A Musician, An Artist and  A Creative

Texture 

The texture in both the original piece and our cover is homophonic throughout almost the whole piece, with a melody and many accompaniment parts. In the intro there is great textural variation with it going from a monophonic vocal solo to a chord. In the original, this chord is purely vocal; however, in our performance we used lots more instrumentation to create a thicker sounding texture and greater contrast. We added a small acapella section towards the end of our song which has less texture than that part in the original. Overall we didn’t change the texture much only exaggerating it in some parts to create textural interest.

 

Pitch 

We kept the pitch almost all the same except we transposed it from the key of C# to C to make it easier to read and notate music. The melody is sung in a middle female register. The melodic contour of most of the piece relies on descending patterns. However in the first half of the pre chorus there is a slow ascending pattern ending with a vocal climax before descending again this break away from expectations creates lots of melodic interest and draws the listener in right before the catchy chorus.

 

Structure

We utilised exactly the same structure as the original piece:

• intro

• Chorus

• Verse 1

• Pre-chorus

• Chorus

• Verse 2

• Chorus

• Bridge

• Pre-chorus

• Chorus

• Outro

We changed the outro a little instead of fading out we had us laughing and clapping at the end.

 

Tone colour

Perhaps the most drastic change we made to the original song was with our choice of instrumentation and this greatly affected the tone colour. The original had a warm tone colour and rough, raspy, almost jazzy vocals. The tone colour of our cover was brighter and cleaner, it feels less improvised and more thoroughly rehearsed. This is especially heard in the intro when all of the instruments as well as vocals create huge swelling chords with a lot more variation in tone colour than the original.

 

Dynamics and expressive techniques

We utilised soft and loud dynamics in the intro to really push the contrast between the vocal solo and the chords. Other than that, the song remains at a moderately loud volume throughout the entire piece without much variation. The original featured growling in the vocals and we used that technique in our cover. We also introduced a violin who used both bowing and plucking in our cover. Additionally we had distortion and a bit of reverb on one of the guitar tracks and our vocals had slight reverb and soft delay. Neither of these featured in the original song.

 

Duration

We used the same tempo as the original song which was 151bpm (allegro). The song is in quadruple metre. With the exception of the intro the melody largely consists of short note values. It also occasionally alternated between short and long between phrases. We changed a few of the accompaniment’s rhythms but it didn’t have a huge impact on the piece as a whole. Overall we didn’t change much of the duration of the piece.