, AA then the second part is the Rhyme that completes the B

part of the couplet. with the A being the question, and the B is the answer and it is in an AAB form for the lyrics and thus the music.

Which brings up the lyrics of the Blues genre. Which are usually AAB but can also have other models as well. Had you thought to put the Blues form and rhyming scheme into your study?

Talk to you more about it later.

LJS

Yes, couplets, good point. So if we say that "Mary" is a two-phrase couplet (instead of four lines of text), which I like btw, then here's how I hear it with just the landmarks shown:

[beat][beat] [beat][beat] [beat][beat] [rime][rest]
[beat][beat] [beat][beat] [beat][beat] [rime][rest]

So that puts the stress spotlight (the lyrical rhyme) at the three-quarter mark through the phrase. That matches Desperado, and Desperado uses same-length phrases, but interleaved couplets. But it doesn't match the limerick (which puts rhymes

at the halfway mark, in two different-length types of phrase). Very interesting. This is what I'd seen, though: 50% and 75% (and 0%) placements. Still don't know why, but I'm happy with the additional examples, and chance to process. :) Btw, I'm also
seeing a tendency in songs to put the musical resolution in the same place as the lyrical rhyme. That may be an obvious practice.

Also, that's very interesting about the Blues form. On my TODO list was an item to do a "detour" analysis of some Blues forms (incl 12-bar). Btw, I don't know what the proper term nor theory is for a "detour", I'm sure there is one, but I just

made that word up. Lemme do a bit of that analysis here, and that should serve to illustrate what I mean by a detour:

So, let's say you've just composed this little bit of music (which, to use the term that you reminded me of, is a couplet):

I
[I] hate to see that [I] evening sun go [I] down. [I] It
[V] makes me think I'm [IV7] on my last go [I] round [I]

It's great, it works. It should: it's just the primary chords in common cadence. But let's say that you now want it to be longer. This is true of lots of songs, you just find that you're resolving, giving up the goods, too early. You want to

hold onto that lovely suspense a bit longer for the enjoyment of the listener. So, you insert a detour (you insert it into the chain so that it fits front and back). And, having added a detour, you rinse and repeat until the music is long and/or
suspenseful enough. In this case, we could begin by adding 8 bars in anticipation of the result being more "even" and balanced, or we could try just adding 4 bars to begin with just to see how that feels.

So let's say we insert a 4-bar detour right at the end of the first line. We can then tweak that last I to an I7 if we like, and a couple other tweaks. And you get this (notice how what we spliced in fits without needing major surgery to what

was already there).

I
[I] hate to see that [I] evening sun go [I] down. [I7] I
[IV] hate to see that [IV] evening sun go [I] down. [I] It
[V] makes me think I'm [IV7] on my last go [I] round [V7]

And that works of course, too, b/c it's a variant of 12-bar blues. The fact that the first two lines share the same melody and lyrics is ok: they have different harmony. The false lyrical rhyme between "down" and "down" doesn't spoil things,

because of that (and because we eventually get a true rhyme). If we make the first two lines identical in harmony, melody, AND lyrics, then that doesn't sound anywhere near as artful (although you'd get away with it if you performed it with enough soul).

So, really, my mental model is that the Blues form example is actually a regular old couplet extended with a 4-bar detour.

-Steve

Oh, and of course, that 12 bar blues example is another one (like the limerick) where the rhymes come at the halfway point in the phrase. I guess what I'm looking for is something like a theory that say "lyrical rhymes and musical resolutions

always come at the 50% mark in a phrase, you just have to look at the phrases in the right way." The theory would have to account for why the phrases in Desperado (for example) appear to be twice as long as the theory requires. :)

Well, some accommodations have to be made for various forms of the songs themselves in the overall sense. You can't compare apples and oranges except in the context of something like Fruits and non fruits. You can't compare forms in the same manner.

If you compare a Sonata Allegro form with the same criteria as a Rondo, even though they may contain some parts that may be related or used in a different way.

By the same token, the Blues is a specific form as is a limerick, as is the AB or ABAB form of Mary had a....

IT would be cool if there were written or it would be cool to write some poetry that would merge the three mentioned into something like a Rondo or Sonata-Allegro form and set it to music, but I don't know of any that would actually do that. (hmm,

it could be an interesting project to arrange multi form poetry rhymes into a Rondo and see how it plays out}

But the Form, with poetry would have to have different classifications based upon the rhyming schemes. i.e. Couplets, Limericks, Blues for example. AND your study may come up with additional forms based upon your research and methods of analysis.

At this moment, Christmas AM, I can't think of any others but they must exist someplace. (Merry Christmas btw)

Have you looked into the arrangements of rhyming schemes in something like the Shakespeare Sonnets)

Oh, have to go. Just heard reindeer footsteps on our roof. Time for family Santa time.

Later.
LJSe

Merry Christmas, LJ, and all at rec.music.theory! :)

Re: sonnets, yes I did jot down some thoughts about them a couple weeks ago, but that was to examine their meter rather than their rhymes. Here's a copy-paste of my notes (these should be best viewed in a monospace font, btw, so copying this stuff

into Notepad should do the trick).

Finish with some thoughts on Iambic pentameter. A good example of iambic pentemeter is Shakespeare's twelfth sonnet, which is usually read like this, with just a short pause of arbitrary length between lines.

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM
When I do count the clock that tells the time,

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM
And see the brave day sunk in hid'eous night;

This is of course classic verse, and great stuff, and there's even some music to the series of five pulses (two syllables per pulse), which are known as iambs. But, if it were music, then I think it would defy the intuition of the listener. And, a

band trying to play it would be driven crazy by its lack of any consistent and predictable protocol for dividing up time. I can think of three ways in which iambic pentameter like this could be made playable as music.

[2]
When

[1 2][1 2] [1 2] [1 2] [1 2][1 2][1 2][1 2]
I do count the clock that tells the time, and

The first way is this example above, which uses two beats per bar. And that agrees with the iambs in the original version. Notice how using a pickup beat for "When", and moving "and" to the end of the previous line, means we still have the stress on

the first beat. There are eight bars to the line here (but still only five iambs of syllables, so this is not octameter), with the pivot in the same place we always see it: right in the center of the phrase. The price we pay for that is marking time for
a good few beats, but that's not a problem: it's a very common practice in popular songs. Two beats per bar isn't extremely common, though, so let's try four.

[4]
When

[1 2 3 4] [1 2 3 4] [1 2 3 4][1 2 3 4]
I do count the clock that tells the time, and

This is the second way. The only real difference between this treatment and the previous one is that the number of times we stress a word per line goes down from five to three.

[Aside: we could actually bump that number up to four by making use of that unused beat 1 in bar 4. And, for all we know, Shakespeare meant this to be in 4/4 and he might have tried a nice "Hey!" on that very beat. But he probably decided it

interfered too much with the gravitas of the sonnet. ;)]

But in any case, I would hazard a guess that for every person who prefers the esthetics of the iambic version, at least as many would prefer the esthetics of the stress-per-four-beats version. I think I do.

A third way of setting iambic pentameter to music is to give it two beats per bar but eliminate the arbitrary (although, natural) pause at the end of lines. The musicians would be fine with that, but the singer would have no place to breathe in an

endless stream of syllables. Also, I suspect some listeners would find the grouping of bars in fives to be unusual enough that it'd interfere with their enjoyment. On the other hand, we could look to Paul Desmond's "Take Five" for a counter-argument.
That's a very well-known jazz piece in 5/4 time that has a huge and adoring audience (myself included). Grouping beats into fives is certainly unusual, and defies our intuition built from marching and dancing to music, but it's certainly something you
can develop a liking for. So maybe that's true of grouping bars into fives, too.

If I am reading this correctly, you are putting it to meter but with interpretation. That is OK but for the purposes of classification, I don't see the rhyming scheme in any way I can relate it to the topic of discussion. By that I mean, How are the

lines arranged according to the rhyming schemes? Wouldn't you need several lines to see if there is a pattern? or some comparison of form?

Maybe there is not a rhyming scheme, in which case, there would not be a way to use them in the rhyming scheme analysis. Am I missing something?

ljs

You're right, I wandered away from the strict topic of lyrical rhyming there. However, I do feel that getting a proper understanding and model of (the hierarchy of) time units themselves (in both music and verse) is a prerequisite to developing a model
of the time unit at which rhymes should occur. :) I just pasted that in because that was the only thing that I had on sonnets. However, what I pasted in is perhaps in the service of my original question because it does support the 50% theory. You can see
the rhyming scheme in the first 4 lines of sonnet 12:

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white;

If you subscribe to my meter interpretations then, as I say above, "the pivot [is] in the same place we always see it: right in the center of the phrase." I was using a different term ("pivot") a couple weeks ago, but that's the "crisis" or "stress point"
or "rhyming point" or whatever that I talk about in this thread. And here it's at 50% of the way through the phrase as we've seen in several examples now. Note that, whether each pair of lines rhymes or each alternate line rhymes, I'm not focusing on. I'
m focusing on the pivot, or crisis, or spotlight in a phrase where the lyrical rhyme and/or musical effect (e.g. resolution) has greatest effect.

But this thread's been great, I'm seeing some interesting commonality between examples, even if I don't yet have the grand universal theory I'm after. :)

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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On Friday, December 25, 2015 at 6:23:11 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Friday, December 25, 2015 at 7:26:01 AM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Thursday, December 24, 2015 at 8:33:22 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Thursday, December 24, 2015 at 6:11:21 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Wednesday, December 23, 2015 at 7:07:03 PM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Wednesday, December 23, 2015 at 6:43:37 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Tuesday, December 22, 2015 at 3:03:59 PM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 9:11:18 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 6:12:41 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

If you put a limerick to music, you might end up with something that feels like this (two phrases of four bars of 3/4. Then two phrases of two bars, etc):

1 2 *3* 4
1 2 *3* 4
1 *2*
3 *4*
1 2 *3* 4

Looking at it that way, the lyrical rhymes always come at 50% of the way through a phrase. You'd put the musical punctuation there, too (e.g. the resolution back to I on the *3* of the last line. But is that the right mental model? Or

do these rhymes/crises actually come at the start of a phrase? If so then a musical limerick really looks like this (four phrases of two bars of 3/4. Then four phrases of one bar, etc, where a rhyme always begins alternate phrases):

1 2
*1* 2
1 2
*1* 2
1
*1*
1
*1*
1 2
*1* 2

Thanks!
Steve

I should explain why I'm asking. I'm trying to develop a model of the current practice (particularly in pop songs) of where lyrical rhymes (and musical rhymes, including resolutions) tend to go with respect to time units. Getting a proper

understanding of (the hierarchy of) time units themselves is of course critical to this, and I'm not sure I'm even there, yet. But in looking closely at a bunch of songs, I am glimpsing vague patterns that these "crises", or inflection points, occur at 0%
, 50%, and 75& of the way through what I believe to be a "phrase" (a musical phrase; not necessarily a lyrical one). I've also been looking into prosody with little success, but I used the limerick form in my question because it seems to nicely span both
worlds.

I don't know how this fits in, but I hear the limeric as an AABA in 12/8
four measures long with the 3 As and 1 B measure. with the B measure being two phrases each one half the length of the A phrase rhythmically.

I can see the phrase being described as three beats long, but not in 3/4. I find that confusing. Instead I could see:

Beat Beat Rime Rest,
Beat Beat Rime Rest,
beat rime, beat rime,
beat beat Rime Rest.

If I understand why, you are doing this to create a model for longer phrases in pop tunes or various other lengths of phrases and different rhyme patterns so I think that a method of describing the phrases has to be universal both to

compound and complex meter as well as to fit into different phrase lenght etc.

That is why I am going to the basic elementary ways of describing the rhythm with Long/short but adding the Rhyme (shortened to Rime as its the same number of characters as beat and rest)

I don't know how my three elements will work or if it will work for all forms you may find but I think some sort of basic simple organization is the best way to attack the rhyming patterns at least until you start to see regular patterns. I

think that you will find recurring and logical patterns although I also think you will have some songs that have unique logical patterns and maybe even a few more art song type of patterns.

As you get more samples, I think that it might be easier to test organizational notation that might work better.

To arrive at my model, I started with

Short short long----
short short long ----
and then it fell apart when the rhyming pattern was cut into half the number of beats.

Then I decided to add the Beat and rhyme words for the third phrase and came up with
beat rime beat rime

and then put it into the final model.

I don't know if this is any help at all, but as I understand more precisely what you are working with, I hope to do better! lol

LJS
element7music.com

Thank you, LJ, your simplification into landmarks such as beats, rimes, rests, and so on is a good one. I'll use that going forward to analyze examples.

One other example I have right now is this little piece of mine: http://voices.azurewebsites.net/my_music/score/limerick_001.png. Bars 1-9 could be interpreted as a limerick in 4/4. I have fitted a limerick to that, and both the lyrical

rhymes and the increased liveliness of the music do give me the impression that the phrase frequency is increasing on the third "line". In bars 1-9 (bar 1 is of course a pickup bar) of that piece, I hear this:

beat beat rime beat
beat beat rime rest
beat rime beat rime
beat beat rime rest

If the model is that a phrase contains one rime, then this matches your analysis of the limerick form in that the rime (or musical emphasis, or stress) comes at the halfway mark in a phrase. Then there's this example:

[*draw the *queen of ][*diamonds, boy * she'll][*beat you *if she's ][*able; * you know the]
[*queen of *hearts is ][*always * your best][*bet. * ][* * Now it] [*seems to *me some ][*fine things * have been][*laid up-*on your ][*table. * But you]
[*only *want the][*ones that *you can't][*get *][*Des- *]

A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%
A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%

Exiting that chunk of music with a rhyme at the halfway mark sounds correct, and balanced. Ending with a 75% rhyme, I don't know if it would, yet if you consider A and B to be one long unit, then the 75% rhymes come close to 50% of the

composite unit. On the other hand, if A and B really are one unit then the rimeB rhymes are appearing at 75%. Anyway, I was just curious to know if anyone knew the "rules" (aka the common practice and what patterns have been found to work). Understanding
the psychology is not crucial, but would be nice. :)

I'll keep looking at examples as I come across them. But FWIW, a lot of pop songs seem to rhyme right at the border between the end of one phrase and the start of another. That's where my 0% value came from.

Thanks!
Steve

As a related sidelight:

In my music classes when the kids are mostly beginners especially at upper elementary and higher, I would teach them to SolFa on the pentatonic scale and Ta-TiTi Kodaly rhythmic or 1+2+3+4+ notation (depending on the students and how far along

in my elementary studies I were at the time. And I usually taught them music as if they were a composer once they developed basic skills

I had many variations but in general I would have them either individually or in groups, have them select a poem and recite it to a beat. They were free to put the emphasis where they liked but they had to syl-la-bi-cate the poem first and then

practice saying the lyrics as a chant (or a rap depending upon the demographic and student interests.

Then when they knew it, one or some of the students would draw a line over the syllable that landed on the beat. And you can probably figure out the rest. As they did this I also had them put a wavy line or a "Z" when there was a beat without a

syllable. (the wavy line would eventually turn out to be a rest and the Z is just the way the Kodaly kids learn to represent a quarter rest.

Most of their poems wound up to be combinations of quarters and eights so then I went to long/short to get the regular quarter and 8th rhythms in the pboem. WIth the line above the beats, if there was no short/short, that already was the Kodaly

symbol for a Ta or quarter note. and if there was a short short, then they drew a line over the second note and connected the tops and that was the symbol for the TiTi or two eight notes.

The ones that had triplet meters, or syncopation, gave me an excuse to teach them how to vary it to show how to notate it and it worked great. It also allowed me to progress to FORM when they looked at where the rhymes landed and I had them

start to group the phrases into measures and the measures into an actual form chart.

Then for the more advanced students or higher level grades, I would sometimes have them sing pentatonic melodies to the words and notate them in SolFa. I enjoyed it and most of the time, so did the kids.

Your examples just reminded me of that so I thought I would remember and share it with you.

But when left to their own devices almost all the poems turned out to be rhyming at the end of the phrase. Of course with the younger students, all their rhymes were nursery rhymes so most followed the pattern of:

Mary had a little lamb,
Its Fleece was white as SNOW.
Every where that Mary went,
Her lamb was sure to GO.

Most poems seem to follow this same pattern as it has to do with couplets. So I am thinking that couplets might be the center of your investigating how the lyrics are put together.

One thing that I notices when I did the same thing as above with a Blues theme, is that the couplet is the basis of the Blues tunes but the first part of the Couplet is used twice, AA then the second part is the Rhyme that completes the B part

of the couplet. with the A being the question, and the B is the answer and it is in an AAB form for the lyrics and thus the music.

Which brings up the lyrics of the Blues genre. Which are usually AAB but can also have other models as well. Had you thought to put the Blues form and rhyming scheme into your study?

Talk to you more about it later.

LJS

Yes, couplets, good point. So if we say that "Mary" is a two-phrase couplet (instead of four lines of text), which I like btw, then here's how I hear it with just the landmarks shown:

[beat][beat] [beat][beat] [beat][beat] [rime][rest]
[beat][beat] [beat][beat] [beat][beat] [rime][rest]

So that puts the stress spotlight (the lyrical rhyme) at the three-quarter mark through the phrase. That matches Desperado, and Desperado uses same-length phrases, but interleaved couplets. But it doesn't match the limerick (which puts rhymes at

the halfway mark, in two different-length types of phrase). Very interesting. This is what I'd seen, though: 50% and 75% (and 0%) placements. Still don't know why, but I'm happy with the additional examples, and chance to process. :) Btw, I'm also seeing
a tendency in songs to put the musical resolution in the same place as the lyrical rhyme. That may be an obvious practice.

Also, that's very interesting about the Blues form. On my TODO list was an item to do a "detour" analysis of some Blues forms (incl 12-bar). Btw, I don't know what the proper term nor theory is for a "detour", I'm sure there is one, but I just

made that word up. Lemme do a bit of that analysis here, and that should serve to illustrate what I mean by a detour:

So, let's say you've just composed this little bit of music (which, to use the term that you reminded me of, is a couplet):

I
[I] hate to see that [I] evening sun go [I] down. [I] It
[V] makes me think I'm [IV7] on my last go [I] round [I]

It's great, it works. It should: it's just the primary chords in common cadence. But let's say that you now want it to be longer. This is true of lots of songs, you just find that you're resolving, giving up the goods, too early. You want to hold

onto that lovely suspense a bit longer for the enjoyment of the listener. So, you insert a detour (you insert it into the chain so that it fits front and back). And, having added a detour, you rinse and repeat until the music is long and/or suspenseful
enough. In this case, we could begin by adding 8 bars in anticipation of the result being more "even" and balanced, or we could try just adding 4 bars to begin with just to see how that feels.

So let's say we insert a 4-bar detour right at the end of the first line. We can then tweak that last I to an I7 if we like, and a couple other tweaks. And you get this (notice how what we spliced in fits without needing major surgery to what was

already there).

I
[I] hate to see that [I] evening sun go [I] down. [I7] I
[IV] hate to see that [IV] evening sun go [I] down. [I] It
[V] makes me think I'm [IV7] on my last go [I] round [V7]

And that works of course, too, b/c it's a variant of 12-bar blues. The fact that the first two lines share the same melody and lyrics is ok: they have different harmony. The false lyrical rhyme between "down" and "down" doesn't spoil things,

because of that (and because we eventually get a true rhyme). If we make the first two lines identical in harmony, melody, AND lyrics, then that doesn't sound anywhere near as artful (although you'd get away with it if you performed it with enough soul).

So, really, my mental model is that the Blues form example is actually a regular old couplet extended with a 4-bar detour.

-Steve

Oh, and of course, that 12 bar blues example is another one (like the limerick) where the rhymes come at the halfway point in the phrase. I guess what I'm looking for is something like a theory that say "lyrical rhymes and musical resolutions

always come at the 50% mark in a phrase, you just have to look at the phrases in the right way." The theory would have to account for why the phrases in Desperado (for example) appear to be twice as long as the theory requires. :)

Well, some accommodations have to be made for various forms of the songs themselves in the overall sense. You can't compare apples and oranges except in the context of something like Fruits and non fruits. You can't compare forms in the same manner.

If you compare a Sonata Allegro form with the same criteria as a Rondo, even though they may contain some parts that may be related or used in a different way.

By the same token, the Blues is a specific form as is a limerick, as is the AB or ABAB form of Mary had a....

IT would be cool if there were written or it would be cool to write some poetry that would merge the three mentioned into something like a Rondo or Sonata-Allegro form and set it to music, but I don't know of any that would actually do that. (hmm, it

could be an interesting project to arrange multi form poetry rhymes into a Rondo and see how it plays out}

But the Form, with poetry would have to have different classifications based upon the rhyming schemes. i.e. Couplets, Limericks, Blues for example. AND your study may come up with additional forms based upon your research and methods of analysis. At

this moment, Christmas AM, I can't think of any others but they must exist someplace. (Merry Christmas btw)

Have you looked into the arrangements of rhyming schemes in something like the Shakespeare Sonnets)

Oh, have to go. Just heard reindeer footsteps on our roof. Time for family Santa time.

Later.
LJSe

Merry Christmas, LJ, and all at rec.music.theory! :)

Re: sonnets, yes I did jot down some thoughts about them a couple weeks ago, but that was to examine their meter rather than their rhymes. Here's a copy-paste of my notes (these should be best viewed in a monospace font, btw, so copying this stuff into

Notepad should do the trick).

Finish with some thoughts on Iambic pentameter. A good example of iambic pentemeter is Shakespeare's twelfth sonnet, which is usually read like this, with just a short pause of arbitrary length between lines.

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM
When I do count the clock that tells the time,

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM
And see the brave day sunk in hid'eous night;

This is of course classic verse, and great stuff, and there's even some music to the series of five pulses (two syllables per pulse), which are known as iambs. But, if it were music, then I think it would defy the intuition of the listener. And, a band

trying to play it would be driven crazy by its lack of any consistent and predictable protocol for dividing up time. I can think of three ways in which iambic pentameter like this could be made playable as music.

[2]
When

[1 2][1 2] [1 2] [1 2] [1 2][1 2][1 2][1 2]
I do count the clock that tells the time, and

The first way is this example above, which uses two beats per bar. And that agrees with the iambs in the original version. Notice how using a pickup beat for "When", and moving "and" to the end of the previous line, means we still have the stress on

the first beat. There are eight bars to the line here (but still only five iambs of syllables, so this is not octameter), with the pivot in the same place we always see it: right in the center of the phrase. The price we pay for that is marking time for
a good few beats, but that's not a problem: it's a very common practice in popular songs. Two beats per bar isn't extremely common, though, so let's try four.

[4]
When

[1 2 3 4] [1 2 3 4] [1 2 3 4][1 2 3 4]
I do count the clock that tells the time, and

This is the second way. The only real difference between this treatment and the previous one is that the number of times we stress a word per line goes down from five to three.

[Aside: we could actually bump that number up to four by making use of that unused beat 1 in bar 4. And, for all we know, Shakespeare meant this to be in 4/4 and he might have tried a nice "Hey!" on that very beat. But he probably decided it interfered

too much with the gravitas of the sonnet. ;)]

But in any case, I would hazard a guess that for every person who prefers the esthetics of the iambic version, at least as many would prefer the esthetics of the stress-per-four-beats version. I think I do.

A third way of setting iambic pentameter to music is to give it two beats per bar but eliminate the arbitrary (although, natural) pause at the end of lines. The musicians would be fine with that, but the singer would have no place to breathe in an

endless stream of syllables. Also, I suspect some listeners would find the grouping of bars in fives to be unusual enough that it'd interfere with their enjoyment. On the other hand, we could look to Paul Desmond's "Take Five" for a counter-argument.
That's a very well-known jazz piece in 5/4 time that has a huge and adoring audience (myself included). Grouping beats into fives is certainly unusual, and defies our intuition built from marching and dancing to music, but it's certainly something you
can develop a liking for. So maybe that's true of grouping bars into fives, too.

If I am reading this correctly, you are putting it to meter but with interpretation. That is OK but for the purposes of classification, I don't see the rhyming scheme in any way I can relate it to the topic of discussion. By that I mean, How are the
lines arranged according to the rhyming schemes? Wouldn't you need several lines to see if there is a pattern? or some comparison of form?

Maybe there is not a rhyming scheme, in which case, there would not be a way to use them in the rhyming scheme analysis. Am I missing something?

ljs

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Saturday, December 26, 2015 at 6:11:56 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Saturday, December 26, 2015 at 4:03:11 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Saturday, December 26, 2015 at 10:28:10 AM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Friday, December 25, 2015 at 6:23:11 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Friday, December 25, 2015 at 7:26:01 AM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Thursday, December 24, 2015 at 8:33:22 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Thursday, December 24, 2015 at 6:11:21 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Wednesday, December 23, 2015 at 7:07:03 PM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Wednesday, December 23, 2015 at 6:43:37 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Tuesday, December 22, 2015 at 3:03:59 PM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 9:11:18 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 6:12:41 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

If you put a limerick to music, you might end up with something that feels like this (two phrases of four bars of 3/4. Then two phrases of two bars, etc):

1 2 *3* 4
1 2 *3* 4
1 *2*
3 *4*
1 2 *3* 4

Looking at it that way, the lyrical rhymes always come at 50% of the way through a phrase. You'd put the musical punctuation there, too (e.g. the resolution back to I on the *3* of the last line. But is that the right mental model?

Or do these rhymes/crises actually come at the start of a phrase? If so then a musical limerick really looks like this (four phrases of two bars of 3/4. Then four phrases of one bar, etc, where a rhyme always begins alternate phrases):

1 2
*1* 2
1 2
*1* 2
1
*1*
1
*1*
1 2
*1* 2

Thanks!
Steve

I should explain why I'm asking. I'm trying to develop a model of the current practice (particularly in pop songs) of where lyrical rhymes (and musical rhymes, including resolutions) tend to go with respect to time units. Getting a

proper understanding of (the hierarchy of) time units themselves is of course critical to this, and I'm not sure I'm even there, yet. But in looking closely at a bunch of songs, I am glimpsing vague patterns that these "crises", or inflection points,
occur at 0%, 50%, and 75& of the way through what I believe to be a "phrase" (a musical phrase; not necessarily a lyrical one). I've also been looking into prosody with little success, but I used the limerick form in my question because it seems to
nicely span both worlds.

I don't know how this fits in, but I hear the limeric as an AABA in 12/8
four measures long with the 3 As and 1 B measure. with the B measure being two phrases each one half the length of the A phrase rhythmically.

I can see the phrase being described as three beats long, but not in 3/4. I find that confusing. Instead I could see:

Beat Beat Rime Rest,
Beat Beat Rime Rest,
beat rime, beat rime,
beat beat Rime Rest.

If I understand why, you are doing this to create a model for longer phrases in pop tunes or various other lengths of phrases and different rhyme patterns so I think that a method of describing the phrases has to be universal both to

compound and complex meter as well as to fit into different phrase lenght etc.

That is why I am going to the basic elementary ways of describing the rhythm with Long/short but adding the Rhyme (shortened to Rime as its the same number of characters as beat and rest)

I don't know how my three elements will work or if it will work for all forms you may find but I think some sort of basic simple organization is the best way to attack the rhyming patterns at least until you start to see regular

patterns. I think that you will find recurring and logical patterns although I also think you will have some songs that have unique logical patterns and maybe even a few more art song type of patterns.

As you get more samples, I think that it might be easier to test organizational notation that might work better.

To arrive at my model, I started with

Short short long----
short short long ----
and then it fell apart when the rhyming pattern was cut into half the number of beats.

Then I decided to add the Beat and rhyme words for the third phrase and came up with
beat rime beat rime

and then put it into the final model.

I don't know if this is any help at all, but as I understand more precisely what you are working with, I hope to do better! lol

LJS
element7music.com

Thank you, LJ, your simplification into landmarks such as beats, rimes, rests, and so on is a good one. I'll use that going forward to analyze examples.

One other example I have right now is this little piece of mine: http://voices.azurewebsites.net/my_music/score/limerick_001.png. Bars 1-9 could be interpreted as a limerick in 4/4. I have fitted a limerick to that, and both the lyrical

rhymes and the increased liveliness of the music do give me the impression that the phrase frequency is increasing on the third "line". In bars 1-9 (bar 1 is of course a pickup bar) of that piece, I hear this:

beat beat rime beat
beat beat rime rest
beat rime beat rime
beat beat rime rest

If the model is that a phrase contains one rime, then this matches your analysis of the limerick form in that the rime (or musical emphasis, or stress) comes at the halfway mark in a phrase. Then there's this example:

[*draw the *queen of ][*diamonds, boy * she'll][*beat you *if she's ][*able; * you know the]
[*queen of *hearts is ][*always * your best][*bet. * ][* * Now it]
[*seems to *me some ][*fine things * have been][*laid up-*on your ][*table. * But you]
[*only *want the][*ones that *you can't][*get *][*Des- *]

A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%
A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%

Exiting that chunk of music with a rhyme at the halfway mark sounds correct, and balanced. Ending with a 75% rhyme, I don't know if it would, yet if you consider A and B to be one long unit, then the 75% rhymes come close to 50% of the

composite unit. On the other hand, if A and B really are one unit then the rimeB rhymes are appearing at 75%. Anyway, I was just curious to know if anyone knew the "rules" (aka the common practice and what patterns have been found to work). Understanding
the psychology is not crucial, but would be nice. :)

I'll keep looking at examples as I come across them. But FWIW, a lot of pop songs seem to rhyme right at the border between the end of one phrase and the start of another. That's where my 0% value came from.

Thanks!
Steve

As a related sidelight:

In my music classes when the kids are mostly beginners especially at upper elementary and higher, I would teach them to SolFa on the pentatonic scale and Ta-TiTi Kodaly rhythmic or 1+2+3+4+ notation (depending on the students and how far

along in my elementary studies I were at the time. And I usually taught them music as if they were a composer once they developed basic skills

I had many variations but in general I would have them either individually or in groups, have them select a poem and recite it to a beat. They were free to put the emphasis where they liked but they had to syl-la-bi-cate the poem first

and then practice saying the lyrics as a chant (or a rap depending upon the demographic and student interests.

Then when they knew it, one or some of the students would draw a line over the syllable that landed on the beat. And you can probably figure out the rest. As they did this I also had them put a wavy line or a "Z" when there was a beat

without a syllable. (the wavy line would eventually turn out to be a rest and the Z is just the way the Kodaly kids learn to represent a quarter rest.

Most of their poems wound up to be combinations of quarters and eights so then I went to long/short to get the regular quarter and 8th rhythms in the pboem. WIth the line above the beats, if there was no short/short, that already was the

Kodaly symbol for a Ta or quarter note. and if there was a short short, then they drew a line over the second note and connected the tops and that was the symbol for the TiTi or two eight notes.

The ones that had triplet meters, or syncopation, gave me an excuse to teach them how to vary it to show how to notate it and it worked great. It also allowed me to progress to FORM when they looked at where the rhymes landed and I had

them start to group the phrases into measures and the measures into an actual form chart.

Then for the more advanced students or higher level grades, I would sometimes have them sing pentatonic melodies to the words and notate them in SolFa. I enjoyed it and most of the time, so did the kids.

Your examples just reminded me of that so I thought I would remember and share it with you.

But when left to their own devices almost all the poems turned out to be rhyming at the end of the phrase. Of course with the younger students, all their rhymes were nursery rhymes so most followed the pattern of:

Mary had a little lamb,
Its Fleece was white as SNOW.
Every where that Mary went,
Her lamb was sure to GO.

Most poems seem to follow this same pattern as it has to do with couplets. So I am thinking that couplets might be the center of your investigating how the lyrics are put together.

One thing that I notices when I did the same thing as above with a Blues theme, is that the couplet is the basis of the Blues tunes but the first part of the Couplet is used twice, AA then the second part is the Rhyme that completes the B

part of the couplet. with the A being the question, and the B is the answer and it is in an AAB form for the lyrics and thus the music.

Which brings up the lyrics of the Blues genre. Which are usually AAB but can also have other models as well. Had you thought to put the Blues form and rhyming scheme into your study?

Talk to you more about it later.

LJS

Yes, couplets, good point. So if we say that "Mary" is a two-phrase couplet (instead of four lines of text), which I like btw, then here's how I hear it with just the landmarks shown:

[beat][beat] [beat][beat] [beat][beat] [rime][rest]
[beat][beat] [beat][beat] [beat][beat] [rime][rest]

So that puts the stress spotlight (the lyrical rhyme) at the three-quarter mark through the phrase. That matches Desperado, and Desperado uses same-length phrases, but interleaved couplets. But it doesn't match the limerick (which puts

rhymes at the halfway mark, in two different-length types of phrase). Very interesting. This is what I'd seen, though: 50% and 75% (and 0%) placements. Still don't know why, but I'm happy with the additional examples, and chance to process. :) Btw, I'm
also seeing a tendency in songs to put the musical resolution in the same place as the lyrical rhyme. That may be an obvious practice.

Also, that's very interesting about the Blues form. On my TODO list was an item to do a "detour" analysis of some Blues forms (incl 12-bar). Btw, I don't know what the proper term nor theory is for a "detour", I'm sure there is one, but I

just made that word up. Lemme do a bit of that analysis here, and that should serve to illustrate what I mean by a detour:

So, let's say you've just composed this little bit of music (which, to use the term that you reminded me of, is a couplet):

I
[I] hate to see that [I] evening sun go [I] down. [I] It
[V] makes me think I'm [IV7] on my last go [I] round [I]

It's great, it works. It should: it's just the primary chords in common cadence. But let's say that you now want it to be longer. This is true of lots of songs, you just find that you're resolving, giving up the goods, too early. You want

to hold onto that lovely suspense a bit longer for the enjoyment of the listener. So, you insert a detour (you insert it into the chain so that it fits front and back). And, having added a detour, you rinse and repeat until the music is long and/or
suspenseful enough. In this case, we could begin by adding 8 bars in anticipation of the result being more "even" and balanced, or we could try just adding 4 bars to begin with just to see how that feels.

So let's say we insert a 4-bar detour right at the end of the first line. We can then tweak that last I to an I7 if we like, and a couple other tweaks. And you get this (notice how what we spliced in fits without needing major surgery to

what was already there).

I
[I] hate to see that [I] evening sun go [I] down. [I7] I
[IV] hate to see that [IV] evening sun go [I] down. [I] It
[V] makes me think I'm [IV7] on my last go [I] round [V7]

And that works of course, too, b/c it's a variant of 12-bar blues. The fact that the first two lines share the same melody and lyrics is ok: they have different harmony. The false lyrical rhyme between "down" and "down" doesn't spoil things,

because of that (and because we eventually get a true rhyme). If we make the first two lines identical in harmony, melody, AND lyrics, then that doesn't sound anywhere near as artful (although you'd get away with it if you performed it with enough soul).

So, really, my mental model is that the Blues form example is actually a regular old couplet extended with a 4-bar detour.

-Steve

Oh, and of course, that 12 bar blues example is another one (like the limerick) where the rhymes come at the halfway point in the phrase. I guess what I'm looking for is something like a theory that say "lyrical rhymes and musical resolutions

always come at the 50% mark in a phrase, you just have to look at the phrases in the right way." The theory would have to account for why the phrases in Desperado (for example) appear to be twice as long as the theory requires. :)

Well, some accommodations have to be made for various forms of the songs themselves in the overall sense. You can't compare apples and oranges except in the context of something like Fruits and non fruits. You can't compare forms in the same

manner. If you compare a Sonata Allegro form with the same criteria as a Rondo, even though they may contain some parts that may be related or used in a different way.

By the same token, the Blues is a specific form as is a limerick, as is the AB or ABAB form of Mary had a....

IT would be cool if there were written or it would be cool to write some poetry that would merge the three mentioned into something like a Rondo or Sonata-Allegro form and set it to music, but I don't know of any that would actually do that. (

hmm, it could be an interesting project to arrange multi form poetry rhymes into a Rondo and see how it plays out}

But the Form, with poetry would have to have different classifications based upon the rhyming schemes. i.e. Couplets, Limericks, Blues for example. AND your study may come up with additional forms based upon your research and methods of

analysis. At this moment, Christmas AM, I can't think of any others but they must exist someplace. (Merry Christmas btw)

Have you looked into the arrangements of rhyming schemes in something like the Shakespeare Sonnets)

Oh, have to go. Just heard reindeer footsteps on our roof. Time for family Santa time.

Later.
LJSe

Merry Christmas, LJ, and all at rec.music.theory! :)

Re: sonnets, yes I did jot down some thoughts about them a couple weeks ago, but that was to examine their meter rather than their rhymes. Here's a copy-paste of my notes (these should be best viewed in a monospace font, btw, so copying this

stuff into Notepad should do the trick).

Finish with some thoughts on Iambic pentameter. A good example of iambic pentemeter is Shakespeare's twelfth sonnet, which is usually read like this, with just a short pause of arbitrary length between lines.

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM
When I do count the clock that tells the time,

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM
And see the brave day sunk in hid'eous night;

This is of course classic verse, and great stuff, and there's even some music to the series of five pulses (two syllables per pulse), which are known as iambs. But, if it were music, then I think it would defy the intuition of the listener. And,

a band trying to play it would be driven crazy by its lack of any consistent and predictable protocol for dividing up time. I can think of three ways in which iambic pentameter like this could be made playable as music.

[2]
When

[1 2][1 2] [1 2] [1 2] [1 2][1 2][1 2][1 2]
I do count the clock that tells the time, and

The first way is this example above, which uses two beats per bar. And that agrees with the iambs in the original version. Notice how using a pickup beat for "When", and moving "and" to the end of the previous line, means we still have the stress

on the first beat. There are eight bars to the line here (but still only five iambs of syllables, so this is not octameter), with the pivot in the same place we always see it: right in the center of the phrase. The price we pay for that is marking time
for a good few beats, but that's not a problem: it's a very common practice in popular songs. Two beats per bar isn't extremely common, though, so let's try four.

[4]
When

[1 2 3 4] [1 2 3 4] [1 2 3 4][1 2 3 4]
I do count the clock that tells the time, and

This is the second way. The only real difference between this treatment and the previous one is that the number of times we stress a word per line goes down from five to three.

[Aside: we could actually bump that number up to four by making use of that unused beat 1 in bar 4. And, for all we know, Shakespeare meant this to be in 4/4 and he might have tried a nice "Hey!" on that very beat. But he probably decided it

interfered too much with the gravitas of the sonnet. ;)]

But in any case, I would hazard a guess that for every person who prefers the esthetics of the iambic version, at least as many would prefer the esthetics of the stress-per-four-beats version. I think I do.

A third way of setting iambic pentameter to music is to give it two beats per bar but eliminate the arbitrary (although, natural) pause at the end of lines. The musicians would be fine with that, but the singer would have no place to breathe in

an endless stream of syllables. Also, I suspect some listeners would find the grouping of bars in fives to be unusual enough that it'd interfere with their enjoyment. On the other hand, we could look to Paul Desmond's "Take Five" for a counter-argument.
That's a very well-known jazz piece in 5/4 time that has a huge and adoring audience (myself included). Grouping beats into fives is certainly unusual, and defies our intuition built from marching and dancing to music, but it's certainly something you
can develop a liking for. So maybe that's true of grouping bars into fives, too.

If I am reading this correctly, you are putting it to meter but with interpretation. That is OK but for the purposes of classification, I don't see the rhyming scheme in any way I can relate it to the topic of discussion. By that I mean, How are

the lines arranged according to the rhyming schemes? Wouldn't you need several lines to see if there is a pattern? or some comparison of form?

Maybe there is not a rhyming scheme, in which case, there would not be a way to use them in the rhyming scheme analysis. Am I missing something?

ljs

You're right, I wandered away from the strict topic of lyrical rhyming there. However, I do feel that getting a proper understanding and model of (the hierarchy of) time units themselves (in both music and verse) is a prerequisite to developing a

model of the time unit at which rhymes should occur. :) I just pasted that in because that was the only thing that I had on sonnets. However, what I pasted in is perhaps in the service of my original question because it does support the 50% theory. You
can see the rhyming scheme in the first 4 lines of sonnet 12:

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white;

If you subscribe to my meter interpretations then, as I say above, "the pivot [is] in the same place we always see it: right in the center of the phrase." I was using a different term ("pivot") a couple weeks ago, but that's the "crisis" or "stress

point" or "rhyming point" or whatever that I talk about in this thread. And here it's at 50% of the way through the phrase as we've seen in several examples now. Note that, whether each pair of lines rhymes or each alternate line rhymes, I'm not focusing
on. I'm focusing on the pivot, or crisis, or spotlight in a phrase where the lyrical rhyme and/or musical effect (e.g. resolution) has greatest effect.

But this thread's been great, I'm seeing some interesting commonality between examples, even if I don't yet have the grand universal theory I'm after. :)

Lemme just underline that thought, again, because I do feel that this is important. During my recent efforts to answer my question, I kept coming across things that said "rhymes appear at the ends of lines". That does seem to be the common belief and

yet it doesn't seem to be true. When you write out a poem or a song then, yes, rhymes do often appear at the end of lines of text. But the text and the beats of music don't match 1:1. If you only write down lyrics with respect to the text, then you also
put line breaks in the wrong place with respect to the bars, too. So looking at text is a poor tool for understanding rhythm and rhyme; that seems plain. All the examples I've given above are meant to show how to write down the text with respect to the
rhythm, and then see where the rhymes/effects appear. And, despite folks saying that limericks and sonnets (etc) rhyme at the end of the line (which a naive glance at a limerick, or the four lines of sonnet above would suggest), in fact they rhyme at the
50% mark of the "line" if you recognize that a big chunk of the "line" is silent. I find that really interesting, and I didn't come across anything that pointed that fact out in my research travels, but of course maybe I didn't travel to the right places.
:) But that's why I came here. :)

It might be wise to switch to different composers who composed Art Songs. It will give a more specific example of how the musical application of your topic. At least you will have a finite definitive model to compare with other songs of the same and of
different composers. When doing a study, the fewer variables the better, and when you start to interpret the model, that is an outside influence that the researcher is putting in an would tend to influence the outcome in a slanted way. Not on purpose of
course, but that is something that has to be considered.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Monday, December 28, 2015 at 6:40:41 AM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Saturday, December 26, 2015 at 6:11:56 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Saturday, December 26, 2015 at 4:03:11 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Saturday, December 26, 2015 at 10:28:10 AM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Friday, December 25, 2015 at 6:23:11 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Friday, December 25, 2015 at 7:26:01 AM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Thursday, December 24, 2015 at 8:33:22 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Thursday, December 24, 2015 at 6:11:21 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Wednesday, December 23, 2015 at 7:07:03 PM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Wednesday, December 23, 2015 at 6:43:37 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Tuesday, December 22, 2015 at 3:03:59 PM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 9:11:18 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 6:12:41 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

If you put a limerick to music, you might end up with something that feels like this (two phrases of four bars of 3/4. Then two phrases of two bars, etc):

1 2 *3* 4
1 2 *3* 4
1 *2*
3 *4*
1 2 *3* 4

Looking at it that way, the lyrical rhymes always come at 50% of the way through a phrase. You'd put the musical punctuation there, too (e.g. the resolution back to I on the *3* of the last line. But is that the right mental

model? Or do these rhymes/crises actually come at the start of a phrase? If so then a musical limerick really looks like this (four phrases of two bars of 3/4. Then four phrases of one bar, etc, where a rhyme always begins alternate phrases):

1 2
*1* 2
1 2
*1* 2
1
*1*
1
*1*
1 2
*1* 2

Thanks!
Steve

I should explain why I'm asking. I'm trying to develop a model of the current practice (particularly in pop songs) of where lyrical rhymes (and musical rhymes, including resolutions) tend to go with respect to time units. Getting

a proper understanding of (the hierarchy of) time units themselves is of course critical to this, and I'm not sure I'm even there, yet. But in looking closely at a bunch of songs, I am glimpsing vague patterns that these "crises", or inflection points,
occur at 0%, 50%, and 75& of the way through what I believe to be a "phrase" (a musical phrase; not necessarily a lyrical one). I've also been looking into prosody with little success, but I used the limerick form in my question because it seems to
nicely span both worlds.

I don't know how this fits in, but I hear the limeric as an AABA in 12/8
four measures long with the 3 As and 1 B measure. with the B measure being two phrases each one half the length of the A phrase rhythmically.

I can see the phrase being described as three beats long, but not in 3/4. I find that confusing. Instead I could see:

Beat Beat Rime Rest,
Beat Beat Rime Rest,
beat rime, beat rime,
beat beat Rime Rest.

If I understand why, you are doing this to create a model for longer phrases in pop tunes or various other lengths of phrases and different rhyme patterns so I think that a method of describing the phrases has to be universal both

to compound and complex meter as well as to fit into different phrase lenght etc.

That is why I am going to the basic elementary ways of describing the rhythm with Long/short but adding the Rhyme (shortened to Rime as its the same number of characters as beat and rest)

I don't know how my three elements will work or if it will work for all forms you may find but I think some sort of basic simple organization is the best way to attack the rhyming patterns at least until you start to see regular

patterns. I think that you will find recurring and logical patterns although I also think you will have some songs that have unique logical patterns and maybe even a few more art song type of patterns.

As you get more samples, I think that it might be easier to test organizational notation that might work better.

To arrive at my model, I started with

Short short long----
short short long ----
and then it fell apart when the rhyming pattern was cut into half the number of beats.

Then I decided to add the Beat and rhyme words for the third phrase and came up with
beat rime beat rime

and then put it into the final model.

I don't know if this is any help at all, but as I understand more precisely what you are working with, I hope to do better! lol

LJS
element7music.com

Thank you, LJ, your simplification into landmarks such as beats, rimes, rests, and so on is a good one. I'll use that going forward to analyze examples.

One other example I have right now is this little piece of mine: http://voices.azurewebsites.net/my_music/score/limerick_001.png. Bars 1-9 could be interpreted as a limerick in 4/4. I have fitted a limerick to that, and both the

lyrical rhymes and the increased liveliness of the music do give me the impression that the phrase frequency is increasing on the third "line". In bars 1-9 (bar 1 is of course a pickup bar) of that piece, I hear this:

beat beat rime beat
beat beat rime rest
beat rime beat rime
beat beat rime rest

If the model is that a phrase contains one rime, then this matches your analysis of the limerick form in that the rime (or musical emphasis, or stress) comes at the halfway mark in a phrase. Then there's this example:

[*draw the *queen of ][*diamonds, boy * she'll][*beat you *if she's ][*able; * you know the]
[*queen of *hearts is ][*always * your best][*bet. * ][* * Now it]
[*seems to *me some ][*fine things * have been][*laid up-*on your ][*table. * But you]
[*only *want the][*ones that *you can't][*get *][*Des- *]

A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%
A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%

Exiting that chunk of music with a rhyme at the halfway mark sounds correct, and balanced. Ending with a 75% rhyme, I don't know if it would, yet if you consider A and B to be one long unit, then the 75% rhymes come close to 50% of

the composite unit. On the other hand, if A and B really are one unit then the rimeB rhymes are appearing at 75%. Anyway, I was just curious to know if anyone knew the "rules" (aka the common practice and what patterns have been found to work).
Understanding the psychology is not crucial, but would be nice. :)

I'll keep looking at examples as I come across them. But FWIW, a lot of pop songs seem to rhyme right at the border between the end of one phrase and the start of another. That's where my 0% value came from.

Thanks!
Steve

As a related sidelight:

In my music classes when the kids are mostly beginners especially at upper elementary and higher, I would teach them to SolFa on the pentatonic scale and Ta-TiTi Kodaly rhythmic or 1+2+3+4+ notation (depending on the students and how

far along in my elementary studies I were at the time. And I usually taught them music as if they were a composer once they developed basic skills

I had many variations but in general I would have them either individually or in groups, have them select a poem and recite it to a beat. They were free to put the emphasis where they liked but they had to syl-la-bi-cate the poem first

and then practice saying the lyrics as a chant (or a rap depending upon the demographic and student interests.

Then when they knew it, one or some of the students would draw a line over the syllable that landed on the beat. And you can probably figure out the rest. As they did this I also had them put a wavy line or a "Z" when there was a beat

without a syllable. (the wavy line would eventually turn out to be a rest and the Z is just the way the Kodaly kids learn to represent a quarter rest.

Most of their poems wound up to be combinations of quarters and eights so then I went to long/short to get the regular quarter and 8th rhythms in the pboem. WIth the line above the beats, if there was no short/short, that already was

the Kodaly symbol for a Ta or quarter note. and if there was a short short, then they drew a line over the second note and connected the tops and that was the symbol for the TiTi or two eight notes.

The ones that had triplet meters, or syncopation, gave me an excuse to teach them how to vary it to show how to notate it and it worked great. It also allowed me to progress to FORM when they looked at where the rhymes landed and I had

them start to group the phrases into measures and the measures into an actual form chart.

Then for the more advanced students or higher level grades, I would sometimes have them sing pentatonic melodies to the words and notate them in SolFa. I enjoyed it and most of the time, so did the kids.

Your examples just reminded me of that so I thought I would remember and share it with you.

But when left to their own devices almost all the poems turned out to be rhyming at the end of the phrase. Of course with the younger students, all their rhymes were nursery rhymes so most followed the pattern of:

Mary had a little lamb,
Its Fleece was white as SNOW.
Every where that Mary went,
Her lamb was sure to GO.

Most poems seem to follow this same pattern as it has to do with couplets. So I am thinking that couplets might be the center of your investigating how the lyrics are put together.

One thing that I notices when I did the same thing as above with a Blues theme, is that the couplet is the basis of the Blues tunes but the first part of the Couplet is used twice, AA then the second part is the Rhyme that completes the

B part of the couplet. with the A being the question, and the B is the answer and it is in an AAB form for the lyrics and thus the music.

Which brings up the lyrics of the Blues genre. Which are usually AAB but can also have other models as well. Had you thought to put the Blues form and rhyming scheme into your study?

Talk to you more about it later.

LJS

Yes, couplets, good point. So if we say that "Mary" is a two-phrase couplet (instead of four lines of text), which I like btw, then here's how I hear it with just the landmarks shown:

[beat][beat] [beat][beat] [beat][beat] [rime][rest] [beat][beat] [beat][beat] [beat][beat] [rime][rest]

So that puts the stress spotlight (the lyrical rhyme) at the three-quarter mark through the phrase. That matches Desperado, and Desperado uses same-length phrases, but interleaved couplets. But it doesn't match the limerick (which puts

rhymes at the halfway mark, in two different-length types of phrase). Very interesting. This is what I'd seen, though: 50% and 75% (and 0%) placements. Still don't know why, but I'm happy with the additional examples, and chance to process. :) Btw, I'm
also seeing a tendency in songs to put the musical resolution in the same place as the lyrical rhyme. That may be an obvious practice.

Also, that's very interesting about the Blues form. On my TODO list was an item to do a "detour" analysis of some Blues forms (incl 12-bar). Btw, I don't know what the proper term nor theory is for a "detour", I'm sure there is one, but I

just made that word up. Lemme do a bit of that analysis here, and that should serve to illustrate what I mean by a detour:

So, let's say you've just composed this little bit of music (which, to use the term that you reminded me of, is a couplet):

I
[I] hate to see that [I] evening sun go [I] down. [I] It
[V] makes me think I'm [IV7] on my last go [I] round [I]

It's great, it works. It should: it's just the primary chords in common cadence. But let's say that you now want it to be longer. This is true of lots of songs, you just find that you're resolving, giving up the goods, too early. You want

to hold onto that lovely suspense a bit longer for the enjoyment of the listener. So, you insert a detour (you insert it into the chain so that it fits front and back). And, having added a detour, you rinse and repeat until the music is long and/or
suspenseful enough. In this case, we could begin by adding 8 bars in anticipation of the result being more "even" and balanced, or we could try just adding 4 bars to begin with just to see how that feels.

So let's say we insert a 4-bar detour right at the end of the first line. We can then tweak that last I to an I7 if we like, and a couple other tweaks. And you get this (notice how what we spliced in fits without needing major surgery to

what was already there).

I
[I] hate to see that [I] evening sun go [I] down. [I7] I
[IV] hate to see that [IV] evening sun go [I] down. [I] It
[V] makes me think I'm [IV7] on my last go [I] round [V7]

And that works of course, too, b/c it's a variant of 12-bar blues. The fact that the first two lines share the same melody and lyrics is ok: they have different harmony. The false lyrical rhyme between "down" and "down" doesn't spoil

things, because of that (and because we eventually get a true rhyme). If we make the first two lines identical in harmony, melody, AND lyrics, then that doesn't sound anywhere near as artful (although you'd get away with it if you performed it with
enough soul).

So, really, my mental model is that the Blues form example is actually a regular old couplet extended with a 4-bar detour.

-Steve

Oh, and of course, that 12 bar blues example is another one (like the limerick) where the rhymes come at the halfway point in the phrase. I guess what I'm looking for is something like a theory that say "lyrical rhymes and musical

resolutions always come at the 50% mark in a phrase, you just have to look at the phrases in the right way." The theory would have to account for why the phrases in Desperado (for example) appear to be twice as long as the theory requires. :)

Well, some accommodations have to be made for various forms of the songs themselves in the overall sense. You can't compare apples and oranges except in the context of something like Fruits and non fruits. You can't compare forms in the same

manner. If you compare a Sonata Allegro form with the same criteria as a Rondo, even though they may contain some parts that may be related or used in a different way.

By the same token, the Blues is a specific form as is a limerick, as is the AB or ABAB form of Mary had a....

IT would be cool if there were written or it would be cool to write some poetry that would merge the three mentioned into something like a Rondo or Sonata-Allegro form and set it to music, but I don't know of any that would actually do that. (

hmm, it could be an interesting project to arrange multi form poetry rhymes into a Rondo and see how it plays out}

But the Form, with poetry would have to have different classifications based upon the rhyming schemes. i.e. Couplets, Limericks, Blues for example. AND your study may come up with additional forms based upon your research and methods of

analysis. At this moment, Christmas AM, I can't think of any others but they must exist someplace. (Merry Christmas btw)

Have you looked into the arrangements of rhyming schemes in something like the Shakespeare Sonnets)

Oh, have to go. Just heard reindeer footsteps on our roof. Time for family Santa time.

Later.
LJSe

Merry Christmas, LJ, and all at rec.music.theory! :)

Re: sonnets, yes I did jot down some thoughts about them a couple weeks ago, but that was to examine their meter rather than their rhymes. Here's a copy-paste of my notes (these should be best viewed in a monospace font, btw, so copying this

stuff into Notepad should do the trick).

Finish with some thoughts on Iambic pentameter. A good example of iambic pentemeter is Shakespeare's twelfth sonnet, which is usually read like this, with just a short pause of arbitrary length between lines.

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM
When I do count the clock that tells the time,

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM
And see the brave day sunk in hid'eous night;

This is of course classic verse, and great stuff, and there's even some music to the series of five pulses (two syllables per pulse), which are known as iambs. But, if it were music, then I think it would defy the intuition of the listener. And,

a band trying to play it would be driven crazy by its lack of any consistent and predictable protocol for dividing up time. I can think of three ways in which iambic pentameter like this could be made playable as music.

[2]
When

[1 2][1 2] [1 2] [1 2] [1 2][1 2][1 2][1 2]
I do count the clock that tells the time, and

The first way is this example above, which uses two beats per bar. And that agrees with the iambs in the original version. Notice how using a pickup beat for "When", and moving "and" to the end of the previous line, means we still have the

stress on the first beat. There are eight bars to the line here (but still only five iambs of syllables, so this is not octameter), with the pivot in the same place we always see it: right in the center of the phrase. The price we pay for that is marking
time for a good few beats, but that's not a problem: it's a very common practice in popular songs. Two beats per bar isn't extremely common, though, so let's try four.

[4]
When

[1 2 3 4] [1 2 3 4] [1 2 3 4][1 2 3 4]
I do count the clock that tells the time, and

This is the second way. The only real difference between this treatment and the previous one is that the number of times we stress a word per line goes down from five to three.

[Aside: we could actually bump that number up to four by making use of that unused beat 1 in bar 4. And, for all we know, Shakespeare meant this to be in 4/4 and he might have tried a nice "Hey!" on that very beat. But he probably decided it

interfered too much with the gravitas of the sonnet. ;)]

But in any case, I would hazard a guess that for every person who prefers the esthetics of the iambic version, at least as many would prefer the esthetics of the stress-per-four-beats version. I think I do.

A third way of setting iambic pentameter to music is to give it two beats per bar but eliminate the arbitrary (although, natural) pause at the end of lines. The musicians would be fine with that, but the singer would have no place to breathe in

an endless stream of syllables. Also, I suspect some listeners would find the grouping of bars in fives to be unusual enough that it'd interfere with their enjoyment. On the other hand, we could look to Paul Desmond's "Take Five" for a counter-argument.
That's a very well-known jazz piece in 5/4 time that has a huge and adoring audience (myself included). Grouping beats into fives is certainly unusual, and defies our intuition built from marching and dancing to music, but it's certainly something you
can develop a liking for. So maybe that's true of grouping bars into fives, too.

If I am reading this correctly, you are putting it to meter but with interpretation. That is OK but for the purposes of classification, I don't see the rhyming scheme in any way I can relate it to the topic of discussion. By that I mean, How are

the lines arranged according to the rhyming schemes? Wouldn't you need several lines to see if there is a pattern? or some comparison of form?

Maybe there is not a rhyming scheme, in which case, there would not be a way to use them in the rhyming scheme analysis. Am I missing something?

ljs

You're right, I wandered away from the strict topic of lyrical rhyming there. However, I do feel that getting a proper understanding and model of (the hierarchy of) time units themselves (in both music and verse) is a prerequisite to developing a

model of the time unit at which rhymes should occur. :) I just pasted that in because that was the only thing that I had on sonnets. However, what I pasted in is perhaps in the service of my original question because it does support the 50% theory. You
can see the rhyming scheme in the first 4 lines of sonnet 12:

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white;

If you subscribe to my meter interpretations then, as I say above, "the pivot [is] in the same place we always see it: right in the center of the phrase." I was using a different term ("pivot") a couple weeks ago, but that's the "crisis" or "stress

point" or "rhyming point" or whatever that I talk about in this thread. And here it's at 50% of the way through the phrase as we've seen in several examples now. Note that, whether each pair of lines rhymes or each alternate line rhymes, I'm not focusing
on. I'm focusing on the pivot, or crisis, or spotlight in a phrase where the lyrical rhyme and/or musical effect (e.g. resolution) has greatest effect.

But this thread's been great, I'm seeing some interesting commonality between examples, even if I don't yet have the grand universal theory I'm after. :)

Lemme just underline that thought, again, because I do feel that this is important. During my recent efforts to answer my question, I kept coming across things that said "rhymes appear at the ends of lines". That does seem to be the common belief and

yet it doesn't seem to be true. When you write out a poem or a song then, yes, rhymes do often appear at the end of lines of text. But the text and the beats of music don't match 1:1. If you only write down lyrics with respect to the text, then you also
put line breaks in the wrong place with respect to the bars, too. So looking at text is a poor tool for understanding rhythm and rhyme; that seems plain. All the examples I've given above are meant to show how to write down the text with respect to the
rhythm, and then see where the rhymes/effects appear. And, despite folks saying that limericks and sonnets (etc) rhyme at the end of the line (which a naive glance at a limerick, or the four lines of sonnet above would suggest), in fact they rhyme at the
50% mark of the "line" if you recognize that a big chunk of the "line" is silent. I find that really interesting, and I didn't come across anything that pointed that fact out in my research travels, but of course maybe I didn't travel to the right places.
:) But that's why I came here. :)

It might be wise to switch to different composers who composed Art Songs. It will give a more specific example of how the musical application of your topic. At least you will have a finite definitive model to compare with other songs of the same and of

different composers. When doing a study, the fewer variables the better, and when you start to interpret the model, that is an outside influence that the researcher is putting in an would tend to influence the outcome in a slanted way. Not on purpose of
course, but that is something that has to be considered.

Yes, I do need to do that. It's going to take me a while. :) I have a small set of analyses (which I need to finish off, and add to) of songs by The Beatles, AC/DC, Billy Joel, Adele, Eagles, Cher, Bryan Adams, Taylor Swift, Mariah Carey, which are all
teaching me stuff, naturally. Once I have enough data, though, I should be able to see common practice patterns. I'll re-post in 2016 if I make any discoveries worth mentioning, Happy New Year to all you rec-music-theoreticians. :)

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On Monday, December 28, 2015 at 9:16:53 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Monday, December 28, 2015 at 6:40:41 AM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Saturday, December 26, 2015 at 6:11:56 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Saturday, December 26, 2015 at 4:03:11 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Saturday, December 26, 2015 at 10:28:10 AM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Friday, December 25, 2015 at 6:23:11 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Friday, December 25, 2015 at 7:26:01 AM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Thursday, December 24, 2015 at 8:33:22 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Thursday, December 24, 2015 at 6:11:21 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Wednesday, December 23, 2015 at 7:07:03 PM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Wednesday, December 23, 2015 at 6:43:37 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Tuesday, December 22, 2015 at 3:03:59 PM UTC-8, e7m wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 9:11:18 PM UTC-6, Steven Charles White wrote:

On Monday, December 21, 2015 at 6:12:41 PM UTC-8, Steven Charles White wrote:

If you put a limerick to music, you might end up with something that feels like this (two phrases of four bars of 3/4. Then two phrases of two bars, etc):

1 2 *3* 4
1 2 *3* 4
1 *2*
3 *4*
1 2 *3* 4

Looking at it that way, the lyrical rhymes always come at 50% of the way through a phrase. You'd put the musical punctuation there, too (e.g. the resolution back to I on the *3* of the last line. But is that the right mental

model? Or do these rhymes/crises actually come at the start of a phrase? If so then a musical limerick really looks like this (four phrases of two bars of 3/4. Then four phrases of one bar, etc, where a rhyme always begins alternate phrases):

1 2
*1* 2
1 2
*1* 2
1
*1*
1
*1*
1 2
*1* 2

Thanks!
Steve

I should explain why I'm asking. I'm trying to develop a model of the current practice (particularly in pop songs) of where lyrical rhymes (and musical rhymes, including resolutions) tend to go with respect to time units.

Getting a proper understanding of (the hierarchy of) time units themselves is of course critical to this, and I'm not sure I'm even there, yet. But in looking closely at a bunch of songs, I am glimpsing vague patterns that these "crises", or inflection
points, occur at 0%, 50%, and 75& of the way through what I believe to be a "phrase" (a musical phrase; not necessarily a lyrical one). I've also been looking into prosody with little success, but I used the limerick form in my question because it seems
to nicely span both worlds.

I don't know how this fits in, but I hear the limeric as an AABA in 12/8
four measures long with the 3 As and 1 B measure. with the B measure being two phrases each one half the length of the A phrase rhythmically.

I can see the phrase being described as three beats long, but not in 3/4. I find that confusing. Instead I could see:

Beat Beat Rime Rest,
Beat Beat Rime Rest,
beat rime, beat rime,
beat beat Rime Rest.

If I understand why, you are doing this to create a model for longer phrases in pop tunes or various other lengths of phrases and different rhyme patterns so I think that a method of describing the phrases has to be universal both

to compound and complex meter as well as to fit into different phrase lenght etc.

That is why I am going to the basic elementary ways of describing the rhythm with Long/short but adding the Rhyme (shortened to Rime as its the same number of characters as beat and rest)

I don't know how my three elements will work or if it will work for all forms you may find but I think some sort of basic simple organization is the best way to attack the rhyming patterns at least until you start to see regular

patterns. I think that you will find recurring and logical patterns although I also think you will have some songs that have unique logical patterns and maybe even a few more art song type of patterns.

As you get more samples, I think that it might be easier to test organizational notation that might work better.

To arrive at my model, I started with

Short short long----
short short long ----
and then it fell apart when the rhyming pattern was cut into half the number of beats.

Then I decided to add the Beat and rhyme words for the third phrase and came up with
beat rime beat rime

and then put it into the final model.

I don't know if this is any help at all, but as I understand more precisely what you are working with, I hope to do better! lol

LJS
element7music.com

Thank you, LJ, your simplification into landmarks such as beats, rimes, rests, and so on is a good one. I'll use that going forward to analyze examples.

One other example I have right now is this little piece of mine: http://voices.azurewebsites.net/my_music/score/limerick_001.png. Bars 1-9 could be interpreted as a limerick in 4/4. I have fitted a limerick to that, and both the

lyrical rhymes and the increased liveliness of the music do give me the impression that the phrase frequency is increasing on the third "line". In bars 1-9 (bar 1 is of course a pickup bar) of that piece, I hear this:

beat beat rime beat
beat beat rime rest
beat rime beat rime
beat beat rime rest

If the model is that a phrase contains one rime, then this matches your analysis of the limerick form in that the rime (or musical emphasis, or stress) comes at the halfway mark in a phrase. Then there's this example:

[*draw the *queen of ][*diamonds, boy * she'll][*beat you *if she's ][*able; * you know the]
[*queen of *hearts is ][*always * your best][*bet. * ][* * Now it]
[*seems to *me some ][*fine things * have been][*laid up-*on your ][*table. * But you]
[*only *want the][*ones that *you can't][*get *][*Des- *]

A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%
A (beat beat beat rimeA) rime at 75%
B (beat beat rimeB beat) rime at 50%

Exiting that chunk of music with a rhyme at the halfway mark sounds correct, and balanced. Ending with a 75% rhyme, I don't know if it would, yet if you consider A and B to be one long unit, then the 75% rhymes come close to 50% of

the composite unit. On the other hand, if A and B really are one unit then the rimeB rhymes are appearing at 75%. Anyway, I was just curious to know if anyone knew the "rules" (aka the common practice and what patterns have been found to work).
Understanding the psychology is not crucial, but would be nice. :)

I'll keep looking at examples as I come across them. But FWIW, a lot of pop songs seem to rhyme right at the border between the end of one phrase and the start of another. That's where my 0% value came from.

Thanks!
Steve

As a related sidelight:

In my music classes when the kids are mostly beginners especially at upper elementary and higher, I would teach them to SolFa on the pentatonic scale and Ta-TiTi Kodaly rhythmic or 1+2+3+4+ notation (depending on the students and how

far along in my elementary studies I were at the time. And I usually taught them music as if they were a composer once they developed basic skills

I had many variations but in general I would have them either individually or in groups, have them select a poem and recite it to a beat. They were free to put the emphasis where they liked but they had to syl-la-bi-cate the poem

first and then practice saying the lyrics as a chant (or a rap depending upon the demographic and student interests.

Then when they knew it, one or some of the students would draw a line over the syllable that landed on the beat. And you can probably figure out the rest. As they did this I also had them put a wavy line or a "Z" when there was a beat

without a syllable. (the wavy line would eventually turn out to be a rest and the Z is just the way the Kodaly kids learn to represent a quarter rest.

Most of their poems wound up to be combinations of quarters and eights so then I went to long/short to get the regular quarter and 8th rhythms in the pboem. WIth the line above the beats, if there was no short/short, that already was

the Kodaly symbol for a Ta or quarter note. and if there was a short short, then they drew a line over the second note and connected the tops and that was the symbol for the TiTi or two eight notes.

The ones that had triplet meters, or syncopation, gave me an excuse to teach them how to vary it to show how to notate it and it worked great. It also allowed me to progress to FORM when they looked at where the rhymes landed and I

had them start to group the phrases into measures and the measures into an actual form chart.

Then for the more advanced students or higher level grades, I would sometimes have them sing pentatonic melodies to the words and notate them in SolFa. I enjoyed it and most of the time, so did the kids.

Your examples just reminded me of that so I thought I would remember and share it with you.

But when left to their own devices almost all the poems turned out to be rhyming at the end of the phrase. Of course with the younger students, all their rhymes were nursery rhymes so most followed the pattern of:

Mary had a little lamb,
Its Fleece was white as SNOW.
Every where that Mary went,
Her lamb was sure to GO.

Most poems seem to follow this same pattern as it has to do with couplets. So I am thinking that couplets might be the center of your investigating how the lyrics are put together.

One thing that I notices when I did the same thing as above with a Blues theme, is that the couplet is the basis of the Blues tunes but the first part of the Couplet is used twice, AA then the second part is the Rhyme that completes

the B part of the couplet. with the A being the question, and the B is the answer and it is in an AAB form for the lyrics and thus the music.

Which brings up the lyrics of the Blues genre. Which are usually AAB but can also have other models as well. Had you thought to put the Blues form and rhyming scheme into your study?

Talk to you more about it later.

LJS

Yes, couplets, good point. So if we say that "Mary" is a two-phrase couplet (instead of four lines of text), which I like btw, then here's how I hear it with just the landmarks shown:

[beat][beat] [beat][beat] [beat][beat] [rime][rest] [beat][beat] [beat][beat] [beat][beat] [rime][rest]

So that puts the stress spotlight (the lyrical rhyme) at the three-quarter mark through the phrase. That matches Desperado, and Desperado uses same-length phrases, but interleaved couplets. But it doesn't match the limerick (which puts

rhymes at the halfway mark, in two different-length types of phrase). Very interesting. This is what I'd seen, though: 50% and 75% (and 0%) placements. Still don't know why, but I'm happy with the additional examples, and chance to process. :) Btw, I'm
also seeing a tendency in songs to put the musical resolution in the same place as the lyrical rhyme. That may be an obvious practice.

Also, that's very interesting about the Blues form. On my TODO list was an item to do a "detour" analysis of some Blues forms (incl 12-bar). Btw, I don't know what the proper term nor theory is for a "detour", I'm sure there is one, but

I just made that word up. Lemme do a bit of that analysis here, and that should serve to illustrate what I mean by a detour:

So, let's say you've just composed this little bit of music (which, to use the term that you reminded me of, is a couplet):

I
[I] hate to see that [I] evening sun go [I] down. [I] It
[V] makes me think I'm [IV7] on my last go [I] round [I]

It's great, it works. It should: it's just the primary chords in common cadence. But let's say that you now want it to be longer. This is true of lots of songs, you just find that you're resolving, giving up the goods, too early. You

want to hold onto that lovely suspense a bit longer for the enjoyment of the listener. So, you insert a detour (you insert it into the chain so that it fits front and back). And, having added a detour, you rinse and repeat until the music is long and/or
suspenseful enough. In this case, we could begin by adding 8 bars in anticipation of the result being more "even" and balanced, or we could try just adding 4 bars to begin with just to see how that feels.

So let's say we insert a 4-bar detour right at the end of the first line. We can then tweak that last I to an I7 if we like, and a couple other tweaks. And you get this (notice how what we spliced in fits without needing major surgery

to what was already there).

I
[I] hate to see that [I] evening sun go [I] down. [I7] I
[IV] hate to see that [IV] evening sun go [I] down. [I] It [V] makes me think I'm [IV7] on my last go [I] round [V7]

And that works of course, too, b/c it's a variant of 12-bar blues. The fact that the first two lines share the same melody and lyrics is ok: they have different harmony. The false lyrical rhyme between "down" and "down" doesn't spoil

things, because of that (and because we eventually get a true rhyme). If we make the first two lines identical in harmony, melody, AND lyrics, then that doesn't sound anywhere near as artful (although you'd get away with it if you performed it with
enough soul).

So, really, my mental model is that the Blues form example is actually a regular old couplet extended with a 4-bar detour.

-Steve

Oh, and of course, that 12 bar blues example is another one (like the limerick) where the rhymes come at the halfway point in the phrase. I guess what I'm looking for is something like a theory that say "lyrical rhymes and musical

resolutions always come at the 50% mark in a phrase, you just have to look at the phrases in the right way." The theory would have to account for why the phrases in Desperado (for example) appear to be twice as long as the theory requires. :)

Well, some accommodations have to be made for various forms of the songs themselves in the overall sense. You can't compare apples and oranges except in the context of something like Fruits and non fruits. You can't compare forms in the

same manner. If you compare a Sonata Allegro form with the same criteria as a Rondo, even though they may contain some parts that may be related or used in a different way.

By the same token, the Blues is a specific form as is a limerick, as is the AB or ABAB form of Mary had a....

IT would be cool if there were written or it would be cool to write some poetry that would merge the three mentioned into something like a Rondo or Sonata-Allegro form and set it to music, but I don't know of any that would actually do that.

(hmm, it could be an interesting project to arrange multi form poetry rhymes into a Rondo and see how it plays out}

But the Form, with poetry would have to have different classifications based upon the rhyming schemes. i.e. Couplets, Limericks, Blues for example. AND your study may come up with additional forms based upon your research and methods of

analysis. At this moment, Christmas AM, I can't think of any others but they must exist someplace. (Merry Christmas btw)

Have you looked into the arrangements of rhyming schemes in something like the Shakespeare Sonnets)

Oh, have to go. Just heard reindeer footsteps on our roof. Time for family Santa time.

Later.
LJSe

Merry Christmas, LJ, and all at rec.music.theory! :)

Re: sonnets, yes I did jot down some thoughts about them a couple weeks ago, but that was to examine their meter rather than their rhymes. Here's a copy-paste of my notes (these should be best viewed in a monospace font, btw, so copying this

stuff into Notepad should do the trick).

Finish with some thoughts on Iambic pentameter. A good example of iambic pentemeter is Shakespeare's twelfth sonnet, which is usually read like this, with just a short pause of arbitrary length between lines.

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM
When I do count the clock that tells the time,

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM
And see the brave day sunk in hid'eous night;

This is of course classic verse, and great stuff, and there's even some music to the series of five pulses (two syllables per pulse), which are known as iambs. But, if it were music, then I think it would defy the intuition of the listener.

And, a band trying to play it would be driven crazy by its lack of any consistent and predictable protocol for dividing up time. I can think of three ways in which iambic pentameter like this could be made playable as music.

[2]
When

[1 2][1 2] [1 2] [1 2] [1 2][1 2][1 2][1 2]
I do count the clock that tells the time, and

The first way is this example above, which uses two beats per bar. And that agrees with the iambs in the original version. Notice how using a pickup beat for "When", and moving "and" to the end of the previous line, means we still have the

stress on the first beat. There are eight bars to the line here (but still only five iambs of syllables, so this is not octameter), with the pivot in the same place we always see it: right in the center of the phrase. The price we pay for that is marking
time for a good few beats, but that's not a problem: it's a very common practice in popular songs. Two beats per bar isn't extremely common, though, so let's try four.

[4]
When

[1 2 3 4] [1 2 3 4] [1 2 3 4][1 2 3 4]
I do count the clock that tells the time, and

This is the second way. The only real difference between this treatment and the previous one is that the number of times we stress a word per line goes down from five to three.

[Aside: we could actually bump that number up to four by making use of that unused beat 1 in bar 4. And, for all we know, Shakespeare meant this to be in 4/4 and he might have tried a nice "Hey!" on that very beat. But he probably decided it

interfered too much with the gravitas of the sonnet. ;)]

But in any case, I would hazard a guess that for every person who prefers the esthetics of the iambic version, at least as many would prefer the esthetics of the stress-per-four-beats version. I think I do.

A third way of setting iambic pentameter to music is to give it two beats per bar but eliminate the arbitrary (although, natural) pause at the end of lines. The musicians would be fine with that, but the singer would have no place to breathe

in an endless stream of syllables. Also, I suspect some listeners would find the grouping of bars in fives to be unusual enough that it'd interfere with their enjoyment. On the other hand, we could look to Paul Desmond's "Take Five" for a counter-
argument. That's a very well-known jazz piece in 5/4 time that has a huge and adoring audience (myself included). Grouping beats into fives is certainly unusual, and defies our intuition built from marching and dancing to music, but it's certainly
something you can develop a liking for. So maybe that's true of grouping bars into fives, too.

If I am reading this correctly, you are putting it to meter but with interpretation. That is OK but for the purposes of classification, I don't see the rhyming scheme in any way I can relate it to the topic of discussion. By that I mean, How

are the lines arranged according to the rhyming schemes? Wouldn't you need several lines to see if there is a pattern? or some comparison of form?

Maybe there is not a rhyming scheme, in which case, there would not be a way to use them in the rhyming scheme analysis. Am I missing something?

ljs

You're right, I wandered away from the strict topic of lyrical rhyming there. However, I do feel that getting a proper understanding and model of (the hierarchy of) time units themselves (in both music and verse) is a prerequisite to developing a

model of the time unit at which rhymes should occur. :) I just pasted that in because that was the only thing that I had on sonnets. However, what I pasted in is perhaps in the service of my original question because it does support the 50% theory. You
can see the rhyming scheme in the first 4 lines of sonnet 12:

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white;

If you subscribe to my meter interpretations then, as I say above, "the pivot [is] in the same place we always see it: right in the center of the phrase." I was using a different term ("pivot") a couple weeks ago, but that's the "crisis" or "

stress point" or "rhyming point" or whatever that I talk about in this thread. And here it's at 50% of the way through the phrase as we've seen in several examples now. Note that, whether each pair of lines rhymes or each alternate line rhymes, I'm not
focusing on. I'm focusing on the pivot, or crisis, or spotlight in a phrase where the lyrical rhyme and/or musical effect (e.g. resolution) has greatest effect.

But this thread's been great, I'm seeing some interesting commonality between examples, even if I don't yet have the grand universal theory I'm after. :)

Lemme just underline that thought, again, because I do feel that this is important. During my recent efforts to answer my question, I kept coming across things that said "rhymes appear at the ends of lines". That does seem to be the common belief

and yet it doesn't seem to be true. When you write out a poem or a song then, yes, rhymes do often appear at the end of lines of text. But the text and the beats of music don't match 1:1. If you only write down lyrics with respect to the text, then you
also put line breaks in the wrong place with respect to the bars, too. So looking at text is a poor tool for understanding rhythm and rhyme; that seems plain. All the examples I've given above are meant to show how to write down the text with respect to
the rhythm, and then see where the rhymes/effects appear. And, despite folks saying that limericks and sonnets (etc) rhyme at the end of the line (which a naive glance at a limerick, or the four lines of sonnet above would suggest), in fact they rhyme at
the 50% mark of the "line" if you recognize that a big chunk of the "line" is silent. I find that really interesting, and I didn't come across anything that pointed that fact out in my research travels, but of course maybe I didn't travel to the right
places. :) But that's why I came here. :)

It might be wise to switch to different composers who composed Art Songs. It will give a more specific example of how the musical application of your topic. At least you will have a finite definitive model to compare with other songs of the same and

of different composers. When doing a study, the fewer variables the better, and when you start to interpret the model, that is an outside influence that the researcher is putting in an would tend to influence the outcome in a slanted way. Not on purpose
of course, but that is something that has to be considered.

Yes, I do need to do that. It's going to take me a while. :) I have a small set of analyses (which I need to finish off, and add to) of songs by The Beatles, AC/DC, Billy Joel, Adele, Eagles, Cher, Bryan Adams, Taylor Swift, Mariah Carey, which are all

teaching me stuff, naturally. Once I have enough data, though, I should be able to see common practice patterns. I'll re-post in 2016 if I make any discoveries worth mentioning, Happy New Year to all you rec-music-theoreticians. :)

Sounds like a plan. Happy New Year.

Its been an interesting discussion, hope you get around to bringing it up again.

LJS

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