I've Never Seen Anybody Do the Things You Do Befo[i] : En studie om Cursive Singing

Sammanfattning: Titel: I’ve never seen anybody do the things you do befo[ɪ]: En studie om Cursive Singing. English title: I’ve never seen anybody do the things you do befo[ɪ]: A study about Cursive Singing. This is a critical study about the music industry with focus on the technological aspects of musical trends. The musical trend studied here is a modern singing technique called cursive singing – a phenomenon concerning the pronunciation of the lyrics in contemporary pop music. By looking into three hit songs of the late 2010s in which the singer employs cursive singing, I am aiming to find answers to two questions: Which other musical parameters do these three songs from 2015 to 2019 have in common, and what can they tell us about the mixing process? After answering this question, I am trying to find out whether certain contemporary music production techniques of these three songs could encourage cursive singing, and if so – how? I have employed two methods for analyzing the songs: a multimodal analysis as well as a reenactment of a recording situation. The multimodal analysis is based on the terms and concepts presented in the book Speech, Music, Sound (1999) by multimodalist and linguist Theo van Leeuwen, while the reenactment is an attempt to gain insight in the singing situation of todays recording artists, where the compressor is becoming more and more important in the mixing process, diminishing the dynamics of the recorded song. Through enabling mass production and distribution of music, the music technology has become an essential part of the music industry, while it at the same time is shaping the recorded music.