ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship between creaky voice and microrhythmic nuances in the hope of better understanding the expressive potential of Sia's voice. Among the palette of features available to her for conveying emotions, her use of creaky voice is particularly noticeable, though she reserves it for particularly loaded musical contexts, such as 'Breathe Me'. Creaky voice, then, is an essentially rhythmic phenomenon: people can hear the clicks subdividing the sound event at a microacoustic level. The word 'head' has been laryngealized for its whole duration. The 'a' of 'blame' is in fact segmented into three parts: a creak, a few milliseconds of modal vocalization, then another creak. The creaks and ritard are visible on both the soundwave and the spectrogram, and the latter in fact starts in the busiest sonic area, in turn pushing back the last, creaky 'a'. Altman therefore proposes a supradiegetic space that overlaps the intra-and extradiegetic ones.
