"Understanding 'American Girl'" - A Project In Review

11:13 PM Michael Cotter 0 Comments

        So, on Wednesday February 18th my partner, Melissa, and I got to present our first linguistics project to our class. We chose to work around the pop song "American Girl" by Bonnie McKee to analyze rhyme and how pronunciations of words are slurred, stretched, and slanted to make rhymes in pop music. To take this further, we translated the song lyrics into IPA and Russian to demonstrate the visual connection to the rhymes and, with the Russian, to see what rhymes would work or get lost in translation.

        As a team, I think Melissa and I worked very well together. From the beginning, we had a really good chemistry flow and kept in close contact with one another about our progresses and findings in our project - which is why we finished it so quickly. We also both spoke about how much fun we had with this project. By picking something that we both loved like music it motived us to work on the project more often because it was fun.

        I think our visual aids were also "on point" (slang for "satisfying"). I loved the color scheme we had been able to use that accented our video and Bonnie and made the presentation esthetically pleasing to look at. I think the use of our gif pictures kept the audience's attention from slide to slide and our charts were very easy to follow and highlighted the most interesting findings in the song that could be noticed in full in the handouts we provided.

        I loved our video too. Though, obviously, we didn't direct or visually design the official music video, I think the sing-along version with the IPA lyrics was actually really helpful when trying to look at how IPA works. I think it really highlighted the pattern of the way IPA is used and was able to demonstrate how it works in a simple, creative way being that we broke the song down line by line which was matched by the audio and visual of Bonnie's lips.

        I wish we had found a little more of a rhyme pattern with our translation into Russian. I feel like it would've been really cool to find some sounds that carried over, but as Ben said after we presented - "that sound would sound like garbage in Russian."

        Overall, I feel like we were well prepared, well spoken, and genuinely interested in our topic. I feel like Melissa and I worked together really well and I would absolutely work with her again- which is saying something coming from someone who typically hates to work with a partner.