What’s The Impact Of Lyrics On Music?
- Does a song needs meaningful lyrics? –

The painter needs colours and shapes, the author needs words and sentences, and the musician needs rhythms, tones, sounds and voices. These are basically the main differences of the three art forms. Words and text are in principle not required components to paint or make music. It’s enough to have a title or name for paintings and music pieces.

Music is a language of itself. This is obvious for instrumental music like concerts, symphonies, organ, piano, etc. Rhythms, tones, melodies, sounds and voices mediate mood and feeling without singing meaningful lyrics. Therefore many international songs and hits for example are successful not because of exciting and meaningful lyrics, but due to the unique musical compositions and the specific sonic characters of the singing voices in accordance with the moods, minds and tastes of the mass of listeners.

But the human voice is an individually different musical “instrument” to be used as an outstanding stylistic device as part of a song, a musical, opera or other music pieces. It needs sounds in such a way of vowels, consonants and resonant syllables to get a voice musical audible. Songwriters and rap vocalists apply words and text of known languages which fit to the chosen rhythm and sound.

To express a voice musical effectively, it’s not necessary to use a native language like English, French, Italian, German, etc., an artificial, freestyle fantasy language can be applied as well as part of a music piece.
Folksongs, hits, musicals and operas utilize traditionally meaningful lyrics for singing and recitative. Many foreign-language lyrics may not be readily understood always and completely by the mass of listeners. It’s not essential to understand the used language to know the true promise of the musical piece.
Naturally it’s easier to sing in a native language than creating an adequate and tuneful fantasy language. However there are the possibilities to imitate a native language and hybrid forms of tongues. The imitation of a native language has to take care of the characteristic phonetic attributes of the selected native language. Well known are for example the nasal sounds of the French language.
Who is using an imitation of a native language or fantasy words for lyrics is able to compose a song with vocal arrangement like a traditional songwriter.

But there are still only a few vocal songs published using an artificial or fantasy language. Similar to the poetic licence of literature, the music maker can create new phonetic acoustic and language-like lyrics to use the human voice as pure art form for music.

Is there anything to be said against or in addition?

Volker Zdunnek aka Philos60