This is something I’ve often wondered about. Does using the voice as an instrument (no discernible words) make a mix not an instrumental?
Not trying to start an argument. Maybe a discussion.

I wonder about this too Speck. Good point that on this track, the vocals are used like an instrument (no words). I’d love to open a discussion on this and hear the perspective of other community members.

Sorry to be Mr. Wet Blanket but discussing amongst ourselves isn’t really going to change things.

When a video/film/game maker is on dig.ccmixter and they check the ‘instrumental’ option the results need to be a pure instrumental - they don’t want any vocalization below dialog or titles/text on the screen. They consider it an aural distraction from what’s happening on the screen.

I’m not looking to change things, doesn’t matter to me either way. When I first came to ccM I searched the tag ‘experimental’ to hear who’s doing what in that genre, 90% of it was straight up pop or hip hop or singer songwriter or otherwise other than experimental. Tagging is an imperfect system that depends on everyone having the same objective description of terms, which they don’t. For instance, whoever made the entry for Vocal Music on wikipedia has a different opinion than you as to what constitutes instrumental music:

“Music which employs singing but does not feature it prominently is generally considered instrumental music (e.g. the wordless women’s choir in the final movement of Holst’s The Planets) as is music without singing.”

I will say though that I don’t think I’ve ever tagged anything instrumental that has any kind of voice in it, even wordless voice. And now that I know you feel that’s best for those looking for music for film/video I’ll continue that practice. (Not that most of my instrumental mixes wouldn’t also be an aural distraction ;))

appreciate your sensibilities here…

I’m a graduate of a film scoring program at a music conservatory and the majority of people I know, including close family members, are connected to making film/video content so I’m just basing my (subjective) opinions on that. In a perfect world we would have a tag for “vocalizing” to differentiate but it’s enough for me to wrangle the ‘instrumental’ tag which is key to making our platform useful.

This particular track used to have BOTH the ‘vocals’ AND ‘instrumental’ tags which rendered it useless to the system - in fact it makes the track invisible to dig because we filter that kind of stuff out.