Round 4 NieR

Original Challenge:

Heya, this round is gonna be special one, you’ll be composing for vocals in the style of NieR! The key part of its unique sound is the “chaos language” created specifically for the series by Emi Evans, the lead vocalist. How it works is the structure and flow of the speech is based off of a chosen language. Emi Evans would then bring in sounds from other languages and combine them together to create a distorted evolution of the original language.

It’s not completely random, Emi Evans will give individual words common elements such as some shared ending and starting sounds. Probably the best way to develop your own chaos language lyrics is to take a language you are familiar with and then search around for a language that sounds unique or interesting to you and combine them. There’s no limit to languages you can borrow from, so feel free to explore before settling on one.

Here’s a short break down of how most languages work sound-wise:

Each sound in a language is called a “phoneme”. The English language has somewhere around 44 distinct phonemes. Just to specify, they are different from letters in the alphabet. For example, the letter “e” is pronounced differently in “bread” and “ear”. Other languages have different sounds such as the Spanish “rr”, “ll”, and ”ñ”. You can look up the phonology of a language on Wikipedia to get a list of sounds they contain.

Sounds on their own can be a little meaningless so when structuring your lyrics it’s a god idea to also consider the parts of the words. These are called “morphemes” if you want to look them up. There are two simple categories: One will be the root of your word, for example “catch”. The other is a suffix (such as“-able” or “-ing”) or a prefix (such as “-un” or “-dis”). So when you come up up with imaginary words you can keep some coherence by structuring it like you would a normal word.

You’ll be writing lyrics for a vocalist, so please remember to keep their vocal range and pronunciation in mind when writing! If you’re ever stuck, keep in mind that the main idea behind chaos language is to allow emotions to come through the sounds of the human voice, so relying a lot more on your instincts can help. Try pronouncing the words as well to get a feel for how they sound.

Our round 4 reward is kindly supplied by Orchestra Tools! The Whisper sound pack could be won by anyone participating in the Original or Arrangement/Orchestration challenges. The only requirements is that you post at least one feedback to another challenger for the round.

Summon ethereal tones and channel atmospheric harmonies with four softly played wind instruments — a flute, a muted cornet, a flugelhorn, and a bass clarinet, alongside a rich ensemble of intricately processed pads, plucks, and keys.

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