With only 35 years, Taylor Swift, the richest American singer -songwriter in the musical scenario and a cultural icon of the 21st century, has been on stage for twenty years, a long career that allowed scientists to study the evolution of their language and their accent.
The study, conducted by researchers from the University of Minnesota (United States) and published in JASA, the magazine of the acoustic society of America, used years of recorded interviews to review the changes of accents and dialects adopted by the singer to try to offer a vision of the changes in speech patterns.
The authors defend that studying high -profile dialect changes such as Swift can help scientists better understand the scope of regional dialects, not only in terms of geographical area, but also in terms of social group, age and leadership status.
“Taylor Swift is perfect for this type of longitudinal analysis because she has been interviewed and recorded many times over the years and had reasons to change her accent at specific times,” says Matthew Winn, a researcher at the University of Minnesota and one of the study authors.
The researchers studied Swift’s language from interview recordings he gave when he lived in Nashville, at the beginning of his career, in 2004, when he moved back home in Pennsylvania and when he moved to New York City, in 2014.
From these interviews, the team selected more than 1,400 vocal sounds and analyzed them using software to measure vocal resonances.
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Taylor Swift, a tool to study the evolution of speech patterns: experts
“These resonances indicate the exact way in which a person articulates a vowel,” explains Winn.
“The key to the dialect analysis is to measure the movement of the vowel through the mouth from the beginning to the end of the vowel, that is what makes it distinctive between dialects. We made ten measurements per vocal to show this movement, which was key to show how it changed its articulation in the different cities.”
Thus, the researchers were able to show how Swift adopted characteristics of the southern accent when he lived in Nashville, in particular the sound of the vowel /–pronouncing words like ‘Ride’ more like ‘Rod’-and the advance of the vowel / u /-changing words like ‘two’ so that they sound like ‘tee-you’-some phonetic uses that disappeared when they returned to return to Philadelphia
The authors suggest that the use of southern accent by Swift could have been a way of integrating into the country music community, instead of just connecting with Nashville as a city.
“The second big change we observed was that Taylor lowered the tone of his voice when he moved to New York City,” Winn progresses.
“This was the moment in his career in which he became better known for talking about issues of social change and feminism, as well as the rights of musicians. Sometimes, people with a lower tone of voice are perceived as a voice of authority, and it is possible that she was using that trend to ensure that her message was received,” concludes the researcher.
Since 1929, the journal of the American acoustic society, JASA, publishes the results of theoretical and experimental research referring to sound, music and language.
With EFE information.
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