Is talking like this bad for my voice?
Or job prospects?
or Life in general?
What is UP with Vocal Fry?
Vocal fry is the lowest of the four registers of the human voice.
Our voice is made by air passing through a set of soft flaps in our voicebox; or larynx.
As we breathe, air moves past these flaps and they can vibrate from 100 to 1000 times
a second.
Like a brass instrument's mouthpiece, vocal chords alone create a buzzing sound, but if
you put a resonator above it, like a horn, you can affect a sound!
[[play]] As we learn to control the vibration, we use the throat, mouth, and nasal cavity
as our resonator.
Our vocal chords can make four registers: the lowest is fry, then modal, falsetto, and
whistle on the top.
Most people will speak and sing in the modal range, and if you listen, you can tell when
people switch registers especially as they’re singing.
As you speak, the chords are vibrating smoothly, but fry slams them shut, allowing only bubbles
of air to break through -- which is why it sounds like popping.
In 2012, the Journal of Voice released a study exploring how young women aged 18-25 were
speaking in the lowest register, for some reason!
Essentially, while talking would slip into the vocal fry register -- again, something
rarely done in recent generational memory.
Why?
NO IDEA.
Seriously, no one knows.
But it's definitely new.
In 1972, a study in the Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders explored judgements
of voice quality in both men and women and found 5 to 10 percent of people had quote
"some type of… pathology that produced a deviant voice quality."
Speaking outside the modal range is considered a deviance, so from this result we know people
were definitely using it in the late-20th century.
In the 90s, men and women who were in their 40s used it during a study for the Acoustical
Society of America.
And today, in an disappointingly tiny study from Long Island University, found two-thirds
of women used the fry.
In the past both men and women have used deep voices to convey authority of gravitas, and
looking at the CEOs of 800 public companies, scientists found deeper voices made more money.
In fact, according to their study, as pitch of the voice decreased, the CEO’s salary
increased and deeper voices infer longer tenure too.
Plus, a 2013 PLOS ONE study found women associate sexual attractiveness with deeper, breathier
male voices but men, on the other hand, looked for higher pitched voices in their heteronormative
mates -- and their result?
It's all about body size.
Deeper voices meant larger bodies which then equated to more power.
Regardless, this affectation or tic, is gaining popularity, especially with women, though
I really want to stress the point that men do it too -- women are just getting crap for
it.
Researchers can only guess why it's gaining popularity in women, though there are hypotheses.
Perhaps, the use of the vocal fry is to mimic that "power" or "male attractiveness?"
Or, just as likely, it's something completely different!
We know we're doing it more, and we know that some people don't like that.
A 2014 PlosONE study found people over 40 think females using vocal fry sound like they
"lack authority" but those UNDER 40 don't care one bit.
So, know your audience, but speak like you want!
In the end, it's not physically harmful according to vocal coach Ken Taylor, and as long as
you're not using it constantly or yelling while doing vocal fry, you shouldn't see any
long-term issues.
Noam Chomsky's voice has vocal fry, and so does the former head of the New York Times
Jill Abramson it all the time, I don't see anyone giving him crap about it.
You do you girls and guys.
Do you speak with vocal fry?
If you weren't sure before, you'll probably hear it all the time now.
What do you think of it?