Find Song Ideas by “Listening”
Find Song-One of the ways we can do that is to work on developing the art of using our environment as a “sound box”.
One way we can do this is to work with sounds that you already know about. One way we can do this is to work with melody ideas.
For example, take a sound idea that you have heard before. If you have heard this before, it’s probably something in the rhythm section of the song. Tap it out on your knee and experiment with it. If you don’t know how to tap out a rhythm on your knee, find someone who can. Find someone who can improvise or play an instrument whose job it is to create interesting backgrounds for you while you “tune” out the busyness of the world.
Some of the most effective stuff we can do is to take some quiet time to just Snoop around the house or garden and soak up all the sounds that are there. We can find some sound ideas from everyday life and adjust them until they fit into our song.
This may help us to develop as songwriters by getting into the habit of just being a listener.
The next step is to find some ways we can use all of this sound knowledge. There are many songwriting ideas we can use sound ideas from nature. Take a house cat as an example. Have you ever seen a house cat do something that is just askew in comparison to what it might do in our own lives? Ever notice the way a house cat moves? You have to assume that the neighbor within the house is tapping her heels on the ground to follow her scratching and moving rhythm away from the house. Use this idea of the sound of the house cat to start mixing up rhythmic ideas in your natural environment.
If you want to take it a step further, you can start using the ideas of famous Hollywood movie soundtracks. If you listen to the music used in many Hollywood movies, you will notice that the rhythms and melody ideas are already beginning to show you the way. Let’s go back in time to the early 1900s to find some examples of natural human sounds.
Many of the movie soundtracks from that time were recorded from the actual stamping of the cotton plant equipment. You can use the sound of the cotton plant to “achieve” the same feel of real stamping. If you also think of the early days of recorded music, you will realize that the human voice was the first thing used. Many unlikely combinations of instruments were used to achieve the result of a perfectly pitched harmony of human voices. If you want to use this idea for a movie soundtrack, select human voices from a group of voices that are nearly alike in speaking voice. This is the kind of music you will use in your project. The project will be based on an original idea that you can develop and put into practice, so you don’t have to go exactly as such. Humanizing the score ahead of time will eliminate much of the guesswork.
As you are listening to the sounds of the world, it will excite and amuse you. You will want to incorporate these amusing sounds into your movie. Now you can develop your ideas even further by using a variety of sound effects from the past. Create your mini-movie as you experiment. Use sound effects from the past to Gandrasmic music for the present-day sound beats.
You can use sound effects from history as you create present-day music. Start by choosing the most jovial and amplified sounds from history such as a full brass orchestra. Then intermingle these sounds with the more subdued, but captivating voices from the present day. You can try out different harmonic combinations and amplitudes. The most compelling beats will create rhythms that weave in and out of one another. Try out different tempos and note durations. Finally, you can mix up the slow, fast, fast notes with the beats that are slow and fast.
History can be a rich source of knowledge when used in the development of sound effects. While you are developing your movie, political information, or soundscape, interview someone from history that will be of help in the development of your soundscape and instruments. Listen to the most extemporaneous and fascinating sounds of each era to develop the soundscape theme. If you can, you should also research the classic instruments of each era, as these will likely be themes in future movies. Classical music may emerge from a little box of your mind.