This is a song where the production is erratic, wild and robotic sounding heavily produced. The beat initially paints a happy picture, but feeling nostalgia in the sound design—similar to old videogames I played as a kid, I wrote the song with this feeling in mind. 

While creating the beat, I was humming the melody that would later become the hook. I was thinking about what feelings I wanted the song to evoke, and at some point, I decided that the line that fit best would be asking whether the listener felt something. I landed on “trodde du skulle føle noe”, which translated would be “I thought you were going to feel something”. As I didn’t have any other lines in my head at the time when I freestyled, I just repeated and mumbled similar sounds. I then attempted to change the melody by going up in pitch, which caused my voice to crack a bit. 

When listening back to the freestyle, I did not enjoy the parts where I had gone up in pitch. I therefore decided to base my hook on the first half of the freestyle. When writing, I used the first line, “trodde du skulle føle noe”, and after punching this in, I started to look for a direction to take the song in. I wasn’t actively thinking about my vocal delivery, attempting to use my sincere voice, I was “just singing”. However, I did actively listen to how the autotune reacted to my voice, often using more breath and a slow decrease in pitch at the end of phrases to emphasize the rapid note changes caused by the autotune. 

When listening and creating my beat, I felt it sounded verry otherworldly, utilizing a lot of synths in a verry robotic pattern. I think this influenced some of the lines I wrote, continuing by writing the line “Jeg kommer fra en annen klode”, translating to “I come from a different planet”. I had also set my autotune to zero retune speed, making my voice sound robotic as well. I think this helped solidifying an image around the song. I continued writing “her bruker vi ikke hode”, translating to “we don’t use our heads here”. At this point, I felt the melody and flow I was using had had its course, and I needed to switch it up. I did not want to go up in pitch like the freestyle, so I decided to go down in pitch. I also added more words to the start of the line, changing the feel of flow, as the listener is expecting the phrase start where it started earlier. I continued playing with the notes and amounts of words before bringing back the first melody in the final words of the hook. 

I really enjoyed the beat I had created, and subconsciously, I added a small break at the start of the hook to allow the listener to hear the beat, I repeated this at the start of the verse, this time being aware of what I was doing, only adding an adlib (a vocal entry that serves not as the main element but rather a response to the main vocal) after the hook, giving the listener a bar to appreciate the beat. I see this as a part of tacit knowledge (Polanyi, 1983, pp. 10-11), where initially I intuitively felt that this beat would gain from a small break in the rapping, an example of phenomenal tacit knowledge, and later I employed a more conscious decision, an example of functional tacit knowledge. 

During the verse, I wanted to contrast the hook I had just recorded, therefore, I adopted a more serious and sharp tone in my voice. I also went a full octave down in pitch, bringing more gravitas and seriousness to the voice, as mentioned by Allan Moore when he writes about pitch and feel (Moore, 2012, p. 102). However, this was not done with is theory in mind, rather, it just “felt right”. 

While writing the verse, I used a slightly different flow to the hook. However, I used a similar form as the hook, where I rap small lines in the start, then adding a line with many words. I emphasized this in the verse by using repeating lines. I find it interesting how I swallow or morph words in order to fit the flow I envisioned. Specifically, at the end of the verse I say the line “kansje bare en tåre”, translating to “maybe just a tear”. The way I pronounce it sounds like “kan she ba en tåre”, making it fit the triplet flow a lot smoother. I think this manipulation comes from my dialect and how I speak, emphasized in order to fit an ideal. This line might be perceived as unclear and “mumbly”, but to me, it sounds just right. 

It took some time for me to find the first line, as there is only one way of saying “noe” in English, which is “something”, and I felt this word wasn’t as smooth as “noe”. After thinking for a while, I decided to just use it anyway, seeing where it might take the song, starting with the line “though you would have felt something”. Again, i swallowed syllables and mumbled in order to make it fit the intended flow, sounding like “tha chu wooda felt something”. 

Immediately, I was stuck again. The word “klode” means “planet”, but this would not rhyme with “something”. I then tried to work the word “planet” into the middle of the line, attempting to find a phrase ending that rhymed with “something”. It took a while, but I ended up on the words “deep inn”, writing the line “I’m from a planet that’s so deep inn”. I'm not quite sure if this tells the same story as “I'm from a different planet”, however, I thought it sounded cool and decided to keep it. This set up the next line quite nicely ,landing on the phrase “where we never start thinking”. I continued by writing “she told me that I should have started chilling”, adding a gender to the image. I did not do this consciously, rather it just sounded good. The next line I ended the phrase with “my body started fucking sinking”, painting a more severe and gloomy image compared to the original, which instead painted a picture of difficulty in continue moving forward with the phrase “I don’t have any oar I can row with”. 

Following this line, I rewrote the line “prøver å starte en ny flode” (a word I created in order to fit with the rhyme scheme, the correct word would be “flom”), which translates to “trying to start a new flood”. I rewrote this into “trying to bring a new wave in”, as I felt this fit the message of a starting a new trend or vibe, and I easily found the next line, “maybe I started thinking”. I noticed that using a “-in” end rhyme allows for a lot of versatility when trying to write lines and apply meanings. Continuing into the verse, I wrote “yeah I did it”, not really thinking about the lines that would come later. The next line came smoothly writing, “every minute”, changing it from the original “every month”, though I felt this fit nicely. I struggled on the next line and deciding to change the rhyme, but morphing the words by muffling the ending. “I stopped sleeping” sounds more like “I stopped Sleepe”, allowing me to match it nicely with “started promising”, by using the same technique, morphing it into “started promisie”. I then rapped the next line “things I couldn’t follow up on was a bad thing”. However, because of the morphing, the rhyme change was smooth and not as jarring as it would have been otherwise. 

This coincidentally allowed me to easily write the line “all of the thin strings”, being a direct translation from the original version. To match this rhyme scheme, I had to change the next line from “the heart you tried to borrow” and landed on “you made a heart thin”. This changes the message conveyed, however, I felt till worked nicely. The line “ga deg alt på ryggen er de noe annet du ville få med?” also got translated quite directly into “you got the skin off my back, is there anything else you wanted to bring?” I think I got quite lucky with my choices of end rhymes during the rewriting process of this song, in line with the unexpected and chaotic nature of artistic research (Borgdorff, 2012, p. 165). The lines preceding this I opted to add a word in the ending, changing “maybe just a tear” into “maybe a tear I sing”, adding some extra emotion to these lines. Finishing the verse, I continued writing “I wanted to talk to you”, establishing the new end rhyme. However, I didn’t manage to find a direct translation of “men du ville spille meg”, meaning “but you wanted to play me”, so instead I opted to rap “but you wanted to play cool”, as I felt this conveyed a similar message. Following this, the line “du ville ha et speil” got rewritten into “you wanted a new you”, which removes some of the subtlety of saying “you wanted a mirror”, but I felt it still retained the message from the original meaning. I struggled with the line “ja det ble min feil”, meaning “yeah, it was my fault”, and decided to write this line as “you made me seem rude” in order to retain the flow and rhyme scheme. I managed to nicely translate “jeg ble en løs tegl” meaning “I became a loose brick”, into “I was a loose screw”. 

Norwegian without drums:

5.4. Noe

Norwegian with drums:

English without drums:

English with drums: