Sharing her method for turning poetry into melody, artist Nandi Rose (Halfwaif) demonstrates her Ableton Live workflow in a video for Ableton’s One Thing series. There’s a refreshing simplicity and clarity to her approach: record some chords, speak a poem, sing the poem using the spoken track as a guide, then delete the spoken portion (or keep as a layer).
Halfnaif’s method is similar to the Poetry DNA method, but without using the Convert Audio to MIDI feature of the software.
Thoughts, poet-musicians? Give it a try with your own poetry. One challenge will be rhythmic, as the spoken words might flow naturally in less (or more) musical time than sung words. But Halfwaif’s approach does have the advantage of emphasizing the phrasing of the poetry (and it helps if you can sing).
–poetrydnapoet
Poetry DNA 