Vocal Fry

[Boots]

Do you or your friends do this? I didn't even know it was a thing until I read an advice column in the Sun yesterday. This trend was popularized by the Kardashians, apparently.

[Boots]

An explanation

[allegro]

OH MY GOD, this is FASCINATING!

I had never heard of this, and I’m pretty sure that I DO this sometimes! And I thought it was my ALLERGIES or something LOL!

This is way back from 2013:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor..._annoying.html

This is interesting:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business...al-fry/371811/

[elevenism]

OH MY GOD, this is FASCINATING!

I had never heard of this, and I’m pretty sure that I DO this sometimes! And I thought it was my ALLERGIES or something LOL!

This is way back from 2013:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor..._annoying.html

This is interesting:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business...al-fry/371811/

Ha! I do it too, both the fry and the lift.

[Louie_Cypher]

i think this is the result of mobile phones in Tokyo the have subway cars where you cannot use your phone the din was to loud. which resulted in text messaging. weather this is humans evolving or DE-evolving is anyone's guess
-Louie

[Mantra]

I do this a lot, but I don't feel like I'm even conscious of it most of the time. To be honest, I thought it was just because of my work. I literally have to talk almost nonstop at my job, so at the end of the day my voice is totally shot. And I've noticed that, after years of doing this job, I talk like this more and more. I just assumed it was a mild amount of vocal damage that came from talking all day. It doesn't feel like something I could control, but maybe I could make more of an effort.

[Detunez]

I hate the sound of it, and woman who talk like that instantly lose any form of attraction which i might ever have towards them. lol.

[eversonpoe]

I hate the sound of it, and woman who talk like that instantly lose any form of attraction which i might ever have towards them. lol.

"i'm an asshole"

[Louie_Cypher]

if you're concerned have to do any public speaking, think about going to a few toastmasters. great for finding your speaking voice, really good http://www.toastmasters.org/
-Louie

[Detunez]

"i'm an asshole"

It has nothing to do with being an asshole. i wonder even, how could that ever be seen as being an asshole. Are you an asshole for being attracted to a certain thing, or repulsed by a certain other thing in people ? Absolutely not. It is just normal. that is how people are. being human.

If you cant handle that, then i guess the ironic safe space is needed to shield yourself from humanity.

[botley]

It has nothing to do with being an asshole. i wonder even, how could that ever be seen as being an asshole.

"I'm a profoundly superficial person"

[Detunez]

"I'm a profoundly superficial person"

Oh sorry, i did not know that. i will take it into account the next time that we ever cross each other on the forum. I guess being human and behaving like a human could be a rough deal for some. Don't feel bad though. everybody is different.

[botley]

I feel great, it's you who felt the need to come in here and announce your dislike for people who speak a certain way, and assume everyone else's preferences are equally skin-deep. Good Lord, I could not even imagine.

[Detunez]

I feel great, it's you who felt the need to come in here and announce your dislike for people who speak a certain way, and assume everyone else's preferences are equally skin-deep. Good Lord, I could not even imagine.

Oh, good for you that you feel great. The better for you. Let's all feel great and accept that people differ, and not everybody is compatible with just any other random person. I feel sorry for people who are offended by the fact that not everybody would just settle with anything, just to be settled. i guess it is the modern age: feel offended by everything.

[botley]

Let's all feel great and accept that people differ, and not everybody is compatible with just any other random person. I feel sorry for people who are offended by the fact that not everybody would just settle with anything, just to be settled. i guess it is the modern age: feel offended by everything.

Nobody here is offended by your shallow insecurities, let me assure you.

[Dryalex12]

boy, that escalated quickly

[allegro]

Drift drift drift.

The point is about vocal fry, itself, not drift trolling opinions, or comments that can take us off onto some feminist track...

Here, I'll try to put it back on the track: Vocal fry, interesting article. https://www.npr.org/templates/transc...ryId=425608745

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. When I started working in radio in the 1970s, women were first starting to get a foothold in broadcasting. Where I worked then, many women, hosts and guests, were having trouble with sibilance when they were on mic. That is, the mic exaggerated the highest frequency of their S's, making them sound very hissy. Women were told it was a problem with their voices. We women figured that the mics in our studio just weren't designed for women's voices. And I think maybe that was true because when I moved to WHYY, where there were different mics, it stopped being a problem. This is just a little blip in the long history of women being told there's something wrong with their voices. Now it's taking the form of complaints about upspeak, vocal fry and what's sometimes called the sexy baby voice. Young women are being told their voices lack authority or are simply annoying. And these complaints aren't just coming from older man. They're coming from older women, including feminists. So what's going on? Are women's voices changing? Are the complainers just resistant to change? Or are there genuine problems with how many young women speak? I have three guests who are each coming from a different perspective. Journalist Jessica Grose is a former senior editor at Slate magazine who also hosted Slate's podcast DoubleX Gabfest. She's now the editor of Lenny, which is a forthcoming email newsletter about women's issues, politics and culture from Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner. They're producers of HBO's "Girls." Dr. Penny Eckert is a professor of linguistics at Stanford University and is co-author of the book "Language And Gender." Susan Sankin is a speech and language pathologist who works with non-native speakers and people in a variety of different professions, including actors. Her clients include people who think their speech is interfering with their ability to advance in their careers.

GROSE: I wouldn't say she changed my pitch. It did make me more aware of the upspeak. I thought about it more. I think sometimes I overcompensated to where I was maybe doing vocal fry, which I know is something else people complain about, just to - in an effort to make my voice slightly deeper and more even. I'm doing it right now.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSE: I'm doing vocal fry. It's just that - and that was sort of why I moved away from it, is in some ways, I feel like I can't win and young women can't win because if we're not doing upspeak, then we're compensating, and we're doing something else that people find irritating. It's like advice that women get in the workplace, where it's be aggressive, but don't be too aggressive because that's off-putting. And so ultimately, I found I just had to be myself and not think about it because I wasn't going to win.

[Detunez]

Nobody here is offended by your shallow insecurities, let me assure you.

I do not even comprehend how anybody who is so upset about such an irrelevant thing could even think that they could ever write about insecurities. The simple truth is: you are all so insecure and shallow, that you all took it at face value and made a scene about it. There is nothing shallow about anything i wrote. Different people, different preferences.

But lesson learned. There obviously are a lot of insecure users of this forum who are offended by the stupidest of things, so i will avoid triggering them in the future. Also, my last two posts were a troll, and you all just blindly took it at face value because of how upset you all were. talk about being shallow and insecure...

[allegro]

Well, this thread officially got sidetracked and killed.

Thanks a lot, all of you.

[allegro]

No no, I'm not going to let you ding-dongs kill this thread like that, no

I'm going to link the above NPR piece, again: https://www.npr.org/templates/transc...ryId=425608745

And I'm going to quote this portion of it:

It makes me really angry. And it makes me angry, first of all, because the biggest use of vocal fry traditionally had been men. And it still is men in the UK, for instance. And it's considered a sign of hypermasculinity. And nobody ever complains that men use vocal fry, even though in the past it has driven me crazy 'cause I've thought they're just being hypermasculine, trying to be authoritative by sounding even lower than everybody else. And the business of these hesitation markers - um, uh, just and so - those are not female. And yet when people are picking on women, somehow that's female, and by the same token, uptalk. It's clear that in some people's voices that has really become a stall, but it's been around forever. And people use it stylistically in a variety of ways, both men and women. So the disparity in people's noticing is just very clear to me. People are busy policing young women's language, and nobody is policing older or younger men's language.

[allegro]

Here is another article:

What is 'Vocal Fry' and why doesn't anyone care when men talk like that?

"This American Life" host Ira Glass recently admitted that he uses vocal fry. But in a conversation with Chana Jaffe-Walt (who is not a dude), Glass also admitted that no one notices his vocal fry. And it's not that no one notices — women are criticized for using vocal fry while men have been getting away with it for years.

"I get criticized for a lot of things in the emails to the show," Glass said. "No one has ever pointed this out."

Noted academic and anarcho-syndicalist advocate Noam Chomsky has also been known to employ vocal fry (presumably as a means of dismantling capitalism). Chomsky certainly has his detractors, but none of them seem to take issue with his vocal quality either. And even The Hairpin noted last week that male vocal fry has become "a thing."

In reality, associating the vocal fry trend only with women — both in practice and in naming — is a really just another way of trying to define gender roles.
It's certainly interesting to observe the trends in human social interactions in the same way we observe a pack of wild capuchin monkeys. But the way that vocal fry gained traction in popular culture was, well, kind of weird.

After that Science magazine article came out, women were suddenly being judged for the supposedly abrasive way in which they spoke when they used vocal fry, even though both women and men had probably been talking that way since well before 2011.

There are many legitimate reasons — beyond gender — for why a person might develop vocal fry.
The simple truth is that vocal fry is just one way that people talk, regardless of their gender. Some people employ it as a means of being heard, as differentiating their voices from the rest of the masses. Other people really do just talk that way!

And it's another example of the way we treat women like Goldilocks ("This one's too sexy, and this one's too prude, and..."). If a woman uses a higher register to speak, then it's classified as ditzy, valley-girl uptalk. If a woman uses her lower register, it's vocal fry. If she speaks in the middle (modal range), her words often get lost entirely.

So maybe instead of listening to the sound of someone's voice, we should listen to the actual words they're saying.

[wizfan]

For what it's worth, Fry can be used for heavy metal screaming, as long as you use it correctly (I think it's used along with "false cords"). Here are a couple of guides:
https://www.reddit.com/r/singing/com...those_who_are/
https://www.reddit.com/r/screaming/wiki/technique/fry

[elevenism]

I think the reason I use both fry and lift is to sort add "color" to my speech. I use them both to add emphasis and meaning to what I am saying.

[elevenism]

Also, sorry for double post, but manson sings with vocal fry a lot. Think of the Sweet Dreams cover. It can certainly sound cool.

[kel]

so ... if i understand this, it's basically what the demon thing sounds like in the grudge? a throaty warble? so why is this a thing?

[elevenism]

so ... if i understand this, it's basically what the demon thing sounds like in the grudge

it's not so dramatic as that, usually.
Think of the first line of "Baby One More Time."

[thelastdisciple]

so ... if i understand this, it's basically what the demon thing sounds like in the grudge? a throaty warble? so why is this a thing?

Haha i was just coming here to see if it was something like that as well.

[Jon]

so ... if i understand this, it's basically what the demon thing sounds like in the grudge? a throaty warble? so why is this a thing?

I am a terrible speaker, so I tend to start sentences "hesitantly" and then trail off towards the end. These stutters cause vibrations in my throat which in turn add the warble/vocal fry effect to my voice. It's just the way I talk, apparently.

When I think of extreme vocal fry, the names Phil Anselmo and Tara Reid instantly come to mind.