Men use “vocal fry” more than women, counter to stereotype

Study suggests "the bias is real but socially constructed, rather than grounded in how women actually sound."

See full article...

 

[sasenach]

I would be interested in the nationality split not just gender.. as someone who works in a multinational company I only ever hear it from US colleagues and predominantly women… though I could just be mistaking it in men as part of their accent.

 

[Eurynom0s]

The studies that found women used vocal fry more often were from the US. This one finding that men use it more often is from Canada. Unless I missed something, it seems like based on what we have available to us it's possible that which gender uses vocal fry more depends on which country you're talking about and doesn't support a universal claim about women vs men on this.

 

[SGJ]

I find it intensely irritating in men and women, old and young. I've tried to ignore it, for example when listening to a podcast, but it's very difficult.

 

[numerobis]

The studies that found women used vocal fry more often were from the US. This one finding that men use it more often is from Canada. Unless I missed something, it seems like based on what we have available to us it's possible that which gender uses vocal fry more depends on which country you're talking about and doesn't support a universal claim about women vs men on this.

We make the claim in Canada about how women use it and it's absolutely terrible and we should shoot every woman who uses it back to being barefoot and in the kitchen.

Since day one it's seemed to me to be a completely manufactured controversy.

 

[Feanaaro]

There seems to be an inherent flaw in the methodology, for the kind of speech that people find irritating (
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2y5q31E1gQ
) does include vocal fry in the sense of using a low registry, but it's not just that. It's intonation and the whole affectation. An old person speaking in a creaking way just sounds like an old person, a teenager affecting a vocal fry is completely different.

 

[crepuscularbrolly]

I would be interested in the nationality split not just gender.. as someone who works in a multinational company I only ever hear it from US colleagues and predominantly women… though I could just be mistaking it in men as part of their accent.

Finns use it pretty much universally. 16:16 in the following video. There's a bit about Burmese immediately preceding: vocal fry is a formal part of the pronunciation. The whole video is worth a watch. Posh British men tend to use it a fair bit.

ETA examples in (posh British) Received Pronunciation starting at 12:25. E.g. Shere Khan, Sean Connery as James Bond, Ian Fleming, etc etc.


View: https://youtu.be/Q0yL2GezneU?si=D0h_VuwND2asalE0&t=976

 

[deltaproximus]

I never attributed that kind of voice outside of singing to intentional vocal fry. I just assume when people sound creaky and wobbly, they just have some snot in their throat they haven't spit out yet and they're unwilling to swallow it because they really want to "hawk that lugey." But maybe that's just because that was the reason I talked like that when I was a teenager.

 

[cleek]

There seems to be an inherent flaw in the methodology, for the kind of speech that people find irritating (
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2y5q31E1gQ
) does include vocal fry in the sense of using a low registry, but it's not just that. It's intonation and the whole affectation. An old person speaking in a creaking way just sounds like an old person, a teenager affecting a vocal fry is completely different.

we should all keep in mind that Loudermilk is an asshole.

 

[crepuscularbrolly]

View: https://youtu.be/b15-P12gIf0?si=mTU01-hZsk-ZYzsr&t=85

Charles when he was a young prince:


View: https://youtu.be/I0__QzksN8w?si=Zis76k3WgR1UC5ZM&t=78

 

[Feanaaro]

we should all keep in mind that Loudermilk is an asshole.

I have no opinion on that, nor I do contest that there's bias against young women speech patterns in general. Nevertheless, simply equating the type of speech that many people find irritating with the use of a low registry is silly, for it's clearly not just that.

 

[YetAnotherPoster]

Not that I'd take anything Sam Altman says seriously anyway but it's 1000 times worse with his affected tech bro vocal fry.

 

[fellow human]

Seems like it's simply easier to hear or notice in higher pitched voices.

 

[Luddite1952]

I.. what? Read the article and still don't understand why it's a good or bad thing, not something I have ever noticed before... And honestly, I'm not falling down that particular rabbit hole as I have things to do today.

 

[scortiusthecharioteer]

It doesn't bother me. Uptalk does though. It doesn't bother me so much if I know the person and am familiar with them and their speech patterns. But when I am talking to someone I don't know that well, or at all, which is most of my working day, I just need to know when something that sounds like a question is actually a question.

 

[saanaito]

I learned a bit about vocal fry (among other things) while I was attempting to learn to feminize my voice after I began my transition. It definitely made me realize that I (subconsciously?) lean more heavily on fry than I'd realized.

(Said efforts to "feminize" my voice were a colossal failure, so these days I just try to live with it. It sucks, though.)

 

[Tech-Space-Cars]

So it's a warbling, scratchy voice?

 

[Rick C.]

I never knew it had a name, but I've experienced this before in listening to teenage girls speak. It's like an end of the sentence lowering of their voice. I'm curious why they do it or if they even know they're doing it? Is it a learned behavior that they pick up from each other?

 

[Matthew J.]

Wha-a-a-a-a-a-at?

 

[Cloudgazer]

I don't think the issue is vocal fry (I actually think I kinda like vocal fry), but it is true that, compared to other countries where I don't have a gendered accent preference, I find more American women to sound unappealing to my ears than I do American men.

I'm not really sure why it is though.

Saying that I'm now going to go listen to a female American you-tuber.

 

[Socks Mingus]

Wha-a-a-a-a-a-at?

Yeaaaaaaaaaaaah.

 

[ziatonic]

Brown found a reverse acoustic bias: The primary marker for identifying vocal fry was low pitch, not gender. “This shows that the popular narrative reflects more of a sociocultural bias than empirical reality,” said Brown.

Am I missing something? This reads that low pitch is how people identify fry. So how is it a cultural bias then? Women are higher pitched. This could be written much more clearly.

 

[Causification]

associated with the speech patterns of young women in particular.

Uh, is there research supporting that claim? Because I've never heard that in my life.

 

[brionl]

I.. what? Read the article and still don't understand why it's a good or bad thing, not something I have ever noticed before... And honestly, I'm not falling down that particular rabbit hole as I have things to do today.

Right, I always thought vocal fry was the movie phone guy voice.

 

[crepuscularbrolly]

It doesn't bother me. Uptalk does though. It doesn't bother me so much if I know the person and am familiar with them and their speech patterns. But when I am talking to someone I don't know that well, or at all, which is most of my working day, I just need to know when something that sounds like a question is actually a question.

Protip: don’t visit Australia.

 

[Hookbrah]

Yeaaaaaaaaaaaah.

View: https://youtu.be/6jJkdRaa04g?t=6&si=FknkEfPsUxAL27Ic

 

[Pooga]

There seems to be an inherent flaw in the methodology, for the kind of speech that people find irritating ([YouTube video removed]) does include vocal fry in the sense of using a low registry, but it's not just that. It's intonation and the whole affectation. An old person speaking in a creaking way just sounds like an old person, a teenager affecting a vocal fry is completely different.

I have no opinion on that, nor I do contest that there's bias against young women speech patterns in general. Nevertheless, simply equating the type of speech that many people find irritating with the use of a low registry is silly, for it's clearly not just that.

Vocal fry is an established term. It has a specific definition. What you're doing here is trying to redefine what it means to justify a preexisting bias arbitrarily targeting a specific demographic.

This is very similar to the way certain folks have redefined CRT or DEI from being specific, non-controversial terms for specific things to nebulous, catch-all stand-in terms with shifting definitions so it always means what they're against - even when what they're against has little or nothing to do with the actual thing.

 

[Killdozer77]

This whole thing has been eye opening. I've never heard of any of this stuff. I know some people have annoying vocal intonations, but I just deal with it and go on with my life. I had no idea there was a whole science around it.

 

[Socks Mingus]

Uh, is there research supporting that claim? Because I've never heard that in my life.

There's a graph in the piece w/ some links (I think the first one specifically mentions young women, I only glanced at it though).

The growing prevalence of vocal fry in speech started making headlines in the 2010s, beginning with a study concluding that US women in California used vocal fry significantly more frequently than US men. Another 2014 study had similar findings: women used vocal fry four times more often than men. It’s been documented in Oregon and the Midwest, too, not just California. Yet another study found that women who employ vocal fry during job interviews are perceived more negatively than men who do so. (Anecdotally, Ira Glass, host of This American Life, has said he frequently uses fry in his podcasts and has never received a single complaint, yet often gets hate mail complaining about female staffers’ voices.)

Anecdotally, it had a whole moment in The Discourse (TM, US Edition) like 10-20??? years ago- Often speculated as being due to the influence of reality TV stars like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, as a sort of newfangled "valley girl" accent for the social media age. This wasn't just vocal fry in general but, like, a specific pattern of deploying fry to varying degrees of exaggeration within sentence structures etc...

I never heard it all that often IRL but think it has kind of trickled down in less exagerrated form into more common use by people of any gender especially anyone who was young around that time. Many people seem to use fry similarly to, or in combination with, filler words (uhm, ah, like, etc...).

 

[Pooga]

Uh, is there research supporting that claim? Because I've never heard that in my life.

I've heard it off and on for about 20 years now. I'm sure there are many folks here who are part of today's lucky 10,000 on the subject, but as the video linked above points out, it's use by girls and young women has been a common target of derision.

 

[randomcat]

when a sexy person does a thing it's sexy, when a subjectively less sexy person does a thing it's less sexy, film at eleven

 

[Feanaaro]

Vocal fry is an established term. It has a specific definition. What you're doing here is trying to redefine what it means to justify a preexisting bias arbitrarily targeting a specific demographic.

This is very similar to the way certain folks have redefined CRT or DEI from being specific, non-controversial terms for specific things to nebulous, catch-all stand-in terms with shifting definitions so it always means what they're against - even when what they're against has little or nothing to do with the actual thing.

Vocal fry has a clear established definition in a scientific sense, but it is also used in ordinary language to refer to a certain kind of speech affectation which includes vocal fry ion the specific sense but it's not simply reducible to that. I am not the one confusing concepts, the study referenced in the article is. And besides, it is a well-known thing that a word can be used in more than one meaning, especially across different contexts.

 

[Aube]

Brown collected speech examples of 49 Canadians from online sources...

What does "online sources" mean, exactly? How well do the demographics of the male and female groups line up? Were the speech samples all captured in the same context? What are the size of the two groups?

The first question is about how representative the sample is. The second question, the comparability of the comparison groups. The third question the control of exogenous factors. The final question informs the interpretation of the statistics (which do not seem to have been published yet).

 

[metavirus]

I hate to yuck on some researchers’ yum but this is good ignoble bait. Everyone is familiar with lots of Keanus, surfer guys, and such doing the same. Maybe some of the annoyance with it is gendered, but I’d venture most pejorative opinions of it is fairly balanced in terms of being annoyed with any genAlpha sporting a stereotypical genAlpha affectation of disaffection.

 

[GFKBill]

Brown collected speech examples of 49 Canadians from online sources

While we're discussing biases, I count 4 potential sources of bias in just that one sentence. Be good to see the actual paper to know more about the methodology.

Edit: Aaand thoroughly ninja'd by Aube.

 

[MailDeadDrop]

I have a hard time supporting the headline "Men use “vocal fry” more than women" when according to the article it is based upon an analysis of recordings of 49 Canadians. Do better, Ars.

 

[GFKBill]

If the method of identifying amount of vocal fry used in the second expriment was valid, why not use it for categorisation in the first experiment?

 

[murty]

One of my favorite moments of the most recent iteration of Beavis and Butthead involves them watching a YouTube instructional video on own to do vocal fry for metal singing.

(Whole thing is less than 5 minutes, it’s just split across two videos on YT for some reason)

Part 1:
View: https://youtu.be/SPH0uUB6R7U


Part 2:
View: https://youtu.be/Z9UfBrw8tJE


On a personal level, I can fry pretty good, but it’s only something I use in non-serious joking contexts, or occasionally in singing when emulating source material that does the same. Can’t imagine trying to talk like that all the time.

 

[GFKBill]

Vocal fry has a clear established definition in a scientific sense, but it is also used in ordinary language to refer to a certain kind of speech affectation which includes vocal fry ion the specific sense but it's not simply reducible to that. I am not the one confusing concepts, the study referenced in the article is. And besides, it is a well-known thing that a word can be used in more than one meaning, especially across different contexts.

Feel like you shot yourself in the foot by opening with "Vocal fry has a clear established definition in a scientific sense".