PRODALOUB

Chanson française is a lyric-centered French song tradition in which the expressiveness, prosody, and storytelling of the French language take priority over virtuosic vocal display. Melodies tend to be memorable yet restrained, arranged to support the text rather than overshadow it. Historically linked to Parisian cabarets, music halls, and the café-concert circuit, the style embraces topics ranging from love and everyday life to social satire and political commentary. Typical accompaniments include guitar, accordion, piano, and small orchestras, with arrangements that can range from intimate to lush. Performance is as much about interpretation and diction as it is about singing, often favoring conversational phrasing and dramatic nuance.

Poetry (as a recorded genre) centers on the spoken or performed recitation of verse, foregrounding voice, diction, rhythm, and imagery over conventional song structure. Performances may be entirely unaccompanied or framed by sparse accompaniment such as piano, strings, jazz combos, drones, or subtle sound design. Unlike broader spoken word, which can include storytelling, monologues, and comedy, poetry recordings focus on literary verse—metered, rhymed, or free—delivered with attention to prosody and poetic form. Releases range from archival readings by canonical poets to contemporary performance sets recorded in studios, classrooms, libraries, and clubs. The listening experience often emphasizes intimacy and textual clarity: microphones capture breath, cadence, and silence, while arrangements (if any) remain secondary to the poem’s language and pacing.

White voice is a traditional Eastern European folk singing technique—codified as a genre label in the late-20th-century folk revival—that features a bright, powerful, open-throated timbre projected without classical vibrato. Singers carry the sound on resonant, forward-placed vowels to cut through open-air settings. It is closely associated with Polish (biały głos), Ukrainian, and Belarusian rural repertoires: wedding songs, field and ritual chants, work songs, and seasonal carols. Typical textures are unison or heterophony over a drone, with modal melodies (often Dorian or Mixolydian), parallel 3rds/4ths/5ths, and strong rhythmic pulse when dance-derived. On contemporary stages, the style appears a cappella or with folk instruments (frame drum, fiddles, dulcimer/cymbały, hurdy-gurdy, bagpipes/dudy, sopilka) and in fusions that add bass, percussion, and electronics.