Until Taylor Swift?

Taylor Swift sings vibrato on a single note. She does this typically about twice in a song. So these are relative rare. She rarely does them on long notes.

In other words, her use of vibrato is VERY unusual.

And yet it works. At least for me. I love them.

I have not noticed anyone else using this technique. (That doesn't mean no one else did it before Taylor Swift. I probably never noticed it. But maybe she is the first.)

And I don't understand it. I admit that.

Her Vibrato

Her voice is usually extremely flat, by which I mean lacking any vibrato. So the vibrato is more noticeable. Not that anyone but me has probably noticed it.

Her vibratos range from subtle to strong vibratos which are almost like trills. Often there is no warning that they are coming. Instead, she is singing flat and one note is suddenly sung with vibrato.

Why?

Swift's vibrato is very short, at the end of the note. And there is almost an abrupt transition to a strong trillish vibrato.

There is one extremely interesting explanation of this. If you read the page on vibrato, you will see that I don't know why extending a note with vibrato is pleasing. Whatever reason this is, perhaps (1) Taylor Swift has a slightly different way of using vibrato to the same purpose (a short trillish vibrato), and (2) Taylor Swift is bringing this use of vibrato to other purposes within a song. 2. On "Love Story", her famous song based on Romeo and Juliet, the only vibrato occurs on the word "eyes" near the start. The previous note is the same pitch. So maybe she is treating two notes as the same and extending this "double note" with vibrato.

Except this seems to be the only place she does this.

Whatever, this leads to an extremely exciting possibililty. Consider the four repeating notes in "My Country Tis of Thee" (also known as "God Save the Queen"). The strong advice is that repeating notes should always be given different glides.

But I run out of different glides. In "Land where my fa...", I give the first note a glide of a fifth, the second note a glide of a third, and the third note no glide. Then I never figured out what to do for the fourth note. What does seem to work very well is to put vibrato on the fourth note. 3. I suspect that maybe vibrato is used for emphasis. Sometimes? 4. There also seems to be an interaction between vibrato and how the note starts. As noted elsewhere, the consonants of a word can be sung before the beat. Swift seems to do this often. However, most of the time when she puts the vibrato on a single note, the note starts right on the beat.

Alas, I know of at least one exception.