Iconicity in co-singing gesture: the foundations of gesture-vocalization resemblance in beatboxing (IconS)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Lara Pearson
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 568894746

Across a broad range of music traditions worldwide, vocalists tend to gesture with hand and upper body movement as they sing. Gesture plays an important role in both language and music. It can combine with vocalization and musical sound to create meaning, and thus contributes to communication. In musical contexts, co-singing gestures may express affect relating to lyrical content and musical mood, but in addition gestures may reference sonic musical features such as rhythm, melodic movement, timbre and phrasing. Such referencing of sonic features involves semiotic modes that also play important roles in co-speech gesturing, including iconicity. Although it is clear that co-singing gestures often have an iconic dimension, it can be less clear what precisely the gestures are iconic of. For example, a forceful downward "punch" gesture that co-occurs with a loud emphasized vocal sound may be considered as a) crossmodally iconic of sonic qualities or b) unimodally iconic of the forceful vocal production movements (muscular effort) required to create the emphatic sounds. The proposed project will theorize and empirically examine the mechanisms underlying gestural iconicity in a particular musical context, namely beatboxing. This popular and highly creative vocal performance style is well-suited to a study of gestural iconicity for two reasons. Firstly, professional performers tend to gesture freely as they beatbox - it has become part of the performance style. Secondly, the style has a strong focus on innovative vocal sounds and complex beats, drawing from a wide range of electronic music genres, which provides a rich array of sonic and vocal production movement features that may also be expressed through gestural iconicity. The key objectives of the project are, firstly, to gain insight into the different mechanisms underlying gestural iconicity in beatboxing: what precisely the gestures are iconic of. Secondly, the project examines two contrasting accounts of gestural iconicity: the "acoustic account", where gestures are iconic of the vocal sounds produced, and the "vocal-production account", where gestures are iconic of oral articulatory and other vocal-production movements. Thirdly, the project aims to assess the extent to which performers use the same gestures for similar sounds, and whether this is consistent across performances and over time. Through this research, the project aims to expand consideration of gesture-vocalization relations beyond spoken language to the broader field of vocal communication.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 2392: Visual communication. Theoretical, empirical, and applied perspectives (ViCom)
• International Connection: Netherlands
• Cooperation Partner: Wim Pouw, Ph.D.