Many years ago, I was sitting in the Berklee library and I was reading the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. I was reading it for pleasure. I know. I know the phrase, get a life springs to mind. But there I was, and I was reading the section on phonetic relationships, phonetic groupings. Now I thought, ooh, this is going to be really exciting. And it started talking about consonant groupings. I said, okay. Okay. It's said, here's a group, here's a group of consonants. All of them use the air column in the same way. All of them use the air column by interrupting it. And then, exploding with it. And those are called plosives, because they explode. There are six of them. There is the[SOUND]. Do that,[SOUND]. Note that the place that you are exploding your two lips together, stop the air. And then[SOUND] explode, okay? Now let's try the t sound. Now ,note that you're putting the tip of your tongue on your hard palette, stopping the air there and then exploding. So,[sound]. And finally, let's take look at the k sound[SOUND] where you raise the middle of your tongue to your soft pallet[SOUND] interrupt the air there and then explode with it. So that moving backwards in the mouth we have[SOUND], all of which are phonetically related in that they interrupt the air column. And then explode with it. If you do the p sound,[SOUND], note that you're not using your vocal cords,[SOUND] you're not engaging your vocal chords[SOUND]. If you engage your vocal chords while doing the p sound[SOUND], it becomes a b. So that p and b , let's call them partners. That is to say, they have in common that they both interrupt the air column with your two lips. They have as a differentiation that the p is unvoiced, you don't use your voice, and that the b is voiced, you do engage your vocal cords. So,[sound] do the t sound. Now engage your vocal cords. It becomes a d, and so there's t's partner, d. Now, let the k sound[SOUND] engage your vocal cords. It becomes a g. So there are your six plosives. The three on voice,[SOUND] and the three voiced, and they form a family. I thought, wow, that's pretty interesting. I never thought about it. And then, a little voice in the back of my head said, I wonder if anyone's ever applied this to rhyming. And so, I looked around, looked around, looked around, looked around, nobody had. And so I thought, okay, why don't I do that? So here, we are playing around with the second condition for perfect rhyme, that the consonant sounds after the vowel have exactly the same sound. And I'm changing the second condition for perfect rhyme to the consonant sounds after the vowel are phonetically related, and that creates then family rhyme. So, if one were working simply in these six plosives, what would happen if, let's say starting with my heart's been stuck in the mud. So there I've got mud as a rhyme, that I want to rhyme, and let's say that I go into my perfect rhymes and find out, you know, blood, stud, and I don't really have as many possibilities there. I can't really say what I want to say in this, I guess fairly stable, let's say, sequence. So, I'm going to go different places. So, using this whole notion of phonetically-related consonants at the end, here we have the d as the ending consonant. And let's, let's then take a look at d's partner, t. And go to our rhyming dictionary and find in our rhyming dictionary words that use the short U vowel but end in t. So, in our rhyming dictionary, we'll get things like cut, glut, hut, shut, rut. So, mud, rut. Really? Mud, rut. Sound a lot alike. That is to say here, using the partner, we have something like a perfect rhyme substitute. Now, let's put the G in the bass. [music] Da, da, da, da, dum. [music] The G is very closely related to the C. In the key of C, in the scale of C, the first overtone is the octave. The second overtone is the fifth. So that when you play the root and the fifth, relatively speaking, there are very few extra overtones created, relatively speaking. So that it feels pretty smooth when we hit the C major triad, sing the C and put the five in the base. You might call that a C major first position, root position substitute. You might call it a substitute, that is it gives you almost everything. Now playing the C in the bass does, but not quite, takes just a little bit away. But it still is very useful because playing that really does make you feel like you've come home, even though your room has been repainted. Even though the bedspread is different, you're still home and you can get a pretty good night's sleep. Let's go back into d's little rectangle, its two companions, b, which is voiced like d is, and g, which is voiced like d is, and mud, rub, mud, rug. So that we have now In looking at t, and now b, and now g, as ending consonants we have now increased our rhyming options by a factor of three. So, we have three times as many opportunities to say something that we mean, that is interesting, and still create what amounts to a perfect rhyme. We can also work with tease to companions. So, mud, cup, mud, truck. And still, retain that, close resemblance between all of those sounds. Based on the manipulation of the second condition for perfect rhyme, which is now reading that the consonants following the vowel belong to the same phonetic family. So, having thought about this and said, wow, okay, that really seems to make sense. And looking to see if anybody else had worked down that alleyway I thought, okay, I'm going to do that. And so, you will find in Chapter 4 of Writing Better Lyrics this whole sche, schematic of, of family rhyme. I then continued reading into another group of consonants, which instead of interrupting the air column, actually impede the air column and create by impeding the air column, friction. Friction. And those are, because they create friction by impeding, making it difficult for the air to get out but not stopping it, those are called Fricatives because they create friction. And for the fricatives, there are 10 of them. As you can see on the chart, they're also broken into companions. That is, in the same rectangle, those that are voiced in the same way, both the voiced fricatives and the unvoiced fricatives, so that when you start with a word that ends in a fricative, you can then start working in the companion box, and then into the partner's box, and see what see what you can figure out. So, let's take anybody looking for love? Looking for love? So, you know, go to your rhyming dictionary under perfect rhymes, you will find above, dove, glove. And by the way, you won't find of, of. That has a slightly different vowel sound. But how many times has love been rhymed with of? Hmm, lot's of times. But, you know, that's just an application of this close proximity of rhyme. So that you have very limited number of possibilities when trying to rhyme love. And how many songs have looked heavenward when talking about love. The sky above, the stars above. All of these of above, above, above. Why do stars seem so romantic? Why does the moon seem so well? Maybe they are, but you know what? They're also up there. And so they, you can use the word above. Now it seems to me that, you know, what if the sound that we had come up with, when we were in our harmony stage, and just developing sounds when we're pointing at things. What if, instead of coming up with the word love, what if we had said that concept, that thing, that feeling in the heart? What if we had said, girt. I girt you. I girt you. At which point, when those sounds now connect with that feeling, I bet you there would be lots of farming metaphors. Dirt, girt and of course, obviously since all love leads to pain, hurt would work really well, too. Just kidding. So that so that because the perfect rhyme possibilities with love are so limited, let's see if we can expand it a little bit. Certainly, love, buzz, love, grudge, love, rough, love, crush, love, crutch, that all of those are going to create some degree of connection. That even though it's not a perfect rhyme, you're going to get fairly consistent stability. Now, note that the love and crush doesn't sound when you say it, like so much of a rhyme, or like a perfect rhyme substitute. But note also, that singers sing vowels. That vowels are our tone generators so that when I sing love, the vowels are the kings. The vowels are the royalty. The consonants are simply second class citizens. So,love. And so, when the vowels in songs, as they always are, are your first class citizens, your royalty and the consonant's second class citizens, love, crutch, feels pretty close. So, it's because of the nature of songs that it is a vowel exaggerated medium. That we can make really interesting connections between words, which if spoken, don't quite create that full resolution, or at least a strong resolution. But in song, we can do that. Thirdly, according to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, there are the nasals. Those three sounds that come out your nose. So,[sound] the m sound,[SOUND] the n sound,[SOUND] the ng sound, those three are in the same family, and note that all three of them are voiced. They have in common that they all drive the air column up your nose. And so, the sound comes out your nose. Your sound for the m[SOUND] closes your lips and uses the mouth and the sinus cavities as a resonating chamber. The n sound,[SOUND] raises the tip of your tongue to your hard palate and takes part of your mouth out of the resonating chamber, and that's why m and n sound different from each other. You have part of your mouth, about half of your mouth, resonating along with your sinus cavities. And then, the ng sound,[SOUND] completely closes your, your, your, it takes your mouth out of the mix and sends all of the sound up through your nasal cavities. So, those three, come, sun, hung, are pretty close. And so, those are the three categories of consonants the plosives, the fricatives and the nasals, which you can engage in creating perfect rhyme substitutes, family rhyme. And in doing that, we'll be able to create something like closure. That is something like G in the base, ba da, da, da, dum. [music] And feel pretty resolved. Not quite as resolved as perfect rhyme. So that what family rhyme does is, first of all, it gives you in the plosives five times the number of options you have with simple perfect rhyme. In the fricatives, since usually all fricatives don't engage, it will generally give you seven or eight times as many opportunities to say what you mean and still have a stable rhyme, a resolved rhyme. And in the nasals, of course, you get then by a factor of two or three the, the, the, the number of opportunities to say what you mean and still rhyme, and still have a resolving figure, still have the rhyme impact that happens. It's rhyme does a lot of things. Rhyme will create for you closure when you get to the end of a, end of a verse or chorus. And if you work rhyme inside the lines, that is to say inside the rhyme scheme, it can give you a sense of acceleration. For example, let's just take the, the limerick. There once was a student name Esser whose knowledge grew lesser and lesser. And it once grew so small, he knew nothing at all. So now, he's a college professor. So there we go, once grew so small, he knew nothing at all. You get those short lines that rhyme, and that pushes you forward. That gives you an acceleration. With perfect rhyme, the acceleration is crisper. With perfect rhyme, the closure is more full. But you all, don't always want that kind of crispness, that kind of solidity depending on what you're talking about. So, what we're trying to do here is engage the sonic aspects of your writing, that is the relationship between vowels and consonants. Engage that much as you do with chords in your tool belt, allowing you with rhyme scheme itself to create something more or less stable. By opening the gate slightly, either in an accelerating position or in a closing position, opening the gates slightly with family rhyme. And giving you not quite the resolution you could have had with a perfect rhyme. But still, giving you enough resolution that although your room has been repainted. And the bedspread has been changed, you still get to sleep in your same bed and get a good night sleep.
