Interpreting ‘noise’ in the data: A comparative study of two contemporary music singers

Abstract

A central theoretical issue in sociophonetics concerns the relationship between group-level and individual variation (Kendall et al., 2023; Walker and Meyerhoff, 2013). While variationist research has traditionally focused on socially defined speaker groups, more recent third-wave approaches place the individual at the forefront, viewing speakers as stylistic agents who use linguistic features in context as resources for identity construction (Eckert, 2012). From another perspective, articulatory phonetic approaches are also primarily concerned with the individual, modeling speech as the outcome of physiological and motor processes within speakers, and capturing both generalizable tendencies and idiosyncratic traits. Drawing on both perspectives, this study builds on the foundation that individual differences, far from constituting ‘noise’ in the data, provides crucial information for understanding variation in speech and singing. This is part of a larger work on the realization of word-internal intervocalic /t/ by British singers when performing, where /t/ is frequently produced as a flap, a feature associated with American English (Wells, 1982), rather than a prototypically British alveolar stop. British contemporary music singers participated in an analysis of their spoken and sung productions using electropalatography (EPG) for articulatory data, alongside informal interviews to obtain qualitative sociolinguistic data. This paper reports in detail on two of these singers (S1 and S2) as a comparative case study. They share similar sociolinguistic profiles: both are SBE speakers, professional lead singers in rock bands, long-term residents in Paris, have comparable vocal ranges, and do not display flapping in their speech. Yet, they show sharply contrasting patterns in the realization of intervocalic /t/ in singing. In an experiment designed to elicit flapping under different conditions, S1 flapped nearly all tokens (76%), whereas S2 produced only a single flap. Results from the articulatory analysis show that S2 has a consistent and stable production and realization of stop /t/ throughout. By contrast, S1’s /t/ productions involve reduced anterior contact and high per-token variability, reflecting a less targeted and constricted gesture in terms of place of articulation. These differences are echoed in the interviews: S1 views pronunciation from a technical angle linked to his work as a music producer, avoiding sharp constrictions because they create unwanted intensity peaks in the signal, whereas S2 treats pronunciation as a stylistic resource, using “careful articulation” to construct a character associated with intellectualism, Englishness, and a rejection of American singing styles. Together, these findings reaffirm that, as widely recognized in variationist studies today, individual differences are not mere ‘noise’ but a structured outcome of articulatory and sociostylistic processes. They further highlight the relevance of /t/ as a particularly informative variable for investigating the sung voice in contemporary music.

References

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