What is prosody? — Simon Hawkins

For songwriting, why is prosody so important? And what is it, anyway?

Here’s a story: Some time ago, I walked along the most beautiful part of this country, along the South Downs. It was spectacular - on the right: sea, miles away - on the left: English countryside at its best. On the way home, I walked close to the station at Amberley, where there was still an old signal box that housed a mechanical set of levers to make sure each train went on the right line. And it reminded me of something about our own beautiful craft: Prosody.

What is it?

I’ve always thought prosody is a lovely moment when we craft a song with a perfect combination of lyrics and music. And prosody is great, mostly because it enables us to paint a particular emotion with our song, which ultimately is what we try to achieve as songwriters.

But, taking this more in-depth, there are more things we have at our availability when we write a song than thinking about just the words and music. Prosody has two parts:

Phonology
Cognitive

Now, if you’re like me, this is probably too deep to spend too much time talking about anything with an ‘ology’ at the end of a word like that. But, for me as a songwriter, there are some things it can interest me in: my seven levers of prosody.

My seven levers

Looking at the two parts of prosody, there are seven different levers we can use as songwriters (and poets) like the signalman used to pull and push in his signal box:

Chunking - this is whether the syllables are in the right place at the right time in the music. Here’s the rule for stresses (“DUM”) and unstressed (“da”) syllables in a 4/4 staff:
- DUM goes on beat 1 or 3
- da goes on beat 2 or 4.
Emotion - what’s the emotion in the lyric - well, that’s where the melody needs to go (high or low)
Intonation - 3 T’s - tonality, tonicity, and tone. This is all about sub-syllable parts in threes - a beginning, a middle and an end - then match to the melody, the emotion, as the chucking in 1.
Loudness/stress - production should fix this, often kept to the chorus.
Pitch - higher notes are normally for higher emotion and vice versa. Maybe keep some for the chorus too.
Rhythm (and rhyme) - similar to 1 above for rhythm. Rhyme keeps with the established rhyme scheme, except if there’s no rhymes. Always choose emotion above a sucky rhyme.
Tempo - unless we’re in classical or musical songs, it might be worth keeping to the beats per minute (BPM) constant. But there're no rules, just tools.

There are, in reality, more levers we can pull or push, we can talk about. But for me, these are the major ones.

How can we use these to ensure prosody in our songs?

Am I saying, to be a GRAMMY winner, we have to get a Ph.D. in linguistics? No! In reality, it’s more about the craft than the science of how this works - it’s about the art and emotion matching between our lyrics and music together.

For me, this is what I do:

Find the bumps - having drafted a song - both the lyric and the music - I listen to the complete song to see if there are any “bumps” in there, where the emotions don’t seem to fit together.
Decide which to fix - listen to the bump zone and decide what would be better to fix - the lyric or the music. For me, it’s a lot easier to fix the music because, for me, music is always there.
Fix and review - having fixed it, I listen to it now again with the new lyric or music, asking does it still cause a bump in the song? Do the music and lyric now match perfectly? If not, I go back and have another go.

This is normally not a re-write - just minor things. Things that make all the difference to make it a more powerful song. And, to be honest, if it needs a re-write, that would be fine by me because it’s a lot cheaper to fix something in the writing room than in the studio where it’s demoing.

Questions

Here are a few questions for you:

Could there be a bump somewhere in one of your songs?
If you found one and you’ve fixed it, what does it sound like without the bump now?
Is it more powerful because of it ironed out?

This is all about having a song that is packed with emotion the way you intended. Ultimately, it could mean the difference between getting your song cut rather than left unheard.

I hope this helps. And stay safe!

Simon Hawkins