The absence of lyrics, by imitating an instrument, is one way of approaching improvised vocal music. Scat-singing is a good example of this. But what is interesting to me, is how to use the language, texts and the whole potential of the “body-instrument” as a starting point instead of removing the lyrics and singing “like an instrument”.
Language is an exclusive musical parameter for voice. Language itself forms rhythms in different levels: Syllables - they form transients and sonorities, words and sentences - they form patterns and sequences.
The poem or text as a whole – can work as a dynamic for the whole music piece. In linguistics, prosody is concerned with those elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments (vowels and consonants) but are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, stress, and rhythm.
“Most studies (of prosody) have declared the attempt to write such a prosody as impossible: they prefer to see free verse as an aberrant version of regular metrical verse. They also believe that behind free verse is the ‘ghost of meter’. Running against that current, A Prosody of Free Verse bases its new system on additive rhythms that do not fit conventional time signatures”. (Andrews 2016). Adding to this one of the main characters of my investigations have been the “textural” elements of single letters and words.
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