Overview

• Published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, the study tracks Swift’s speech from 2008 to 2019 across Nashville, Philadelphia and New York City.
• The analysis finds Southern features in the Nashville period, including /aɪ/ monophthongization and /u/ fronting, which diminish after her return to Pennsylvania.
• Swift’s speaking pitch is significantly lower in the New York era, a pattern the authors note can index authority but that could also reflect age-related change.
• Researchers extracted over 1,400 vowel tokens from album-promotion interviews and made ten acoustic measurements per vowel to document articulation shifts.
• Independent work on her singing accent from the University of Chester reports similar patterns, while the authors caution that their observational data cannot establish intent or isolate all causes.