What Do Rick and Morty's Burps Hide?

Little can be added at this point about Rick Sanchez, the mad scientist, anarcho-nihilist, and hopeless alcoholic from Rick and Morty. His dialogue is almost as acidic as his worldview, and it is "enhanced" by a relatively constant stream of burps that seem to reflect his drinking problem. However, paralinguistic researcher Brooke Kidner from the University of Southern California conducted the first acoustic analysis of Rick's burps, in an attempt to determine the latent meaning they hide.

Human language has a wide variety of "non-traditional words". A moan of pleasure, a grunt when angry, or a gasp of astonishment are common examples, but outside the traditional spectrum there are "alternatives" like burping while speaking. Granted, it is not very frequent due to its unpleasant tendency, but if the perpetrator is a mad scientist and nihilist to the bone with alcohol problems, it doesn't surprise us too much.

During a phonetics course at the University of Southern California, researcher Brooke Kidner had heard that the burp was a case of "sound without meaning", but when she presented Rick Sanchez's dialogues as a counterexample, the instructor told her to investigate further. This leads us directly into the world of paralanguage, officially defined as "set of non-verbal elements of the voice". One of the pioneers of paralanguage was linguist George Leonard Trager, who detected certain characteristics of the burp in the '50s, starting with the fact that we can "speak through it".

(Editor's note: I didn't make it past 20 seconds. If you think you can handle a compilation of Rick's burps, here it is.)

The Study Details

Kidner's work focused on expanding Trager's data. The burp is a "laryngeal vocalization" that occurs in the glottis or below it, with a profile similar to the "vocal fry" (that is, the lowest register of a human voice). In normal conversation, about 100-105 glottal pulses per second are recorded. Under "vocal fry", that number ranges between 100 and 135 pulses, but with a burp, the average is 140 pulses per second, with much higher peaks.

We must also add the concepts of jitter and shimmer, linked to the instability of frequency and amplitude of sounds. The researcher calculated that a burp has about 144 glottal pulses per second as acoustic identifiers, an extra 4 percent of jitter compared to normal voice, and an additional 15 percent of shimmer. Applying these values to the potential burps of Rick and Morty (more than 200), Kidner found that many are not actually burps, but rather qualify as paralinguistic sounds, on par with "um", "err", and other expressions of agreement or emotion.

Of course, there is a wide margin for error, and the researcher recommends not taking her technical analysis as definitive, but I imagine that Rick Sanchez and his burps are just the tip of the iceberg...

Source: EurekAlert!

Source: Ars Technica