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Acoustic analysis of Taylor Swift’s dialect changes
across different eras of her career
Acoustic analysis of Taylor Swift’s dialect changes
across different eras of her career
Miski Mohamed and Matthew B. Winn
Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
Where to download the paper:
https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0039052
Frequently asked questions:
Can you give me a summary of this paper?
Across different stages of her career, Taylor Swift has moved in and out of communities that have distinct regional or social dialects. This paper tracks her speech through interviews recorded at times when she lived in Nashville, Philadelphia, and New York City. We analyzed her vowel articulation in each of these periods, showing that she used key features of Southern accent during her time in Nashville. These features were lost after her return to Philadelphia, and hypercorrected upon her relocation to New York City. She also significantly lowered her voice pitch during her time in New York City, which is when she became more vocal about social and political issues. In the paper we provide detailed acoustic analysis of her speech, and discuss some of the motivations she had for adapting her speech in a strategic way.
What are some examples of the ways in which Taylor Swift’s accent has changed throughout her career?
There are two things we analyzed in the paper – her vowel articulation and her voice pitch.
When Taylor was in Nashville, she changed how she pronounced two vowels. First, the vowel in “my” which becomes similar to “ma” (we call this monophthongization of /aɪ/). Also, she used a fronted version of the /u/ vowel (“who” would shift toward “he-you”). These are both key features of a Southern accent.
The second major thing we saw was a lowering of Taylor’s voice pitch when she moved to New York City. This was the time in her career when she became more well known for speaking up on issues of social change and feminism, as well as musician’s rights. So it’s possible that she was lowering her voice to ensure that she was received as a voice of authority. Even though she has the ability to speak about these issues without needing to change her voice, this is a typical thing that people do when they are ascending into leadership.
Why did you analyze Taylor Swift? Is it just because she’s popular?
Her popularity is what made this research possible. It is usually extremely difficult to studying how a person’s dialect changes, because it is not realistic to follow around someone with a microphone and hope that they move to a different city and change how they speak. But Taylor Swift gives us that rare opportunity to observe dialect change in a very detailed way because she moved around to different cities and also was recorded many times over the years. She lived in different geographic regions, and also had different kinds of social influences and aspirations that might have further shaped how she wanted to sound. So this gives us a way to interpret these speech changes as reflective of social and career goals rather than just being in a different city.
What is the scientific significance of these results?
Why is it valuable to understand how people adopt accents and regional dialects?
When we perceive speech, we don’t just perceive the words – we perceive the person and the character traits that they want to convey. Not everybody changes their speech after moving to a new city, so it’s interesting to think about what motivates the people who DO change. Not only did Taylor Swift move to Nashville, she was also trying to integrate into a country music community, where southern accent is a marker of inclusion and authenticity. Our study highlights this language behavior, in the context of real social and career aspirations. In addition to the technical aspects of our measurements, the results also help to expand the scope of how we think dialects work. Many people think that dialects just reflect where a person grew up. And that is mostly true, but it also includes the social community that you want to be a part of.
On a technical level, we built on the techniques used to analyze vowel articulation in a way that can be carried forward to new experiments. As for most dialect studies, we measured the first two vocal tract resonances at multiple timepoints for each vowel to form trajectories. We also converted frequency measurements to semitones, which allows for better comparison across people of different sizes, and also is in better alignment with how we perceive sounds as well. We split the vowel measurements by various word-level features (such as analyzing the /u/ vowel in different contexts where the Southern features would be more or less expressed). Then, we applied new time-series statistical techniques to model the differences across the dialect regions. Finally, we illustrated these techniques with great care in the paper so that others can use this approach and build further.
How could I make measurements like these?
You could watch this video here!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGW8J4cG0qY
The paper refers to her Philadelphia era in 2012.
But wasn't she still in Nashville at that time?
Yes, this part of the paper could have been written more clearly. For her 2012 phase, the best way to describe this is a transition from Country music to Pop music. She expressed love for Philadelphia in her public persona, but wasn't actually living there. We just interpreted this to mean a return to her "roots".
What next steps are you planning?
How are you looking to build on these results?
The main focus of the research in our lab is actually not dialects or Taylor Swift! We do most of our work trying to understand how speech communication is affected by hearing loss. We work with people who listen using a cochlear implant, and try to understand the factors that might make listening effortful for them. Hearing loss affects 1 in 7 adults in the US, and yet we have much to learn about how hearing difficulties can affect a person’s stress, ability to work, and willingness to socialize with friends and family. These are the topics that motivate our work. We run experiments that measure changes in pupil dilation and eye movements as signatures of how hard a person has to work to understand what they hear.
Is this a real scientific journal?
YES! The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is the premier international scientific society in acoustics devoted to the science and technology of sound. Its 7,000 members worldwide represent a broad spectrum of the study of acoustics. ASA publications include The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (the world's leading journal on acoustics), JASA Express Letters, Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, Acoustics Today magazine, books, and standards on acoustics. The society also holds two major scientific meetings each year. See https://acousticalsociety.org/.
Can you show me some cool images from the paper?
YES! see below
How to cite the paper:
Mohamed, M. & Winn, M.B. (2025). Acoustic analysis of Taylor Swift’s dialect changes across different eras of her career. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 158(2), 2278–2289. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0039052
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