Vocals "credited as" stage role?

I started by relating the vocalists of the opera Akhnaten to the respective recordings. I thought it would be a good idea to add their roles to the vocal credits as well. For example:

But it somehow seems wrong. On releases soprano vocals are credited as “soprano” and not “Queen Tye”…

On the other hand, there are other releases where exactly that has been done (e.g. back image of Koyaanisqatsi → “Voice of Koyaanisqatsi” - not “bass vocals”)

And a recording should be independent of the specific release… :thinking:

Should I continue with that? Or should I remove these “credited as” entries and put the roles in an annotation? …or leave it altogether, because there’s a list of roles and performers on Wikipedia, including this performance (“CBS recording, 1987”)?

I was recommended to do this by @chabreyflint when I was adding this release of Carmen

also, yes, perhaps a recording should be independent of a release*, but the role is more a property of the work in this case, which would be related no matter what release it’s on

*I’m not sure I agree here, but I’m open to the idea

also, the vocal roles is credited in the booklet of this release, on page 3

1 Like

Thanks! If it was even required to do so for Carmen, I’ll continue… :slight_smile:

(So far I would have interpreted that rather strictly - for example, spoken vocals [voice] - but it includes more information)

Since our user interface provides this “credited as” field, specifically for opera, and it’s valuable information, independently from what’s said on a given Release. Opera Releases basically all have this information, not necessarily on the (back) cover (like here: Release “Carmen (Gesamtaufnahme in deutscher Sprache)” by Bizet; Ludwig, Schock, Muszely, Prey, Chor der Deutschen Oper Berlin, Berliner Symphoniker, Horst Stein - Cover Art - MusicBrainz), but certainly in the booklet. So there’s is certainly nothing wrong with adding them :wink:

1 Like

This breaks user expectations of how the %performer% and %instruments% metadata values should work in Picard (and also all webservice consumers as a whole). e.g., “Moralès” isn’t equivalent to “baritone vocals” and can’t be consumed correctly by users of the MusicBrainz webservice. I’d expect “Moralès” to end up in the artist credit if at all, rather than in the name of the vocals.

So not then?
That would save me from deciding whether the daughters of Akhnaten should be named individually :wink:

I feel like this is solved by the fact that it is linked to the vocal part (i.e. baritone vocals), is it not? for example, Picard can easily standardize this performer credit with a checkbox in the settings

I’ve added the roles as “credited as”, but if there are technical issues, I would remove them
(clicking remove is easier than typing all the names again)

@yindesu:The roles show in addition to, not instead of the vocal range. It will be “Georg Völker: baritone vocals [Moralès]”, like here Recording “Carmen: Zweiter Akt: Nr. 13 Chor: Ein Hoch, ein Hoch dem Torero! (Zuniga, Frasquita, Mercédès, Carmen, Moralès, Chor)” by Chor der Deutschen Oper Berlin, Ursula Gust, Christa Ludwig, Iwan Rebroff, Ursula Schirrmacher, Georg Völker, Berliner Symphoniker, Horst Stein - MusicBrainz. So where’s the problem?

I was specifically talking about users of the webservice. This doesn’t look as terrible as I remember it if people are just supposed to discard the credited-as value in all cases.

As you’re probably aware, the usage of the “credited-as” field would never be used for instruments like it’s being used in this vocals example, and MusicBrainz has had the goal of merging vocals and instruments into the same relationship type, so it still feels wrong to me.

The idea here is that they played baritone vocals, specifically the baritone role of Moralès. In the same way you can indicate they played violin, specifically the role of 1st violin.

3 Likes