History:Performance Restructuring Proposal

This page is about restructuring AdvancedRelationshipTypes and AdvancedRelationshipAttributes connected to the PerformanceRelationshipClass and the types in MusicalAssociationRelationshipClass which use the VocalRelationshipAttribute or the InstrumentRelationshipAttribute or any that is proposed here.

Because I found different unrelated problems which can be implemented / solved uneffecting the others I structure this into sections.

Speech

Speech is completly different from vocal performance which is intended to be singing, rapping or doing recitate and the like. Therefore I propose to add a sub-type SpeakerRelationshipType to the vocal PerformerRelationshipType and NarratorRelationshipType, ReaderRelationshipType as subtypes to SpeakerRelationshipType.

For details see named types and PerformanceRelationshipClass.

Redesign of the Vocal Relationship Attribute

Separating vocal role, vocal range/tone and vocal style

Currently it is not possible to define vocal ranges for background singers or choirs. Is this necessary? If so it would probably be better to split this into two attributes vocal role and vocal range.

Adding vocal styles

There is no good place for adding vocal styles at the moment. Mixing them with vocal ranges could be a bit confusing. Especially since there can be no unusable grouping elements in AdvancedRelationshipAttributes.

Do we need vocal styles at all? Examples: Rap, Recitative/Sprechgesang, Death Growl.

The following is discussion about that from the old version of this page:

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ok, as discussed on the mailing list when this has come up, i think rap is a really bad role to include. it is not a concrete style, like the classical ones (which refer to a specific vocal range), and a lot of rap type singing strays between the 'real' singing, and rapping, if not a combination of the two. it's just a horribly grey area and there's no real need to make the distinction. i mean we don't define any other type of contemporary singing - eg 'growling' for death metal, 'whining' for radiohead, etc :) (all of which i find equally silly btw!). everything contemporary should be kept as 'lead'. --Gecks 

• I agree that it is perhaps not correct to group vocal styles together with vocal ranges/tones. Nonetheless I would like to have this AR to be a bit more descriptive. I mean we have tons of instruments now but only a few vocal styles. It was proposed somewhere to use SurvivalOfTheFittest on the instruments to see which we need and which we can combine and whatever. I think somehow they are also a grey area but we do implement them!
  • Well an instrument is different, because you know categorically what instrument is used (invariably from the liner notes) whereas a singing 'style' is almost completely subjective these days. I don't consider the two areas similar :) --Gecks--
    • You run issues without the "rap" option with groups that have multiple vocalists where one's role is singing while the other's role is rapping. THC!! has three vocalists - a female singer, a male singer, and a female rapper. ハレンチ☆パンチ also has 3 - one does lead singing, second does rap and some backup singing, and the third does just chorus singing. m-flo has Verbal as rapper and various guest vocalists for the actual singing. CRIMSON has a lead singer/samisen player and a rapper/harp player for their two vocalists. With all of them its divided into the one(s) doing the lead singing and the other doing the rapping; putting all of them under "lead vocals" simply feels inaccurate. Rapping in general might not be as clearly defined as the different roles in classical singing but with groups that have both singers and rappers it's very clear in their specific cases. It'd be more useful to the people with that music to have that info in the database than to simply lump all the vocalists together as having performed lead vocals. --DJKC
  And one thing: what do you think about recitative? Keeping it in my proposal and perhaps building it in with a separate link type or something? I'm not quite sure if I used a good translation for what I wanted to say.. in german we have "Sprechgesang" - directly translated this would be "speech-singing". My dictionary said recitative but when I translate that back to german it says either "Sprechgesang" or "Rezitativ" (which is not what I want). Compare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recitative and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprechgesang. --Shepard

Maybe I misunderstood the proposal (or the current inplementation), but I think we need a way to mark chorus vocals. All too often is there one vocalist doing the lead in the verser and another doing the hook/chorus/refrain. It feels weird to mark this as either background (because it's not) or lead (because... well, it /is/ lead, but only in a small and well defined part of the song). Who's with me, or why am I wrong? //bnw

Adding Attribute "Performance Role"

Currently it is not possible to have text-field attributes in AdvancedRelationships (apart from the dates). It would be nice to be able to define a role for a performance though as free-text. That is: a (fictional) character that is represented by an instrument, a singer or a speaker.

That would look like this:

performed {additional} {guest} {instrument} (as {role}) on
performed {additional} {guest} {vocal} vocal (as {role}) on
 {additional:additionally} {guest} spoke (as {role}) on

Examples:

SomeName performed Oboe as The Duck on Peter and the Wolf (feat. narrator Sting)

Kent Broadhurst performed speech as The Hypnotherapist on Regression

This could be useful for musicals, operas, metal operas and so on.

Adding Sub-Types to Band Members

The SupportingMusicianRelationshipType in the MusicalAssociationRelationshipClass was implemented with sub-types to specify instruments or vocals of the support. The MemberOfBandRelationshipType does not yet have that.

One proposal was to have something like this:

is/was a member of
 played {instrument} in
 performed {vocal} vocal in

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Original author: Shepard