This paper explores the intricate relationship between textual prosody and musical meter in Taylor Swift’s diverse discography. While scholars have included some of Swift’s songs in their overall work on prosodic dissonance (e.g., Eron 2020 and BaileyShea 2021), more comprehensive studies are needed to address this tension across her repertoire. This paper spans Swift’s various stylistic periods, examining notable examples from her albums and showcasing instances of prosodic dissonance. The paper delves into Swift’s experimentation with different genres, asserting that this artistic endeavor significantly influences her approach to creating and performing prosodic dissonance. Additionally, Swift’s ability to work within different styles is clarified by how well the prosodic dissonance fits into her songs. Two prominent examples, “Blank Space” and “Karma,” illustrate the application of Eron’s Stress Discrepancy Rule (SDR), which essentially states that a musical event sounds dissonant when a strong syllable is placed in a metrically weak position or vice versa. The exploration extends to Swift’s use of thick textures and clever rhythmic patterns in two songs with highly distinct styles like “Teardrops on My Guitar” and “...Ready For It?” (the former a pop-country style and the latter an electropop/synthpop style) to understand their impact on prosodic dissonance. The paper concludes by introducing an addendum to the SDR, proposing that recurring or parallel phenomenal accents can mitigate the effect of odd prosody-meter placements; in Swift’s music, these phenomena are ascending melodic intervals. Examining specific examples from Swift’s output, such as the outros to “The Other Side of the Door” and “Cardigan” and the prechorus to “Look What You Made Me Do,” the paper underscores Swift’s consistent technique of using phenomenal accents to normalize prosodic dissonance. Additionally, this repetition in her music usually illustrates a list or series of events, which enhances Swift’s storytelling. While acknowledging the need for more comprehensive research, this study explores Taylor Swift’s lyrical and melodic sensitivity as manifested through prosodic dissonance in her music. This research and analysis ultimately provides a model for analysis of songs by artists that Swift has influenced, such as Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish.

Sign language covers involve live and recorded performances of aural music that occur simultaneously with a sign language performance. Several distinct musical voices circulate in sign language cover songs: the voice(s) in the original piece of music, the voice(s) of the interpreter(s), and captions. These voices circulate in different modalities, and may be perceived visually, aurally, and/or through touch. Questions of identity and authenticity arise when analyzing any translated music, but as a kind of music-making that is directly tied to a musical performance in a different modality, sign language covers are especially fruitful for analysis. What does it mean to have musical voices performing simultaneously in two modalities? How do we make sense of this multiplicity, and how do sign language performers negotiate their own voice and identity in relation to others’ voices?

This paper argues that sign language covers, especially those distributed and consumed through social media, act as a uniquely powerful locus for exploring aspects of musical and linguistic identity. Specifically, I explore captioning, vocal imitation, video editing techniques, and linguistic multiplicity as important elements of vocal plurality in sign language covers. Using Malawey’s sheet of characteristics of aural covers as a model, I begin by summarizing the characteristics of a sign language cover song. Throughout a series of analytical case studies, I draw upon these characteristics in order to compare sign language covers to their originals, and to explore how sign language cover artists manipulate these musical characteristics in order to navigate questions of identity and authenticity in their covers.

In analyzing vocal plurality in sign language cover songs, I showcase the unique opportunities for multiplicity inherent in signing voices, and ultimately, in all vocality.

Most English-language texts constitute a line of verse, often made up of a syntactic unit such as a clause, which are set to a musical phrase of, say, two to four measures (BaileyShea 2021). Setting Japanese texts to Western-style music is challenging, as Japanese morphemes are so multisyllabic that it is difficult to complete a subject-verb clause in two-to-four measures. It takes fifteen morae to say “I love you” in grammatically correct Japanese, so that a literal translation of the Beatles’ “Michelle” could take as many as 15 morae. Such difficulties perpetuated the myth that Western music couldn’t be sung in Japanese. How, then, did Japanese songwriters adjust their music to a metered, riff-defined genre such as rock?

This paper explores the myths and realities of Japanese songwriting by examining the work of seminal Japanese rock band Happy End (1969–1973). In the great Japanese rock debate featured in New Music Magazine (1970), Happy End argued with fellow band Flower Travelin’ Band (FTB) as to whether rock could be written in Japanese. The FTB camp criticized Happy End’s song, “Haru yo koi” (Come, Spring, 1970) as awkward, as it takes eleven measures—a half-minute—to complete a single clause.

Happy End’s second album, Kazemachi Roman (Romance of the Wind City, 1971)—an ode to a disappearing Tokyo in the face of urban renewal—showed a maturation of their text-setting skills. In “Kaze o atsumete” (Gather the Wind), Hosono Haruomi retains interest during Matsumoto’s 60-morae-long sentence by withholding a strong cadence until the end of that sentence, marking the beginning of the chorus; his meandering harmonic progression parallels the linguistic sentence extensions and captures the image of someone ambling about the city, stumbling upon an unexpected vista. In “Haikara hakuchi” (Stylish Idiot), Ōtaki’s habit of lengthening phrase endings is marshaled to highlight the wordplay in the title. Through subtle text setting, Happy End demonstrates not only that Japanese can indeed constitute a rock lyric but also that the combination of Japanese words and music can encapsulate an ephemeral moment in Tokyo’s ever-changing cityscape.