I’ve been thinking a little about mumbling as a phenomenon since my mum complained at me about the use of it in the opening episode of Happy Valley. Then the backlash against Rihanna’s new single Work cemented the notion that we see mumbling as bad and an irritant, I’ve been accused of being a mumbler (mostly by my mum) and seems to be a common occurrence in conversational speech. Mumbling effectively becomes a stream of sound, rather than having any discernible words that we can understand. However, often we can understand each other just fine even without pronouncing all our words properly and things such as tone, rhythm, intonation, volume etc come to the fore to fill in the gaps. Sam Wolfson sums this up quite nicely in his article ‘From ‘War and Peace’ to Rihanna – Why Is Everyone Mumbling?’ for Vice, Wolfson puts forward the case for mumbling as a linguistic fine-tuning that is far from lazy. Rihanna along with rap artists such as Fetty Wap, Young Thug, Gucci Mane, Future and Rich Homie Quan are cited as examples of the use of mumbling in music and seems to be an interesting trend where the song are pretty much made up of 80% of vowel sounds. Wolfson then lists the TV Shows recently that have garnered significant complains due to ‘incoherent mumbling’; War and Peace, Jamaica Inn (and we can include here Happy Valley) and then actors Heath Ledger and Kirsten Stewart who have been deemed mumblers.

‘Some people – Zoella, for example – feel required to make some kind of mouth noise almost constantly, even if they have nothing to say. That’s why we have mumbling; it’s a vocal fart that provides the scent of speech without containing any actual content.’

But is mumbling really that bad? Wolfson brings up an interesting area of linguistics called patois, which is language that is considered non-standard and can refer to pidgins, creoles, dialects and native/local speech. All of this can work, as Wolfson suggests, as ‘a way of involving you in a world that goes beyond just the meaning of the words.’ Here mumbling evokes a feeling of naturalism akin to everyday conversation that is punctuated by trailing off and remaining incomplete. Mumbling can also produce a narrative that is meandering and atmospheric, I particularly like this visual reference and presents us with a very object-like image of the voice. Wolfson also refers to another article ‘Mumbling Isn’t a Sign of Laziness—It’s a Clever Data-Compression Trick’ by Julie Sedivy for Nautilus, here Sedivy makes an interesting link from mumbling to the production of MP3s and JPEGs. Sedivy posits that whereas mumbling is stereotypically associated with laziness, weakness, and ‘linguistic wimpiness’ as Sedivy puts it. Mumbling can now be seen as having a logic similar to data compression in the creation of MP3s and JPEGs in order to throw out information that is redundant.

‘Far from being a symptom of linguistic indifference or moral decay, dropping or reducing sounds displays an underlying logic similar to the data-compression schemes that are used to create MP3s and JPEGs. These algorithms trim down the space needed to digitally store sounds and images by throwing out information that is redundant or doesn’t add much to our perceptual experience’

Sedivy goes on to posit a ‘Phonetic Reduction’ where we are more likely to reduce common words such as fine from our everyday conversations, speakers unconsciously and strategically only preserve certain information. Sedivy also calls this ‘Strategic Laziness’, which has interesting connotation and perhaps rewrites how we read the term lazy. Rather than being a lack of action, it becomes purposeful. Out of both of these I particularly like the concepts of compression, reduction, incompleteness and meandering. Perhaps combined with these can be the notions of collective voices and choirs (a mumbling choir?) alongside technology to create sound as object as an intervention such as 3D printing, voice recognition etc?

Examples of mumbling:

Rihanna’s Work

Young Thug’s Check

I also came across Cities Aviv’s Don’t Ever Look Back, here he uses a level of noise combined with viscous vocals to form a frustrated inner monologue mumble. The layering of sound also evident in his other work is interesting, especially how the vocal seems to be fighting an ever growing noise threatening to overcome it.

Jamaica Inn