Talking Fast: The Use of Speech Rate as Iconic Gesture

Abstract

In the recently popular country song “Our Song, ” Taylor Swift recalls a memory of talking to her high school boyfriend on the phone. She sings, When we‟re on the phone and you talk reeeeal slow, because it‟s late, and your mama don‟t know. As Swift sings the phrase “real slow”, she performs an interesting effect with her voice. Whereas the other words in these two lines last for an eighth or a sixteenth note, the word “real ” is extended for a quarter note. It is, in fact, the only instance in the song in which the second to last word, opposed to the last, is the longest in the line. The listener is given the clear impression that Swift is using her voice to iconically depict the slow tem-poral quality of the phone conversation. In another popular country song, Garth Brooks uses the pitch of his voice to create a similar sort of iconic vocal effect when he sings, “I‟ve got friends in low places. ” Prior to “low, ” the line moves between small inter-vals: two major seconds and a minor third. However, as he sings the word

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