Stereo required

I hadn’t come across the singer ‘Madelline’ before, but I’ve been somewhat entranced by her track ‘Dopamine’, not just because it’s a pleasant song, but because of this particular version.

To the same backing track, you hear her singing it in both French and English at the same time.

If you listen through a single phone speaker, it just sounds like a bit of a jumble, but if you have headphones or anything else with decent stereo separation, then the effect of hearing the same person, singing the same song, at the same time, to the same backing, but in your left ear in French and your right ear in English, is quite bizarre, especially if you have reasonable fluency in both.

It does slightly weird things to my brain, but it’s also interesting to see the flexibility in translation needed to get roughly the same concepts into the same lines.

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2 Comments

I don’t know French, but I’m reasonably fluent in Spanish. I may fire up Audacity and try to do this with some of my favorite 90s songs that were released in both languages. I can think of several from Jon Secada for example. this was a trip.

Yes, it would be fun to do your own! You’d probably want both versions to have been with the same or very similar backing, though, to make sure the singers were synchronised. (Or, I guess, do a little time-manipulation yourself!)

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