Study suggests "the bias is real but socially constructed, rather than grounded in how women actually sound."
See full article...
See full article...
Men use “vocal fry” more than women, counter to stereotype
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
end of sentences??? What are you talking about.. The vocal fry talked about in the article and by everyone is not at the end of sentences, but in the middle of specific or most words.
Edit: And the only change in frequency at the end of sentences I can associate with vocal fry is the raising of pitch in the valley girl accent turning every sentence into a question, but that part is not the vocal fry.
Last edited:
Upvote
7
(8
/
-1)
From the Geoff Lindsey video (excellent speech analyst, by the way), it feels like vocal fry is more irritating (to me) the higher-pitched the base tone is. It gets especially irritating when combined with higher-pitched nasally voices.
The men in the video had a naturally lower base tone range, and were less irritating to listen to. I think it may also be related to the vibration frequency of the fry (just my own impression, not measured), where the frequency appears to be lower for the men than the women.
Vocal fry is also used by men to get extremely low bass notes in singing, and generally sounds pretty good there (even if a 'pure' note is more impressive).
So, the more nasal a voice is, the more irritating vocal fry is. The more the voice comes from the chest, the more pleasant it is. Those also tend to correlate with higher and lower nominal pitch, which likewise correlate with more or less irritation. And possibly the vibration frequency of the fry itself may relate, where higher pitch has a higher vibration frequency, and lower pitch has a lower vibration frequency.
And of course you're going to 'notice' something that annoys you more than something that doesn't. So the portion of the population that produces the more annoying form of vocal fry is going to appear to be more populous than any other part of the population.
The men in the video had a naturally lower base tone range, and were less irritating to listen to. I think it may also be related to the vibration frequency of the fry (just my own impression, not measured), where the frequency appears to be lower for the men than the women.
Vocal fry is also used by men to get extremely low bass notes in singing, and generally sounds pretty good there (even if a 'pure' note is more impressive).
So, the more nasal a voice is, the more irritating vocal fry is. The more the voice comes from the chest, the more pleasant it is. Those also tend to correlate with higher and lower nominal pitch, which likewise correlate with more or less irritation. And possibly the vibration frequency of the fry itself may relate, where higher pitch has a higher vibration frequency, and lower pitch has a lower vibration frequency.
And of course you're going to 'notice' something that annoys you more than something that doesn't. So the portion of the population that produces the more annoying form of vocal fry is going to appear to be more populous than any other part of the population.
Upvote
8
(9
/
-1)
Sam Sheffer is the ultimate vocal fry endboss. To a point you can't concentrate on what he's saying anymore because it so grating.
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
Upvote
2
(2
/
0)
This doesn’t exist in mother tongue and the two other languages I speak. It’s entirely regional English speaking accent thing.
Upvote
-8
(1
/
-9)
In fact I don't think Moon Zappa uses vocal fry at all in the song, while still perfectly capturing how .... how to say this politely ... specific the accent is.
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
Scipio Africanus
Ars Centurion
* Extreme metal enters the chat *
By far it's male dominated but the women who do it can do it just as well.
By far it's male dominated but the women who do it can do it just as well.
Upvote
7
(7
/
0)
MilanKraft
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
This and also, society has much bigger fish to.... and yeah, it's annoying as hell regardless of who is doing it, however...
...with the amount of distraction and noise the average person contends with on a daily basis, there is only so much mental bandwidth available for what's actually important and then hopefully taking some form of action.
I wish all news outlets (not just Ars) would shelve these types of "interesting but not particularly important" stories for a while, and focus for now on the wide array of human endeavor (including communications / entertainment related topics) that are impacted by our society slowing burning to the ground right in front of our faces, on a near-daily basis now. Focus, humans... focus. Or bad shit's gonna happen a lot sooner than many people suspect.
Last edited:
Upvote
-18
(0
/
-18)
Was thinking the same. This story without any references to Tatiana Shmayluk or Mikael Åkerfeldt? Tsk.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
I've never intentionally engaged in vocal fry, but it has seemed like it when I was hittin' the stogies and booze back in the day 
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
well, sometimes. other times, he's a self-sabotaging misanthrope.
Last edited:
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
Throughout 2018, I did a dictionary podcast with a colleague. The transcription software we used was unable to distinguish my voice from her voice. She and I conducted a lot of radio interviews in the '00s and '10s, but only one of us routinely received petulant email about how irritating/annoying/off-putting our voices were -- guess whose...
There's a lot of misogynists out there who have nothing better to do than complain about women's voices. (My colleagues in broadcasting have had similar experiences.)
There's a lot of misogynists out there who have nothing better to do than complain about women's voices. (My colleagues in broadcasting have had similar experiences.)
Upvote
12
(14
/
-2)
As not much of a pop music listener, I had the opposite assumption from the headline, that men would stereotypically use vocal fry more frequently.
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
Less than 50 people from one nationality is like a textbook example of "sample size too small" to make any sort of wide statement.
Upvote
5
(5
/
0)
It's worth noting that a woman played a woman's voice for the test subjects, but manipulated the voice to make it sound (to her subjective ear) like a man. At no point did she play them a man's voice. The claim that she proved anything about male vs female is absolutely false and the idea that you can change a woman's voice to a man's voice by manipulating the audio seems ridiculous to me. I own multiple pedals that modify the voice, and I assure you there is no way to actually make a man's voice sound like an actual woman and not like a man's voice being acoustically manipulated. Similarly, you can easily tell the difference between a child's voice and a man's voice manipulated to sound like a child/chipmunk. I don't have a woman's voice, but I'd imagine the human ear is able to pick up manipulation of a woman's voice too.
All she proved is that when you manipulate how vocal fry sounds, like by lowering the pitch of the voice, you can make it less irritating. She didn't prove anything in regards to how we perceive a male voice using vocal fry because she didn't bother testing with a male voice. That being said, there are definitely men who have annoying voices. Gilbert Godfried made a career off of one.
All she proved is that when you manipulate how vocal fry sounds, like by lowering the pitch of the voice, you can make it less irritating. She didn't prove anything in regards to how we perceive a male voice using vocal fry because she didn't bother testing with a male voice. That being said, there are definitely men who have annoying voices. Gilbert Godfried made a career off of one.
Upvote
8
(11
/
-3)
xs_confusion
Ars Centurion
Great example that even my ear can pick up.
OT: Great, now I've gone down the rabbit hole of trying to find an obscure club mix of Yello's Bostitch.
Upvote
2
(2
/
0)
There are a couple male characters in The Boys who use vocal fry to a hilarious degree.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
To be fair, Sam Altman has been skewing the statistic towards male vocal fry users for some years now.
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
So do the quiet fry get to stay with the school and grow and spawn, or is it just the vocal fry?
Upvote
1
(3
/
-2)
How about a study on high rising terminal (upspeak, uptalk) which makes every declarative statement sound like a question? That is far more annoying to me that vocal fry. It makes people sound like they're uncertain about what they're saying (even though they know very well) and at worst sound like they're being condescending.
Upvote
-1
(0
/
-1)
Tangent (related, like upspeak): How about when someone ends every sentence with the word "right"? For example, "I was at the store, right? And there was this old guy talking to his wife, right? And he was using so much vocal fry it was literally the most annoying thing in the world."
I. Don't. Know. You're the one telling the story. Stop asking if me you're right.
(Threw incorrect use of "literally" in there as a bonus. You're welcome.)
I. Don't. Know. You're the one telling the story. Stop asking if me you're right.
(Threw incorrect use of "literally" in there as a bonus. You're welcome.)
Upvote
2
(3
/
-1)
Same here. I'm left wondering just what "vocal fry" is; so I went to Wikipedia for more info and some examples. Their samples don't really illustrate this speech pattern, either.
Upvote
1
(2
/
-1)
rewrite: OK, I found the Geoff Lindsay video somebody recommended, and now I know what the topic is all about. I can actually hear something in the Kardashian examples and that comedy coffee-shop scene. Most of the rest are so fleeting that I'm surprised there's even a name for it.
I guess it's like kerning - you can happily go your whole life without noticing it at all, but once it's been pointed out, you see it everywhere.
Except that for kerning, there are intuitive rules for how to do it well or how to do it badly. Vocal fry is just a voice register like any others. Sure, I understand why it would be awful if it was one's only vocal register (e.g. the coffee-shop scene), but it's no skin off my back the way most people use it.
Edit: Yep, now that I know what it is, I just noticed it for the first time in a colleague. He's a Texan who tries to project manliness in the John Wayne mode, so he's in a low-and-slow register all the time, which slips into fry quite often. And now it bugs me more than before...
I guess it's like kerning - you can happily go your whole life without noticing it at all, but once it's been pointed out, you see it everywhere.
Except that for kerning, there are intuitive rules for how to do it well or how to do it badly. Vocal fry is just a voice register like any others. Sure, I understand why it would be awful if it was one's only vocal register (e.g. the coffee-shop scene), but it's no skin off my back the way most people use it.
Edit: Yep, now that I know what it is, I just noticed it for the first time in a colleague. He's a Texan who tries to project manliness in the John Wayne mode, so he's in a low-and-slow register all the time, which slips into fry quite often. And now it bugs me more than before...
Last edited:
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
So, given the article... do you find it equally grating when Ira Glass does it?
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
Speaking* for myself, I actually don't notice Ira Glass doing it. His voice annoys me for so many other reasons.
*I initially typoed that as "spearking", which almost works, as it's a matter of my ear...
Upvote
2
(2
/
0)
Coming from another trans woman: there is such a thing as voice feminization surgery. I had it done with Dr. Michael Haben in Rochester, NY.
https://www.professionalvoice.org/feminization.aspx
Upvote
1
(2
/
-1)
Exactly. I'm pretty tuned into people's speech patterns and I notice fry quite a bit, but it is no conceivable way objectively bad the way kerning can be. The use of fry doesn't confuse me and make it harder for me to absorb the information like bad kerning can. If anything it can, though not always, add nuance to the words and increase their information density. People who have problems with it are a little too desperate to find things to dislike and need to spend more time with kittens.
Upvote
1
(2
/
-1)
Whatever the Kardashians speak passes for English, and they are pretty much the ones who torched the linguistic horizon to charcoal level.
On the flip side, the few grass patches that refused to kardashianize were dried out and set to gunpowder flamability level by Daria Morgendorffer a few years prior, around the time she jumped from Beavis and Butthead into her own series.
Upvote
-4
(0
/
-4)
To me, it sounds more like intermodulation of a higher pitch tone and a very low one. Or listening with the sound source on the other side of a fan. But it's not something I'd normally notice in speech. Maybe if I was somebody who'd actually listened to Kardashians.
That said, I'm sort of a vocal chameleon. Put me in an environment where lots of people are talking that way, and in a week or so I will be too.
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
This feature seems common with Native Americans in the northern US, though I find it more noticeable with females. It's never sounded condescending to me, though.
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
Interesting interpretation... If anything, person A speaking to person B in sentences sounding like a question logically sounds like A craving B's validation/opinion on the subject. As far from condescending as linguistically possible.
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
"Valley Girl", the song poking fun at "Valleyspeak", predates the complaints about young women using vocal fry by at least a decade, from my recollection. While the mockery has similar targets, and there is overlap in the Venn Diagram, girls using Valleyspeak are a either subset of those targeted for "artificially" using vocal fry, or the target pool widened once critics started latching on to vocal fry as the alleged primary component of a speech pattern they took issue with.
Upvote
5
(5
/
0)