And, inevitably, there is the Soulful Syllable Stretch. The Soulful Syllable Stretch involves elongating words with flashy arpeggios and trills: "love" becomes "lo-oh-ho-HEY-ah-ho-HO-ho-hoooooooOOOOOOOOVE!" A Soulful Syllable Stretch Grand Mistress, such as Beyoncé Knowles of Destiny's Child, can make one word last a week. Keys alternates Soulful Syllable Stretches with pregnant pauses. How Come You Don't Call Me? is so rife with the latter, you suspect the involvement of Harold Pinter.
When it comes to singing, there are basically two approaches you can take: syllabic or melismatic.
Syllabic means that if you have lyrics, each syllable gets one note. Pretty straightforward enough. In fact, it's so straightforward it's basically the universal way of singing.
This also includes the songs where for a certain syllable the note sung goes through a bit of tremolo, or there's a glissando between one syllable and the next one. You can throw in flourishes if you want, but the rule of thumb remains "one syllable = one note".
Melismatic means that you hold down one syllable while moving through several notes. This is called
melisma. It's very common in religious, Arab, Middle Eastern, African, Balkan, Indian and various other types of music, especially
Folk music (such as the Portuguese fado).
Melisma migrated over to pop music at some indistinct point (credit for popularising it varies between
Stevie Wonder,
Mariah Carey or some others), and now it's pretty common in R&B or R&B-influenced pop music. Remember
Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You"? That's melisma.
* Though to be fair,
Dolly Parton did it in the original version, too, though not nearly as much.
It's easy to see why it ended up in pop music: used properly it can have a great effect. The only problem is that there have been many singers recently who just blindly abuse it to lend their songs some sort of "soulfulness" or whatever, and it just becomes annoying, as demonstrated by the above quote. A frequent way to deride these singers is to note that they take simple words like "yeah", "I" or "whoa" and stretch it to something like
over 9000 syllables. But the real problem is that some artists don't have the skill or vocal range to actually pull it off.
More info about the abuse of this technique can be found
here
.
People who love melisma:
