Is the recording an "instrumental" if it never had words?

I’m not editing classical though. I am editing non-classical music. And I had assumed, as noted above, that a song writer writes songs even if there are no words. When the song is played on the radio he is paid for that performance even though he doesn’t sing.

This is why I am asking - what is he writing if that one “thingy without lyrics” is in the middle of an album of songs. It is not a “song” and it is not “instrumental”. This is where my understanding of the use language is breaking down. Puzzled :confused:

What about a composer writing a tune for a song, the lyricist takes too much time and the tune is published without lyrics? Still not a song?
I’m saying this because I know of instances where the music was composed first. For me, then, it’s a song without lyrics.

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Hang on… but how does that Wikipedia page start?

" An instrumental is a musical composition or recording without lyrics, or singing, although it might include some inarticulate vocals, such as shouted backup vocals in a Big Band setting."

That tells me these musical pieces without words should be “instrumental”. But MB says no.

And the “Song” page tells me that a piece with words is a song. Which is what MB is saying, but as @rey200 mentions there are often songs without words. :crazy_face:

I am going to turn this off and leave it to settle in as too many definitions are clashing in my head here.

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No, no, MB doesn’t say that they’re not instrumental :slight_smile: If we had a work type for instrumental, you could use it! (we don’t currently because that’s also tricky, but that’s a different issue! :smiley: ).

MB only says “do not set this ‘instrumental’ attribute that is meant to separate instrumental and vocal recordings of works with lyrics” :slight_smile:

I am not sure I would agree with that.
To me it seems like that interpretation of ‘instrumental’ could be an additional annotation.

If you have a recording/work/composition, and there are no vocals on it, to me it seems an obvious and unambiguous choice to label it as ‘instrumental’.
It would also not be prone to cause confusion or doubt by an editor or others evaluating it.
It’s basic and simple: 'No vocals?, > instrumental.

When it is considered to be a relative concept and something you would only be able to make a decision on after the recording has been compared to some other recording, it becomes a bit vague, and also more prone to discussions and/or differences in opinions.

edit,
Hm, having read some more comments, I am getting some doubts if I have a correct understanding where and how this ‘instrumental’ attribute is set. I should probably read some more before having ‘an opinion’ :wink:

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@IvanDobsky, more about this strangeness of song not sung:

I mean, I think I was the one to create it, but even if I wasn’t, we did add it specifically for that. You might want to redefine it, but for now, that’s what it’s supposed to mean :slight_smile:

In fact, IIRC it was supposed to mean more precisely “the lyricist and other similar relationships for the work don’t apply to this recording”, since there’s otherwise no way of telling that. To the point that the general agreement was not to use it for karaoke tracks, even though they’re actually instrumental, because they are meant to be sung on so the lyrics are relevant :smiley:

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What wiki says is irrelevant, because we do not have a type “Instrumental”. Instrumentals, as said above have in general no type in MusicBrainz outside classical. But you can (only) add “instrumental” as a property of a recording, on the same level as “live” or “partial”, saying: we have here a performance of a given Work/Song which differs from the original by being performed “instrumental”, or “live”, or “as part of a medley”.

Off topic – as this is really another can of worms: The definition of “Song” as Work with lyrics only is still controversial. An instrumental track in an album of a singer/songwriter is not the only doubtful case; in classical also several composers have published Works explicitly called “Songs without words”…

This is an area I am confused by. If all these types are there for the exclusive use of Classical works, then why are they open for selection for non-classical? Am I allowed to select items like poem? I have musicians who do spoken poetry. What about play? Is that also classical only? I have set radio plays with that type before.

I am not following “wiki”, I am following the English language. Or I thought I was. So many English terms get redefined by MB to something different, but that definition is not clearly written down in the guidelines.

I picked up on “wiki” because @reosarevok quoted part of a Wikipedia article to me, but carefully avoided the bit that seemed to agree with the normal interpretation of the word.

Back to the original question - this whole band’s output is without vocals. They write in the same way a classical musician would and the music is the key.

  • I now learn they don’t write “songs” - but no one can tell me what they are writing. What Work type have they produced? Music without words?

  • I learn they are not “instrumental” Recordings even though they fit the English Dictionary definition. (That mistake I have now fixed thanks to a script)

  • I learn that they are not “English” but instead should be “no lyrics”. Well, that at least makes sense to me. :joy:

When I try and read any of the Classical side of MB I see a very different interpretation of things. I didn’t realise that so many of the terms I thought were for MB wide use are reserved to “Classical Only”. But this thread is not supposed to be about Classical.

Can someone PLEASE write some clearer guidelines? Make it clear what us non-classical editors are allowed to use and the meanings of those terms. There are some strange definitions of “song” and “instrumental” here that are different to how I used to understand these words. Just please WRITE IT DOWN and make it clear and then I’ll attempt to correct things.

And thank you @hiccup as I am glad I am not the only one confused here.

Oh - and if any script expert can help with this, I can then quickly correct the Works to be more compliant ( https://bitbucket.org/loujine/musicbrainz-scripts/wiki/documentation.rst#rst-header-id7 ) Does this script work for anyone? Or is it dead?

And to be clear - I am not arguing against the rules, I am just trying to understand stuff that is not following normal English meanings of the words. :slight_smile:

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Indeed, the English language is often very “rich”, a single simple words having multiple meanings. If you lookup “song” in a dictionary:

Definition of song

1 : the act or art of singing
2 : poetical composition
3a : a short musical composition of words and music
3b : a collection of such compositions
4 : a distinctive or characteristic sound or series of sounds (as of a bird, insect, or whale)
5a : a melody for a lyric poem or ballad
5b : a poem easily set to music
6a : a habitual or characteristic manner
6b : a violent, abusive, or noisy reaction “put up quite a song
7 : a small amount “sold for a song

It seems that among all these meanings, in MB we use the term “song” with the same meaning as French “chanson”, or definition 3a.
Unfortunately the English language sometimes lacks terms with precise meaning, and hence is ambiguous. I don’t think that there is a word in English with a meaning as narrow as “chanson”.
As we use this term in MB with a specific meaning, it could be useful indeed to add it to MB’s terminology.
(we could also move MB to French as default language to avoid the ambiguity of English language :laughing:)

Well I would say it’s just music … no specific type, so leave the type blank. The “Type” for a work is for music which follows a specific composition structure, this is why you have many types of classical music, which is generally more codified.
Unfortunately, the list of work type is very limited (even for classical music) and for many works, the field has to be left blank. And definitely “[No lyrics]” instead of English.

You should probably add tags to specify the genre of music (“Ambient”, “Space rock”, …)
I believe that this would be more relevant to classify these types of work.

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Thank You @Algwyn. I can see the logic in your explanation. Not so sure about learning French to edit MB :joy: as English is confusing enough. And I thought I knew that language.

I don’t touch tags as I always find them opinion based. That’s a mission for another day.

Thanks to you all for a clearer understanding of the terms. Just got to get that script to work now to correct all the Ozric “songs” to a blank and tweak the language.

Yes, it works for me in Firefox with Violentmonkey - but only after I found out that I have to check the boxes on the right side to get any changes applied :joy:

Maybe I missed this somewhere in the thread (although I think @reosarevok at least alluded to it) but:

The “instrumental” checkbox is not a property of the recording but of the recording-work relationship. Which is why it displays as “…is an instrumental recording of…” .

If there were an “instrumental” checkbox on the recording itself, then you’d be correct to check it whether the work itself had words or not.

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They are! But that’s why they don’t work like the rest of the site, and people can just upvote or downvote tags - if you agree, click plus and if you disagree, click minus, and eventually a community opinion will appear that represents more or less the general thinking :slight_smile: (but let’s not continue on this on this topic - if you want to talk tags later we can open a separate one)

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Okay… that is weird. I’ll see if I can get it working on Firefox. I usually am in Vivaldi doing these edits, but that is also Violent Monkey.

Getting weirder - it works loads on a different PC with Vivaldi and Violent Monkey. Not sure why not working on this PC… but will work something out. Damn - spoke too soon. All that lets me do is fill in data for the blank ones… exact opposite of what I need.

So I’ll try getting Firefox setup with Violent Monkey and see if I get the drop down boxes as in the example. Nope - Violent Monkey not wanting to install on Firefox. :confounded: (I want a “bangs head on desk” emojii)

@kellnerd (or anyone) - when i say “does this work”? I mean - can you change a value that is already set to something else? So far all I have got is one copy of Vivaldi letting me set blanks to other values. And Firefox plain refusing to talk to any Violent Monkey.

I gave up on getting that script to behave. It is written opposite to what was needed. It only edits blank data.

So I have hacked my first script. Hacked the code directly. There is now a huge list of outstanding edits for Ozric Tentacles Works to correct the last of my mistakes there. All now Work Type [blank] and language [no lyrics]
https://musicbrainz.org/artist/5629ca87-9086-48c4-8dc4-b4a966c45067/open_edits
https://musicbrainz.org/artist/071e5068-96a5-460f-b3bc-cb4a3a5f2036/open_edits

(Can’t see the easy way to list them all unless you go into my Open Edits… but that is the majority in those two lists)

Managed to get it down to three clicks for each correction. That saved a LOAD of time…

I can also see a reason I have never spotted [No Lyrics] before. If you are looking at a Works page it shows a bizarre “zxx” that I previously assumed was “The World”.

Can we get a better abbreviation? Or put [No Lyrics] up on that Works page? Ozric Tentacles - Works - MusicBrainz

image

Isn’t it kinda weird to put three letter abbreviations in here, but then title the column so wide as “Lyrics Language”? Doesn’t that title just let us put back the actual language here?

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Nope, only blank inputs can be set with this script. But it seems you already tweaked it to obey :grin:

BTW, the @mention did not trigger a notification for me, maybe because you edited it into your post?

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Glad you confirmed it wasn’t just me. I was chasing around different browsers and PCs trying to get the to “work”. And yet it never could have done as I needed.

So the Cricket Bat of Persuasion™ has been applied to the code to beat it into submission. A very messy hack of commenting out a few lines of code. Tweaking a few other bits. Trying a few and checking the edit queues… Now just got to wait for the dozens of edits to get approved. I can then chase out any errors I missed.

Bonus to come out of this is editing my first script - that may be a dangerous step to have learnt :smiling_imp: :nerd_face: :crazy_face:

And @kellnerd - you may be right that this Discordian forum software is not calling you out after I made edits. This time I put your name into the original edit so you can see if it is working.

I always believe one learns more by mistakes than getting it right all the time.

Good point, added MBS-10695 and submitted a pull request.

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