You may find vocal fry irritating, but don’t automatically attribute it to women
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If you have listened to a podcast or watched a video on TikTok lately, you will probably be familiar with vocal fry, even if you didn’t know it had a name. Vocal fry describes the creaky sound that occurs when we speak in our lowest vocal register. It is often considered irritating and is typically associated with young women, but new research suggests there is no good-quality evidence for this stereotype.
Vocal fry occurs when our vocal cords are relaxed but not a lot of air is pushing past them, which naturally happens when we come to the end of an utterance. But it becomes more complicated in the context of popular culture, where it is often presented as a negative – or, more specifically, annoying – characteristic of young women’s speech. Now, Jeanne Brown at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and her colleagues have found that this idea ought to be interrogated.
First, they analysed the speech of 49 Canadian people, collected from online sources. The researchers focused on measurable acoustic markers of vocal fry, such as irregularities in, and small differences between, certain fundamental sound components of each voice, as well as a type of breathiness. They found that these vocal traits were unambiguously more prevalent in men. Additionally, the team found that creakiness increased with the speaker’s age, so neither being young nor being a woman put a speaker in the most creaky group.
Brown says this aligns with past studies that analysed creakiness as an acoustic property, but doesn’t explain why it is often associated with women’s speech. “Maybe it’s something in the processing of the acoustic signal that is leading people to identify more creak in women’s voices. I wanted to dig into that.”
So, she and her colleagues got 40 participants to listen to short voice notes, each of which was a paired with an image of a man or a woman, then rate them on creakiness. Prior to this, all the participants completed a short training module on what creakiness sounds like, so their individual ratings would be less subjective. All the recordings started with Brown’s voice, which had been manipulated to differ in creakiness and sound ambiguous in terms of sex.
The participants successfully identified the creaky voices as creaky, but they were no more likely to consider them to belong to a man or a woman. Brown presented the work at the Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 14 May.
“The controlled perception study and the controlled acoustic study, both of them don’t really support this popular narrative of more creak for women’s voices,” says Brown.
Lisa Davidson at New York University says that people generally correctly identify creakiness when asked to, like in the new research, but in more generic situations, they tend to hear it more selectively due to social and cultural biases. She and her colleagues have found that who the listener is can make a big difference: for example, older people generally rate creaky voices as less pleasant than younger listeners do. “All of this is tied up culturally. You never read anything in the press about how men’s voices are annoying,” says Davidson.
“We get a lot of negative perceptions about creaky voice or vocal fry, but maybe it’s not just about the way that the voice sounds,” says Brown. “Maybe it’s about the whole interpretation of what this person stands for, what this person represents, the social group this person is trying to show that they’re a part of. It could be that people are making judgments about that in addition to the way that their voice sounds.”
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