what is a song

iamhunted

Ive always wondered people's take ont his, but what exactly is a song? If you write a few paragraphs of words for lyrics ... is that a song? Is a tune with music only a song or is a song the mixture of both?

The way I see it is that a bunch of words are lyrics (or a poem), music only is a tune (or instrumental) and the two together can make a song.

What do you say?

K-Ren

A song is anything if enough people get behind the idea for it to be come accepted as a song. Of course it's very hard now to define a song as anything other than what the word has been used for throughout history. I could throw a racoon off the top of a seven-foot pumpkin and call it a song- if other musicians and the masses agreed that it was, then that's what it'd be called.

GrizzlyMan

This is what's on Wikipedia - A song is a piece of music for accompanied or unaccompanied voice or voices or, "the act or art of singing," but the term is generally not used for large vocal forms including opera and oratorio[1]. However, the term is "often found in various figurative and transferred sesnse (e.g. for the lyrical second subject of a sonata...)."[1] The word "song" has the same etymological root as the verb "to sing" and the OED defines the word to mean "that which is sung"[2]. Colloquially, song is sometimes used to refer to any musical composition, including those without vocals. In music styles that are predominantly vocal-based, such as popular music, a composition without vocals may be called a song

But personally I reckon a 'song' is a label that can be put on anything i.e birdsinging, trees blowing, ballad, instrumentals etc.

hatrickpatrick

I think the answer to this question depends entirely on your own point of view and your musical style, but here's my own opinion:
I'm a rock musician. So a song for me must have rhythm, instrument melody, vocal melody, and lyrics. Other genres may not require all of these and some have extra ones - for example, in a lot of rap songs only the rhythm, lyrics, and instrument melody / harmony are needed while the vocals are spoken or shouted without needing a melody behind them. Other genres rely only on instrumentals and rhythm, with no vocals... etc.

For me, a song is a song when it's finished, when I have the rhythm, the chords / harmony, the melody for the instruments (in my case, guitar) and the melody and lyrics for the vocals. Until I have all of those elements, I call each bit a "song fragment" - fragments of lyrics are "lines, verses, or choruses", and all guitar, bass, and keyboard pieces - chords, melodies, everything - I call "riffs".

So I have two different folders on my pc. One is the songs folder and one is the abstract folder.

In the abstract folder, are hundreds of disconnected riffs and scraps of lyrics I've written over the last 2 years since I started writing, which do not yet have a song but which can be occasionally browsed through to see if any of them inspire me to write something bigger.

The songs folder is split into subfolders which are named either after a particular song or, if it has no name yet, the theme / concept behind it. Inside each of these subfolders are the different 'fragments' of the song - so you might have a few audio files recorded from my phone when I come up with a tune on the DART, a few more which are guitar recordings, and some text files which include lyrics. There will also probably be a project file or two in whichever editor I've chosen - usually Garageband or FL Studio, and occasionally audacity.

So when I'm writing something which I want to turn into a finished song and already know what it's about and what message I want to get across, I'm "writing a song". It's only a song when I'm done. If I'm just writing some tunes to use later, they're "riffs", and if I'm just writing down some feelings or lines, they're verse fragments.

OK so it's long winded, but it works for me. As I say, I'm sure everyone has wildly different and varying ways of defining these things.