#6 Spoken words can be music

Not only can silence be music, but spoken words can be music, too. Of course, this is not news to anybody who has heard of Rap… But I don’t specifically only mean words specially written for a song. Recordings/samples of spoken words can also be music or be the basis for a musical idea.

Of course, electronic composers have been using spoken words as a base for compositions for a long time:

The Musique Concrete work “Symphonie pour un homme seul” (1950) by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry contains some manipulated spoken word recordings as well as other vocal parts.

Famously, Steve Reich discovered Phase Music by accident, playing back to identical tape loops of recordings he made of a preacher.

Nowadays it’s much easier to manipulate recording within the digital domain. You need to find or create the source material.

I find “found sounds” inspiring, so I recommend browsing through the audio section of the Internet Archive. But take care that you only use recordings from the public domain.

You can also record your voice or somebody else’s, or play around with a text-to-speech service like ElevenLabs to generate spoken words in different languages and accents if you have a text you want to use but no recording.

Some examples from Phaneronaut releases

The Professor Pepper album contains several examples, here is just a selection of two, using Steve Reich’s phasing technique and a vocoders. Other part of the album use spoken word samples with a pitch shifter or a granular synthesizer.