(no subject)
Feb. 21st, 2019 09:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellwayI work in a store with a background radio, which means I have a fairly good grasp of what Currently Popular Songs *sound* like but very little idea of who made them, what they're called, and in some cases the lyrics.
And I keep being, just, utterly shocked to learn that a song was by Ed Sheeran. I thought I knew what Ed Sheeran's voice sounded like! I thought I was better at voice recognition than this!
It would be one thing if he had just, like, adopted an American accent. But not only do "Shape of You" and "Perfect" not sound like they're the same person as "Bloodstream", they don't sound like they're the same person *as each other*!
(IIRC, I didn't *guess* "Castle on the Hill", but it was a lot less surprising than these two.)
---
Admittedly, I do remember having a very similar experience the first time I heard a Phil Collins' Greatest Hits CD when I was ten or so: "wait, all of these songs on the radio were the same person?" And having to infer whether the radio was playing Billy Joel or Elton John by whether my parents played that particular song on tape a lot (they are both big Billy Joel fans, but have much weaker feelings about Elton John).
But I felt like my voice recognition got suddenly much better when I was thirteen, and now I'm not so sure.
(Or maybe it *did* get better but has now gotten worse again for some reason? Shame I can't just go ask my fourteen-year-old self to listen to a 2019 pop mix and figure out which songs are by the same people. No matter how accurate my *model* of fourteen-year-old me is, a model would still be running on the current substrate, which possibly sucks at this.)
And I keep being, just, utterly shocked to learn that a song was by Ed Sheeran. I thought I knew what Ed Sheeran's voice sounded like! I thought I was better at voice recognition than this!
It would be one thing if he had just, like, adopted an American accent. But not only do "Shape of You" and "Perfect" not sound like they're the same person as "Bloodstream", they don't sound like they're the same person *as each other*!
(IIRC, I didn't *guess* "Castle on the Hill", but it was a lot less surprising than these two.)
---
Admittedly, I do remember having a very similar experience the first time I heard a Phil Collins' Greatest Hits CD when I was ten or so: "wait, all of these songs on the radio were the same person?" And having to infer whether the radio was playing Billy Joel or Elton John by whether my parents played that particular song on tape a lot (they are both big Billy Joel fans, but have much weaker feelings about Elton John).
But I felt like my voice recognition got suddenly much better when I was thirteen, and now I'm not so sure.
(Or maybe it *did* get better but has now gotten worse again for some reason? Shame I can't just go ask my fourteen-year-old self to listen to a 2019 pop mix and figure out which songs are by the same people. No matter how accurate my *model* of fourteen-year-old me is, a model would still be running on the current substrate, which possibly sucks at this.)
no subject
Date: 2019-02-21 03:09 pm (UTC)*googles* how the ff---
no subject
Date: 2019-02-21 04:06 pm (UTC)(also it's a weird song synesthetically, how did he make that one background beat be green *and* orange *and* yellow simultaneously)
---
I can actually kind of hear it in "Shape of You" now that I know to listen for it, but "Perfect" still boggles me. (Although I do find that now that I know the singer of "Perfect" is British, a couple of bits of lyric that I had previously completely failed to parse have resolved into words with a trap-bath split. Context is a powerful thing.)
no subject
Date: 2019-02-21 09:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-25 10:46 pm (UTC)First of all, "Shape of You" and "Perfect" are from 2017, whereas "Bloodstream" was produced back in 2014. And I do think this timeline is relevant: "Bloodstream" has all the characteristics of a song sung by someone who has enough natural musical talent to stay on pitch, but who has had absolutely no formal training. Er, sort of... they think singing is just reading poetry but tonal.
Sheeran's singing throughout "Bloodstream" exhibits poor breath control, leading to a breathy quality, and his consonant production is munged to the point where I thought he was purposely slurring words together until I realized the song was so much comparatively older. Furthermore, there's clearly no thought put into vowel choice, and even when he has the opportunity to do so, rhythmically, he doesn't hold any vowels.
For me, at least, this means I can't understand 3 out of every 5 words he's saying. :P
But actually, I'm really proud of Sheeran, because he's clearly done some work with his vocal training since then! "Shape of You" and "Perfect" both exhibit fantastically improved vocal technique!
In both of these songs he no longer runs his consonants in to each other, and he seems to have gotten the idea of vowel choice down pretty well. He's also done a good job of improving his breath control; you no longer hear the airyness that was present throughout "Bloostream".
Of course, those two songs sound different from each other as well, yet they were produced in the same year. The reason for this, in Barbershop terms, is that "Perfect" is a ballad and "Shape of You" is an uptune.
Of course, this doesn't really mean anything to non-Barbershop people, so I'll go more into detail: "Shape of You" is peppy and a tempo; the singer never really deviates from the driving beat of the song. Meanwhile, "Perfect" is more emotional and less devoted to the rythym, allowing for musical flourishes that deviate from.
This isn't the whole difference, though. The stacatto quality of "Shape of You" also leads to the words themselves being staccato; there's no time to hold on vowels, whereas that happens every other phrase in "Perfect".
"Shape of You" is sung with more of the hard pallate, compared to the warmer quality of "Perfect", especially when Sheeran uses his head voice; I would say he purposefully makes his head voice more forward in "Shape of You", and he very clearly switches between vocal registers during the song. Meanwhile, in "Perfect", he's generally using only his chest voice, and aside from a couple of flourishes I'm not sure if he ever fully left it. If he hit his break (passaggio) he did so with enough of an unstained technique that I didn't hear it. Speaking of strain, "Perfect" is also the most unstained vocals of all three songs; he did his warmups before singing it, and stayed in his comfortable range.
Finally, "Shape of You" sounds like it has a lot more post-production sound mixing, which would quickly differentiate the voice quality even on it's own. Audio editing! It's a powerful thing!
Anyway, I never thought I'd say this, but here's 500 words on Ed Sheeran! Enjoy!