Sociophonetics of Popular Music: Insights from Corpus Analysis and Speech Perception Experiments Andy M. Gibson This dissertation is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics Department of Linguistics University of Canterbury New Zealand September 2019 To my Dad, who taught me the joy of climbing hills on blustery days. Abstract This thesis examines the flexibility and context-sensitivity of speech perception by look- ing at a domain not often explored in the study of language cognition — popular music. Three empirical studies are presented. The first examines the current state of sociolinguis- tic variation in commercial popular music, while the second and third explore everyday listeners’ perception of language in musical and non-musical contexts. The foundational assumption of the thesis is that the use of ‘American English’ in song is automatic for New Zealand singers, and constitutes a responsive style that is both accurate and consistent. The use of New Zealand English in song, by contrast, is stylised, involving an initiative act of identity and requiring effort and awareness. This will be discussed in Chapter 1,where I also introduce the term Standard Popular Music Singing Style (SPMSS) to refer to the US English-derived phonetic style dominant in popular song. The first empirical study will be presented in Chapter 2. Using a systematically selected corpus of commercial pop and hip hop from NZ and the USA, analysis of non-prevocalic and linking /r/, and the vowels of the bath, lot and goat lexical sets confirm that SPMSS is highly normative in NZ music. Most pop singers closely follow US patterns, while several hip hop artists display elements of New Zealand English. This reflects the value placed on authenticity in hip hop, and also interacts with ethnicity, showing the use of different authentication practices by P¯akeh¯a(NZ European) and M¯aori/Pasifika artists. By looking at co-variation amongst the variables, I explore both the apparent identity goals of the artists, and the relative salience of the variables. Chapters 3 and 4 use the results of the corpus analysis to explore how the dominance of SPMSS affects speech processing. The first of the two perception experiments is a phonetic categorisation task. Listeners decide whether they hear the word bed or bad in a condition where the stimuli are either set to music, or appear in one of two non-musical control conditions. The stimuli are on a resynthesised continuum between the dress and trap vowels, passing through an F1 space where the vowel is ambiguous and could either be perceived as a spoken NZE trap or a sung dress. When set to music, the NZ listeners perceive the vowel according to expectations of SPMSS (i.e. expecting US-derived vowel qualities). The second perception experiment is a lexical decision task that uses the natural speech of a NZ and a US speaker, once again in musical and non-musical conditions. Participants’ processing of the US voice is facilitated in the music condition, becoming faster than reaction times to their native dialect. Bringing the results of the corpus and perception studies together, this thesis shows that SPMSS is highly normative in NZ popular music not just for performers, but also in the minds of the general music-listening public. I argue that many New Zealanders are bidialectal, with native-like knowledge of SPMSS. Speech and song are two highly distinct and perceptually contrastive contexts of language use. By differing from conversational language across a range of perceptual and cognitive dimensions, language heard or produced in song is likely to encode and activate a distinct subset of auditory memories. The contextual specificity of such networks may then allow for the abstraction of an independent sub-system of sociophonetic knowledge specific to the musical context. iii Acknowledgements Jen, thank you for seeing my potential, even when all outward manifestations of produc- tivity lay dormant. You kept on believing that I had a PhD in me, and your patience and persistence with me both prior to, and during my enrolment have had a profoundly posi- tive impact on me. One of the highlights of my time at NZILBB has been the intellectual treat of hearing your comments and responses to a wide range of issues in Socio meetings, reading groups, and stats chats over these four years. I am truly grateful to have learnt so much from you. Lynn, you continually reminded me what optimism and positivity look like, along with providing empathy and support during the difficult times. Every chat and every meeting left me feeling like this mission was a bit more possible than it had seemed before. Thank you for insisting that it was within my abilities to ‘get it done’! Catherine, thank you for steering me through my cognitive neuroscience learning. I’m so grateful for the hands on training with EEG, and for all your help when I was battling with E-Prime. Thanks for being supportive and enthusiastic even when it took me forever to get anything done. Coming back to Canterbury after ten years, it was so wonderful to reconnect with old friends like Emma, Heidi, Margaret and Jeanette on-site, while visits from Katie, Abby, and Anita were all real highlights. I then had the pleasure of getting to know so many other wonderful PhD students, post-docs and faculty through the amazing research community that is NZILBB. So many people here have helped me in big and small ways: Kevin, Vica, Petya, Maria, Matthias, Keyi, Ksenia, Xuan, Mohammed, Mineko, Clay, Yoonmi, Scott, Doreen, Ruth, Arshad, Muneir, Jacq (highlighters and curry), Stephanie, Merten, Vicky, Sidney, Moonsun, Wakayo, Donald, Susan, Marie, James, Jeremy, Dan, Simon, Alison, Ryan, Darcy (and Biscuit). Many thanks to both the friends and strangers that participated in the experiments, to the two colleagues who recorded the stimuli, and a second shout-out to Ryan for letting me use Science Music. Jonathan Wiltshire, thank you for helping me with E-Prime. Robert Fromont, I honestly don’t know what I would have done without you (aside from amazing LaBB-CAT support, the lexical frequencies in song were entirely collected and calculated by Robert). A big thank you to all of the singers and rappers who replied to my requests for info about their ethnicities. Jody Lloyd, thank you for being the great champion of own-accent singing and rap in NZ. I look forward to making more music together. I owe a great debt to Allan Bell. Your influence continues to flow through these pages. Thank you for all the opportunities you have given me, and for your friendship. A heartfelt thanks to Janet Holmes and Paul Warren for sparking my interest in linguistics many years ago, and also for enriching collaborations in more recent years. Big love to Bronwyn and Laura, my original ling crew. Thanks to Malcah Yaeger-Dror for keeping me in the loop, and to Dave Britain for collegiality and cocktails. To Sarah Hawkins, thank you for all the chats — your wisdom helped me solve some big problems! Caitlin Smith, thank you for reminding me where all these research questions came from. I am so grateful for my family. Huge love to Alana, Riley, Dylan, Lucas, Tolstoy, Caspian, Ambrosia, Estonia and Olivia. Mum, you’re the best... you understand me so well, and your support through this PhD journey has been amazing. Jo, Karen, and Debs, I love each of you so much. Finally, to Gabriel — thank you for being by my side through this whole process and for bringing joy into my daily life. Here’s to the continuation of this beautiful thing we have. iv Contents 1 Introduction: Contextualising the Sociophonetics of Popular Music 1 1.1 American Accents in NZ Popular Music . .1 1.2 Language and Music Cognition . .5 1.3 High-Fidelity Imitation and the Ritual of Song . .6 1.4 Exemplar Theory and the Importance of Context . .7 1.4.1 Speech production and speech perception . .9 1.4.2 An implementation of the production–perception loop . 10 1.5 A Sociolinguistics of Popular Music . 12 1.5.1 (The lack of) a dialectology of popular music . 13 1.5.2 Early sound recordings . 14 1.5.3 Cultural Imperialism and the Dynamic Model . 15 1.5.4 Genre norms, authentication practices and awareness . 17 1.5.5 Defining the scope of ‘popular song’ . 18 1.6 Assumptions, Questions and Hypotheses . 19 1.7 Thesis Outline . 21 2 The Phonetics of Popular Song: Creation and Analysis of a Corpus 22 2.1 Variationist Approaches to Singing Accents . 22 2.1.1 The importance of salience in identity construction . 24 2.2 Research Questions and Hypotheses . 26 2.3 Introducing the PoPS Corpus . 30 2.3.1 Methods of song selection . 30 2.3.1.1 Inclusion Criteria . 31 2.3.1.2 Identifying ethnicity . 33 2.3.1.3 Under-represented cells . 34 2.3.1.4 Summary of songs excluded from PoPS . 34 2.3.2 Procedures for corpus management . 36 2.3.3 Establishing lexical frequencies in song and speech through corpora . 37 2.3.4 Statistical methods: Dealing with small datasets . 37 2.4 bath ........................................ 38 2.4.1 bath: Method . 40 2.4.2 bath: Results . 40 2.4.3 bath: Discussion . 44 2.4.3.1 Variable pronunciation of the word can’t ........... 47 2.5 Non-prevocalic /r/ . 48 2.5.1 Prior analysis of rhoticity in NZ and US music . 48 2.5.2 Non-prevocalic /r/: Method . 50 2.5.2.1 Coding scheme for non-prevocalic /r/ environments .