In Moving Away, as in a lot of songs, there’s a chorus that repeats at various moments in the piece. The three backing singers all sing at the same time – in unison – and the rhythm of what they sing is pretty much the same as if they were just saying the words out loud.
Try saying ‘moving away’ – mo – ving – a – way. Listen to the rhythm as you say it, and perhaps try tapping your fingers in time. As a comparison, try saying ‘all the time’.
Do the same thing again for ‘moving away’ but say it more slowly. Get slower and slower and see what happens to the rhythm.
In this video clip the backing vocals sing the chorus. Listen to the rhythm and compare it to rhythm of natural speech.
As you can probably hear, the sung rhythm and spoken rhythm are pretty much the same. This isn’t always true – you can probably think of vocal lines, and particularly choruses where the sung rhythm is very different from the spoken one.
