A conversation with Dan Molkentin of SingersBabel — with notes on Peachnote, Sparks and Wiry Cries, and Medici TV

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of meeting for coffee with Dan Molkentin, co-founder and co-artistic director of SingersBabel, the subscription-based website with lyric diction resources. He happened to be in town for the Music Library Association conference, so we took the opportunity to get together and talk shop. I knew at once that he was a kindred spirit when our conversation ranged from web technology stacks, media workflows, and website project management, to textual discrepancies in different composers’ setting of the same poems, Italianate vs. German Latin, and whether we should be rolling or vanishing our final R’s in German.

One piece of SingersBabel news that Dan shared was that they will be introducing Russian resources to the website in coming weeks. The resources will include multimedia guides for learning the basic sounds of the language, as well as guides for specific texts and repertoire. Speaking of repertoire, Dan tells me that the repertoire guides on the site will focus on choral works and oratorio, with a bit of art song to boot. (Although I REALLLLY hope – pretty please – that they’ll consider bringing some opera people on board to produce diction resources for the operatic repertoire and Italian. There’s an untapped market there, and even if they just did the arias from those ubiquitous Larsen anthologies, I bet they’d get business from a bunch of vocal performance majors and the like.)

We also talked about the recent SingersBabel website testing program, which I participated in.  One thing that I discovered in the course of testing is that the website has many more resources than I thought; it’s just that they’re hard to find (and the SingersBabel team is working to rectify that).  A sampling of notable resources:

• Audio comparison of vowel and consonant sounds in different languages (subscription required) – with special attention given to vowels that are transcribed with the same IPA symbol but have slightly different shadings in the various languages
• SingersBabel YouTube channel – song texts, IPA introduction, and more
• Dan’s YouTube channel – including his 35-minute Introduction to Lyric German Diction video
• And I really like this video on how to prepare a song text and really break down the text and diction components:

Dan shared some other online music resources with me as well.  One of them, Peachnote, is something I’ve been meaning to check out for a while.  From what I’ve gathered, Peachnote is a provider of a number of interesting music technologies, but one that particularly attracted Dan’s interest was Peachnote’s platform for collaborative online multimedia annotation of music scores.  In plain English, that means that you can use Peachnote’s score viewer to annotate the score with your own text, audio, or video notes and also view annotations that others have added.  Here’s a screen capture of Peachnote’s score viewer with annotations:

Peachnote also makes it possible to embed the score viewer in your own website, and in fact the viewer is already in use over at IMSLP with a number of scores.  For example, you can go to the IMSLP page for Le nozze di Figaro, navigate to the full score for the overture, and click the “View” button:

The Peachnote viewer then displays the score, which someone has annotated with a YouTube video recording of a performance of the overture:

Dan also tipped me off to the Sparks and Wiry Cries blog and e-zine about art song.  (I can’t believe I’ve never stumbled upon this.)  From their masthead: “Our mission is to provide a virtual home for the art song community: performers, students, scholars and fans. We endeavor to provoke thoughtful discussion about the extraordinary art of song.”  One of their contributors is Emily Ezust, creator and maintainer of The Lied, Art Song, and Choral Texts Archive, and they have a number of other notable contributors as well.

Lastly, Dan mentioned Medici TV, a French website which offers free live broadcasting of concerts, operas, and ballets along with video on demand from their catalog of concerts and classical music documentaries.

Thank you, Dan, for our engaging and enlightening conversation, and best of luck with the SingersBabel venture!

Related Posts:

• Podcast: The Diction Police
• Diction, music history, and tech for choral conductors on SlideShare [via Philip Copeland]
• More posts tagged “diction”
• More posts tagged “IPA”
• More posts tagged “art song”

Working with music texts, Part 2: Translate the text

Credit: The Juilliard Store

This is part 2 of the Tech tools for working with music texts series.

Step 2: Translate the text

My next step is to translate the text I’m singing. I like to do a word-for-word translation and write it into my score. If I’m short on time, or if I have difficulty translating the text myself, I’ll look for a translation from one of these sources. Some of them have literal translations, some have poetic translations, and some have both.  I generally double-check the translations I find online, as they occasionally contain mistakes.

If I’m doing the translation myself, these are the main tech tools and references I use:

• WordReference is my workhorse dictionary for French and Italian and they have many other languages as well as verb conjugations.  They have a website as well as a free iPhone app and Android app (which I use on my Android phone, and like).  No iPad-specific app, but the regular website works fine on an iPad.  The smartphone apps require an internet connection.
• I like BEOLINGUS for German (although I use WordReference for German as well).  BEOLINGUS has many useful search options as well as sound clips of word pronunciations by native speakers.  I also find it easier to stumble across idiomatic usages in BEOLINGUS.  In addition to the regular website, there is a mobile-friendly website as well as free third-party Android apps that use BEOLINGUS as the translation engine (Quickdic Offline Dictionary and Emilio’s Dictionary, both of which work offline).
• Latin is a tough one for me – I don’t know enough of how the language works to get very far doing my own word-for-word translation from reference materials.  I usually go to CPDL and hope that it’s a commonly-set text that I can look up.  Otherwise if it’s some oddball text and I have to attempt the translation myself, I’ll try these dictionaries: University of Notre Dame’s Latin Dictionary and Grammar Aid, William Whitaker’s Words (mobile-friendly-ish version here), or the Latin dictionary from the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University.
• Google Translate is a catch-all tool; copy and paste your text and watch Google do its magic.  Results are decent-to-good but occasionally wacky.  Mouse over the translated phrases to see alternate translations.  There is an Android app and and iPhone/iPad app.
• Nico Castel libretti books – the footnotes are great for untangling idiomatic or archaic usages, cultural/historic references, and similar translation challenges.
• If I end up heading to the library and hitting the stacks, these lists of printed references are helpful: Translations & Song Texts, Finding Translations and Phonetic Readings of Vocal Music Texts, Finding Translations of Vocal Music

If I got really stuck on a translation problem, another option would be to post the translation work I have done so far on a forum like ChoralNet, the New Forum for Classical Singers, or a language-learning forum and ask the community for help.

As I work, I like to type my translation into the Evernote or Dropbox document I created earlier that contains the original text.  Once my translation is done, I can write it into my score on my iPad with the forScore app’s annotation feature.  I can either use the “Draw” option and write it in freehand with my stylus (zooming in if there’s limited space to write in) or the “Type” option and type it in, adding extra spaces between words so that my word-for-word translation lines up properly with each word of the original text.  I may also write in a paraphrase or poetic translation, in a different color than the literal translation just so my eye can distinguish.  If there’s some pesky, godawful singing translation already printed in the score, I can erase it first using forScore’s “Whiteout Pen” option.

It’s during these kinds of tasks that I really appreciate having a tablet.  I like having the equivalent of a big, heavy bookshelf full of dictionaries and reference books and scores all on this slim little tablet that I can take anywhere. The information is accessible to me at any time and place, so I can work on the translation wherever I happen to be.  With my translation document stored in the cloud using Evernote or Dropbox, I can read it or work on it regardless of whether I have my laptop, iPad, or phone with me.

There are some other kinds of translation tech resources that I haven’t looked into yet but would like to, for example, translation-related iPad apps (myLanguage Translator Pro looks interesting and has good reviews) and also dictionaries/references in app or ebook format that work offline.  But I will have to save that for a future blog post.

Related Posts:

• Coming up: Tech tools for working with music texts
• Working with music texts, Part 1: Find the text online, then sync it to the cloud!
• Digital dictionaries for translating archaic words and spellings