Musical work within non-music track?

I’m just checking if there’s any special way to credit a work that is contained within a longer track which is mostly spoken. I didn’t see anything in the style guide that helped.

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You can creit an artist for spoken vocals, see audio books as examples,
You can also add works to the database that contain writing credits for example.
Edit the recording and add an artist relationship, change the type to vocals and the attribute to spoken word.
You can have a work for the song and a work for the poem or text that the lyrics are taken from if those are well known.

Thanks. I’m specifically wondering about the work credit. There’s a way to credit a recording that is only part of a work, but I’m not aware of a way to say “this work is only part of the recording”, except in case of a medley. I’ll just add the work normally unless someone says otherwise.

I might be wrong, but I believe the medley attribute fits “this work is only part of the recording”.

I normally add multiple works normally for cases like multiple movements in one classical track (I don’t use medley because, well, they’re not a medley, just played one after another). I’m not sure how similar that is to your situation though!

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Sorry @reosarevok, I don’t understand why you do not use the medley attribute for works “just played one after another”. A medley is not necessarily as simple but it can be. This relationship attribute is not specific to a genre, just like other relationship attributes. Am I plain wrong?

Ref:

“In music, a medley is a piece composed from parts of existing pieces” - when what you have is multiple disconnected pieces that are just played in a row and published as one track, that’s definitely not a medley in my view of it. It’s just a track which contains recordings of multiple works.

Of course, it depends on how the spoken track in this case is connected to the musical one :slight_smile:

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I most probably misunderstood (and thus widely misused) “medley” as any combination of (partial and full) existing works. This understanding includes pot-pourris, suites, and sets.

Back to the topic: I agree that we do not have enough information for this specific case: which part?

Situations like this cause some trouble if we like to calculate average or median duration (ticket MBS-7379) of the work based on recording durations. We could consider adding new attribute for current “recording of”-relationship.

Currently these situations are easily counted as mistakes and removed by some editors. For example when 60 minute recording is linked with 2 minute orchestral work and only relationship is for spoken vocals it easily looks like a mistake. I’ve already seen some incorrect removals because of this. Maybe an relationship attribute could also solve this problem.

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This is definitely not a medley. In the most extreme example I have, this is 10 minutes of talk and vocal sound effects with about 30 seconds of music at the end.

Other cases include intro/theme music for a longer segment.

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In such cases I just add a normal work link. You can always add an annotation on the recording to describe its contents.

Sure, it would be nice to have some way of mapping this.
I suppose adding optional sequencing to rec-work links (as for work-work parts links), which would be useful in and of itself, combined with special-purpose works like [silence], [spoken word] would work.

What about adding the music part as a standalone recording, and then linking your longer recording to it with „compilation of“? Too dirty?