Youth Voice in Music Making - Intro to Researcher Tessa Sawyer
PhD candidate University of Sheffield
Interdisciplinary research - Sheffield Methods Institute & Department of Music
What is youth voice? The answer to this question seems so obvious that it is not even worth asking: youth voice is about empowerment, agency and democracy. These assumptions can easily mislead us to over-simplify and under-analyse our notions of voice. For example, voice can be used to reproduce problematic stereotypes as well as to challenge these. Youth voice has great potential to empower young people and this research aims to investigate how youth voice is understood and enabled within the day-to-day life of a community music education charity.
As this research is all about youth voice, I worked with a team of young people as co-researchers. Together we planned out how we wanted to investigate our research questions, gathered our data and produced a documentary celebrating and showcasing young people’s musical journeys.
As a researcher-in-residence, I have a dual role as a researcher and a staff member at Tracks. I have been working with Tracks since 2019 and collaborating with my colleagues and Tracks’ young people on this research is such a privilege. The research is now in its final stages and I am very excited to share our findings. Watch this space!
Case Study of collaborative project outputs - Documentary (Tracks in the Making) and Lyrical Genius (songwriting zine)
Introduction
This songwriting case study explores themes from the documentary, Tracks in the Making, and the Tracks’ songwriting zine, Lyrical Genius. The zine was co-produced with young people through various workshops and events delivered by Tracks. Young people helped develop the games and exercises in the zine as well as the lyrics and artwork featured throughout the zine and the backing tracks available online. In addition, some of the young artists recorded their songs featured in the zine.
The documentary and this case study used interview data collected for research on youth voice in music making. As an output of this youth voice research, the documentary was co-produced with a team of four young co-researchers and foregrounds young people’s voices as they discuss their musical experiences and their songwriting processes. The documentary is available to watch on the Tracks UK YouTube channel and more information about the Lyrical Genius project can be found at www.tracksuk.com.
This case study draws on the youth voice research dataset which includes interviews with 31 participants, over 6 and a half hours of filmed footage and approximately 18 months of fieldnotes. The co-researchers helped develop the interview schedule, led on approximately half the interviews, assisted with the filming and, along with the interviewees featured in the documentary, provided feedback on initial edits of the documentary.
In editing the documentary and analysing the dataset, young people’s songwriting experiences were a central theme. This case study first discusses how young people drew on their musical experiences when writing their own songs. The first section explores a snapshot of these experiences and the second section discusses how these experiences influenced their own approach to songwriting.
Songwriting and musical experiences
Musical experiences are unique to each young person. The documentary opens with young people discussing their musical journeys to help give the viewer a sense of the life histories that are embedded in young people's approaches to music and songwriting. Instrumental learning and experiences varied between all the young people, but the unifying element was a love of music listening. In the documentary, the young people reflect on their listening preferences and the music that makes them feel most ‘like myself’, whether that is pop, Riot Grrl or old school classics like Michael Jackson. Throughout the interview data, young people are able to trace these preferences back to their childhood. Music listening often started young, with the earliest memories frequently tied to parental preferences:
“I grew up alongside artists such as Arctic Monkeys, Radiohead, Sex Pistols and Nirvana because of what my parents listened to” (SMS17)
“My mum introduced me to Biggie Smalls from being very young. And then a lot of reggae artists and a lot of dancehall, a lot of neo soul, like Erykah Badu, my mum introduced me to Erykah Badu” (SMS30)
However, for all the interviewees there came a point where they ventured out on their own, searching out new music and beginning to make personal music choices. This often began as preteens and created strong memories, “[I] began to listen to rap on my own…Kanye West was my very first artist that I found, ever…it was so different from what I had listened to before” (SMS19). These moves towards musical independence help to shape the young people’s musical identity and their sense of self as a musician.
In addition, these early musical experiences created opportunities to develop active music listening skills that helped to shape individual approaches to songwriting. Young people learned to listen out for elements in the music that they felt the strongest connection to. For some this was instrumental parts, “I pay most attention to the fiddly instrumentals” (SMS17), for others it was rhythm, “because it seems like it’s a part of you and never leaves” (SMS6) and for others it was lyrics, “because they hold the music underneath together” (SMS3). Regardless of the specific musical element the young person focused on, this form of attentive listening helped them to develop their understanding of underlying structures within the songs. For those with some formal music education, this might include the language to describe what they are hearing. For instance, chord structures, major/minor tonalities, or naming the various elements of a song, verse/chorus/middle 8, etc. For others, this knowledge was felt but difficult to explain, below is a short interaction at the end of an interview:
Interviewer: “Yesterday, I mean, when you guys were creating music, you seemed to know your way around the structure and you know, music in general. Is that something you do outside?
SMS20: “No, I just personally, I just sing in my room and, and I listen to myself. And if I hear something wrong, I will redo it and try to improve” (Interview transcript from 2024-04-05)
Or, as described in the documentary by the bassist from Split approach to music, “I just feel it”. Whatever the terrain of their personal musical journey, young people harnessed their musical experiences in their approach to songwriting.
Approaches to Lyric Writing
The Lyrical Genius zine brings together songwriting ideas, techniques, and exercises collaboratively developed with young people through “delving into their creative processes”. The documentary takes a behind the scenes look at what some of these creative processes are. The interviewees talk about coming up with themes, working collaboratively in groups, and making sure the lyrics fit the beat or melody. Efforts to fit the lyrics and the beat/instrumentation were linked to different objectives, depending on the young person’s personal preferences but also on their concept of what they wanted to achieve within their songwriting. The two quotes below give examples of different kinds of approaches:
“It's the depth of the lyrics…I like to have meaning within, like the shortest amount of lyrics and stuff, and sometimes it's quite, it's quite a simple line that's the most impactful” (SMS28)
“freestyling…the words would come with the feeling but then the flow will just come naturally cause I’ve not planned it out but I mean I’m just flowing off what I’m hearing…I just go with it, like leave me brain I just flow it” (SMS31)
The above examples reflect the different approaches depending on the musical goal. In the first quote, the songwriter appreciates the poetic qualities within lyrics, combining a depth of meaning in their linguistic phrasings which is also aesthetically beautiful. The songwriter goes on to explain that the instrumentation needs to match the lyrics and this matching is felt intuitively. They described instances when they made lyrical changes because the original lyrics were not a good match for how the song was developing musically. As one mentor put it in a group songwriting session:
“Think about the fact that a piano is…sort of the core, [it] is going to give a certain feel anyway, so the instrumentation will give a certain feel. You should probably lean into that, so don’t try and make the piano do something that it isn’t” (Mentor, 2024-05-30)
The second example, where the rapper is talking about freestyling, takes a different approach but the goal is the same, for the flow of the words to match the beat. The rap tutor in the documentary also discusses the idea of an interdependence between the lyrics and the beat, for him, getting the balance between the beat and the lyrics is more important than either aspect on their own. Through their listening to and engaging with different styles of music, young people therefore develop a feel for musical structure and balance that can create a spark for exploring their own musical ideas.
Concluding Thoughts
Developing a feel for balancing lyrics and instrumentation comes through experimentation, that is, trying out different ideas, modifying them and sometimes letting them go. The main goal of the Lyrical Genius zine is to offer various strategies as a starting place for generating songwriting ideas that young people can play around with. The accompanying backing tracks help songwriters to begin to develop a feel for connecting lyrics and instrumentation. Songwriting is about musical curiosity, taking part and having a go helps young people build confidence in their creative potential.
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