Complete the Arc in Music

Think of the main theme from Ludwig van Beethoven’s famous Fifth Symphony and its familiar pattern of three short notes followed by a long one: Bam-Bam-Bam BAM. The final BAM completes the arc of the musical phrase. If you were to hear only Bam-Bam-Bam…it would sound incomplete.

In music, this pattern is called tension and resolution, it refers to a rising progression of musical chords that culminates in a release.

From the sublime of Beethoven to the simple. Think of the universally familiar knock-on-the-door pattern composed of four short notes followed by two long ones: BAM-Bam-Bam-Bam-Bam, BAM BAM (also known as “Shave and a haircut, two bits”). If you were to hear only BAM-Bam-Bam-Bam-Bam...it would sound incomplete.

Composer Leonard Bernstein and lyricist Stephen Sondheim used this familiar rhythmic pattern in their legendary musical West Side Story as the climax to their comedic song “Gee, Officer Krupke.”²

To get a better idea of the power of Complete the Arc, try the following exercise.

Complete the Arc Exercise

When you are next with a group of friends in a restaurant or with colleagues around a conference table, out of the blue, rap your knuckles on the tabletop: BAM-Bam-Bam-Bam-Bam…and then stop short. Odds are that one or two of your companions, without any prompting, will rap their knuckles on the tabletop: BAM BAM—to Complete the Arc.

This instinctive impulse to resolve the logic of a musical phrase transcends cultural borders. Dr. Krzysztof Izdebski, the chair of the Pacific Voice & Speech Foundation, invited me to present the Complete the Arc concept at one of the organization’s annual conferences. The attendees were voice and speech scientists from all over the world: Japan, Russia, Scandinavia, and Western Europe. After Dr. Izdebski’s introduction, I stepped onto the stage and, without uttering a word, rapped my knuckles on the lectern: BAM-Bam-Bam-Bam-bam, then stopped short. Without a word, several people in the audience rapped their knuckles on whatever hard surface was nearby—their armrests, their laptops, or their briefcases—BAM BAM!

Complete the Arc.

Complete the Arc in Film and Video

Film and video editing offer another example of the importance of Complete the Arc. Think about the time you saw a television news clip in which a subject, such as a public official, says “I think that’s a great idea…” and then, with the official’s rising voice suspended in midair, the clip abruptly switches to a shot of a reporter, who comments on the statement. The rise in the official’s voice at the edit point is known by film and video editors as an “upcut” because it sounds incomplete and makes a viewer wonder whether there was something more to the statement. Did the official go on to say “but…” and then disparage the idea? Did the editor alter or manipulate the meaning of the official’s statement? Most likely not, but in the deadline-driven news business, editors are forced to cut on the copy, not the tone.

Rising/Falling Exercise

Deliver the two variations of the same phrase above to a person you know. Watch that person’s reactions to each version. Even as an exercise, the difference will be palpable.

Rising/Falling: The Question

If your voice rises at the end of a phrase, it converts a statement into a question. A question sounds uncertain or dubious; a statement sounds confident, the perception every presenter wants to project. The following exercise demonstrates the difference between the uncertainty in a question and the conviction of a statement.

Question Exercise

Say a simple phrase such as “I grew up in (your hometown”) but do it twice, first as a question with rising inflection and then as a statement with falling inflection. Hear the difference?

Rising/Falling Exception

I discovered an interesting exception to the rising/falling effect in my car’s voice guidance system. After I enter a destination, a recorded male voice provides directions using a rising or falling pattern to convey different meanings. Every time the voice provides an update, he ends the phrase with rising inflection on the last words: “Continue on El Camino Real for three miles…” “Continue on El Camino Real for two miles…” “In 200 feet, turn left…” The rise in his voice creates suspense and indicates that we’re not there yet. But then, when he delivers his last instruction, “You have arrived at your destination,” his inflection falls on the last word, concluding the journey.

This pattern works well for guidance systems because it indicates a continuing journey, but works against presenters because a rising inflection pattern indicates uncertainty.

Rising/Falling: UpSpeak

At the far end of the rising/falling vocal spectrum is what is known as UpSpeak, where the inflection rises at the end of a phrase even further than it does for a question and continues upward until it veers off into complete meaninglessness. In a YouTube video, Garrison Frost demonstrated UpSpeak by simply speaking the first sentence of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address two ways: conventionally and with UpSpeak. In the latter, Frost’s voice rose at the end of each phrase in the sentence—at each comma—weakening the power of those immortal words³:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

UpSpeak is often identified with teenagers because the pattern makes their words—and their personas—sound immature. Comedians have labeled this pattern “Valley Girl Talk.”

British comedian and writer Stephen Fry demonstrated Valley Girl talk as it occurs “particularly on the West Coast of America and a particularly female way of talking”⁴:

My name is Mandy… [rising]

and I want to be class president… [rising]

But UpSpeak is not limited to Valley Girls; presidents do it, too. George W. Bush fell into an UpSpeak pattern during a speech in Florida:

This trip’s a little different from the last time I spent the night here in Miami. Last night Jeb and I had some crabs… [rising inflection]

…with like members of the 1972 Miami Dolphins… [rising]

…Dan Marino and his really dynamic wife… [rising]

…TV stars, Andy Garcia… [rising]

…movie stars, we had a fantastic experience! It’s a lot better, by the way, than preparing for a presidential debate.⁵

Rising/Falling: Vocal Fry

At the far other end of the rising/falling vocal spectrum is “Vocal Fry,” a mannerism in which speakers end their phrases by dropping their voice into a raspy, low-pitched growl.⁶ The mannerism has drawn much attention because it has been adopted by many young women who are said to be emulating celebrities⁷ like Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, and Britney Spears.⁸ It has also generated considerable media attention and controversy because it casts females who use it in a negative light. An article in The Guardian concluded that “this pattern makes young women who use it sound less competent, less trustworthy, less educated.”⁹

But here, too, the pattern is not limited to young women. It can also make a mature woman sound less trustworthy.

Jill Abramson is an experienced and respected journalist who rose through the ranks to become the first female executive editor of The New York Times. She lasted in that role for only four years due to conflicts with management and was abruptly dismissed. Returning to her journalistic roots, she wrote a book called Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts.

When the book was published, however, it landed her in more trouble: Jake Malooley, an alert reporter for Rolling Stone, discovered that she had used ­several passages written by other writers, duplicated word-for-word, without attribution—the literary world’s cardinal sin of plagiarism, made worse because it was perpetrated by an editor. “The irony was thick,” Malooley wrote. “Here was a veteran of the industry, a Harvard journalism lecturer no less, getting facts wrong in a book about ‘the fight for facts’ in contemporary news.”¹⁰

In an effort to defend herself, Abramson made the media rounds. One stop was an interview on PBS, conducted by the respected Walter Isaacson, a former managing editor of Time Magazine, now a professor of history at Tulane University, and the author of biographies of Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci.

Isaacson said, “You’ve been accused of plagiarism in the book because there are a few passages that are pretty much verbatim from sources that weren’t cited well.…Were you cutting and pasting?”¹¹

In her halting answer, Abramson repeatedly dropped her voice into Vocal Fry, indicated by underlines:

I wasn’t doing that much cutting and pasting—some—uh—you know, but I don’t think that in—there are three examples of things that just went uncited, either authors or publications. I have, you know, 70 pages of footnotes and 835 separate citations. I was using—uh—a form of footnoting that I’d never used before called “trailing phrase end notes”—uh—which I’m certain—whether for a source—some people were angry because I credited some material but used other quotes from someone’s interview and didn’t do a separate end note on that. I didn’t think that is what that form required. But looking back I—I wish I had been more careful.¹²

The remedy for both UpSpeak and Vocal Fry is to Complete the Arc.