Gustavo Lacerda

I sometimes have the desire to turn poetry into songs, or unstructured words into rhythmic poetry. The idea is that I am adding more rhythmic structure and/or taking the existing rhythm and discretizing it into small integers (perhaps lossily, as can happen in melodic transcription).

One thing I find frustrating is that I don't have any rhythmic notation or solfège that feels natural to me. Maybe it is only a relative discomfort, being spoiled by my unusual ability for melodic solfège and transcription. So, although I have my moments of rhythmic success, I am unable to write them down for future reference. (I also have the analogous difficulty of finding the right lengths of the notes and pauses when transcribing music, and getting it even roughly right can be really frustrating)

Does anyone have a process or a piece of software that helps with this?

I just recorded this short sentence with some poetic rhythm, and one can perhaps see that Portuguese, as I've chosen to render it, is rather syllable-timed.

Snapshot from GarageBand:


And this is my best shot at notation:
* a 3-register system for the big intonation changes
* accents (é and è) to denote smaller changes in intonation; spelling be damned.
* boldface to denote stress( Read more... )