I love your videos. You have given me an insight, and knowledge into a subject I would have never known about. Not only have oyu educated on linguisitics, but you've provided cultural context in an objective way. I love it
As someone who developed vocal fry from an esophageal disorder + acid reflux, I’d really appreciate a video on how your voice can be damaged by illness, disease, or even tobacco and alcohol.
Actually, watching this, I think that the use of vocal fry at the end of sentences is actually unintentional genius. We've all sometimes talked over each other because we failed to recognise when another person had actually finished speaking. Mistaking a mere pause for the end of a sentence. Often compounded if one's talking to a work colleague over Zoom or Teams, as there's also some unavoidable latency to sending the data over the Internet to account for as well. But if everyone naturally signalled sentence end with vocal fry, we'd know when it was safe to speak. And if it's expected for everyone to do so, then we'd have a natural mechanism of conceding the conversation. This would be so much more orderly. Why don't languages naturally have such universal "signals" for sentence / thought ending already? It'd be so useful.
As a linguist who has spent time in Finland and speaks the language, I feel incredibly stupid now for never noticing how pervasive vocal fry is in Finnish.
Well I'm a Finn, and while not a linguist, I'm still pretty interested in languages and this video gave me an existential crisis, as I've never realised our tendency to speak with creaky voices. If vocal fry is this prevalent in Finland and I'm not going to be able to unhear it from now on, what do I do? Leave the country? 😂
As an American woman, neither a teenager nor rich, I must admit I never noticed this notion called "vocal fry". However, now I won't ever be able to unhear it.
It seems I find it a bit less noticeable. A lot of the clips he showed, I was barely hearing it. But that Air B&B ad, I was only even understanding the words at the end of her sentences through context...nothing but creak to my ears.
This brings to mind the stereotypical airlane pilot cabin announcements, "Uuuuhhhh, ladies and gentlemen, uuuuhhhh, we're now at, uuuuhhhh, 30,000 feet..."
This is a very enlightening video on this subject. I'm elderly and, by and large, this vocal fry is relatively new amongst the general public. I used to think that maybe some people had a sore throat. I even asked about early on. How embarrassing. Anyway, it is annoying because I have a hard time catching the tail end of the sentence as it drops off into the fry abyss. It certainly is unprofessional, too.
Ironically that character is the epitome of exactly what loudermilk was talking about. She’s the gothy, distant, emotionless, sarcastic walking eye roll that this guy insists doesn’t exist.
@@travispratt6327 But by doing it all the time it ends up sounding more natural, as if that's just her regular talking voice. People doing it at the end of every sentence sound a lot more annoying and unnatural to me.
i had always interpreted a constant vocal fry as a form of mumble! or, in some cases in women on camera/mic, an intentional way to sound "sexy" or "alluring." this was an informative video!
The thing that bothers me about it, is that it makes everything the person says, sound like a question. It makes the speaker sound incredibly unsure of their own statements, and I instinctively feel they are subconsciously admitting to not being a reliable source of information.
Speech Pathologist here: Vocal fry can be used as a fluency strategy for people who stutter, especially for those who struggle with blocks. It offers additional tactile feedback with phonations and relaxes muscles involved in phonation.
I think part of the reason it seems to stand out more in women's voices is that men's voiced tend to be deeper, so there's less contrast between 'normal' voice and vocal fry.
nah its equally as obvious to me, but i think people expect women to have high and smooth voices all the time and dont like it when we have noticable vocal fry
I'm 67 living in the San Fernando Valley,. Moon Unit Zappa started local fry with her doing " Valley Girls " song , when the Zappa family lived in Encino....
Your edit of George Saunders and Bond vs Loudermilk was absolute comedy gold, Doc! Would love even more of those even by themselves at some point in the future either to illustrate concepts or just because they're funny. You have a good feel for them, clearly.
Yeah, but Loudermilk did say it was something rich people do and those examples were from people that at least appear to be rich! Dr G did kinda prove their point
@@charliejoseph6465 I see what you mean but I don't think Dr G did prove Loudermilk's point. If their point was just that rich people use it then that would be right, but their point was that it's a sound "rich people use to sound like they don't give a shit" and particularly in the jack scenes he very much does give a shit. And aside from that literal point there's also the very clear insinuation from Loudermilk about vocal fry being negative, there isn't the same insinuation in those clips
This has been so eye-opening, especially the part where you mention uptalk vs. vocal fry. Looking back I’m realizing that I (young American woman) truly do use uptalk when I’m trying to sound non-threatening or unauthoritative, and I use vocal fry when I’m relaxed or even confident around the other person. In hindsight I understood how each would be perceived but only subconsciously. Until today. Phenomenal video!!! :)
@@DrGeoffLindsey Wouldn't that combination be precisely what people find annoying? Not vocal fry per se, which would explain why vocal fry examples from Britain etc. are not an object of criticism.
Thank you too! The older generations hear constant vocal fry as pretentious affectation and assume the speaker is as stupid as a Kardashian. But often enough, vocal fryers aren't even aware.
At that point all I could really think of is how men tend to do drop octaves and increase the base when they want to be authoritative and heard, and increase it when we want to be generally ignored or seem non-threatening. So I wonder, since getting to vocal fry and lowering the register of your voice are pretty similar movements, women do it easier because their access to the lower register "cuts off" earlier producing vocal fry, whereas you might see men might finally hit vocal fry at a far lower frequencies.
Uptalking, vocal fry and pushing the sound through their nose. A horrible combination we never heard in America just 20 years ago. Mostly women and effeminate men.
I'm part Finnish but had to learn Finnish myself, and i thought it was incredibly noticeable in Finnish, so much so that i automatically mimicked it quite early on. my mum's comment: "älä puhu kuin ukkisi"
My mother was a speech pathologist. She passed away 21 years ago, and I know she would have loved this video. Although I did not follow in her footsteps, I was engaged for the whole video and found it informative, funny and thought provoking.
When I was in university, I had a professor whose voice made it sound like he was being sarcastic about everything. He had to preface every new class by warning people that he wasn't attacking them or anyone; his voice just had that drawl and fry naturally. Watching this is incredibly enlightening.
@Waitingforwhatcomes He notes its stereotypically seen in American women and that it's more common in women and Finland as an accent. He notes males have it too, and Hollywood portrayals created the attack like 60 years ago, and also modern Hollywood and media creating it. He also notes that some of the attacks that pretend to be professional are fake and increased viewers to believe it and that it's not dangerous nor any of what false information has put on it to attack it. Also, just noting women also seems better at being able to use it, which the voice box is smaller with women due to testosterone levels in males generally increasing sizes in everything. So it makes a lot of sense why the voice varies between male in female voices just the same.
I'm FInnish but also very fluent in English. After watching this, I realized I use vocal fry almost all the time when speaking in Finnish, but very little when I'm speaking English. It's mindblowing!
You’re confusing whiskey voice with vocal fry. Whiskey voice is cool. Vocal fry is for people who think they are too cool to bother breathing while they speak to you. Finns are so cool they can speak breathing IN as well as out, effortlessly!
@@Debbie-qs2xo Steve-o doesn't do the anoying crackly voice, in fact, he has a soft sexy raspy voice, I for sure would never ask him to leave my house mmm 🥰😋😎
The mention about speaking Finnish without vocal fry really opened up my eyes. I'm a Finn working in customer service, and I get a lot of non-Finnish customers who can say Finnish words picture perfect, but without the vocal fry my brain is still assuming they're speaking English their own native language and thus I cannot comprehend the familiar word as being Finnish. Just another reason why Finnish is such a difficult language to learn.
@@user-nj9mh7ly2nmy Finnish music teacher said that people who are too lazy to use their vocal cords, sound like that. It might be part of speech here or there but some people talk like that all the time. I’m a woman and my Finnish voice is a LOT lower than my English one but I don’t necessarily use vocal fry still. I think I would mainly sound like that when pondering something or back channelling. However, aside for those people always speaking as if they’re trying to imitate a creaky door, the vocal fry in Finnish and in those American clips sounds very different to me. Maybe because Finnish is already very monotonous and often spoken in a lower voice so any short vocal fry wouldn’t be very noticeable, definitely not as noticeable as when speaking English.
I was hearing it at work around 2012, and noticed something since then, that happens nearly every time. When there is 1 *_vocal-fryer_* attending a meeting with others who do *not* vocal fry, the *_non-fryers_* will start to *vocal fry,* following subconsciously the creaky lead of the vocal-fryers. It's annoying but a funny phenomenon.
There's an ad playing right now, before the video begins and I'm sure she's frying. But, I'll click skip in a moment to be sure frying is what I think it is.
I thought it was just me getting old and cranky.😂 Thanks for letting me know I wasn’t going crazy! Started noticing people talking this was over 10 years ago. Drives me nuts! 😬
@SmittySmithsonite Me too! Lol 🤣 and also I notice some people talk like they are asking a question every single sentence! ...and I am like what's wrong with them?! 🤣
This made me remember a line from Terry Pratchett's books which said a character's voice sounded so posh that he was practically speaking in a modulated yawn.
Idk, I live in Oulu, and feels like vocal fry happens more in southern Finland. That's why I rarely visit Helsinki. Have to keep my ears open, maybe it's here too and I haven't paid so much attention to it.
Hahaha! The editing in these clips is outstanding! (especially at around 15 minutes). I've often wondered why the american women's vocal fry irritates me SO MUCH! Thanks for this video. It helps! 😂😂
As a foreigner living in Finland and who has a strong vocal fry when speaking in English, this study about the importance of vocal fry in Finnish is giving me hope 😂
Dr. Lindsey, I think what annoys people isn't just the vocal fry but the elongated ending of the words together with the fry but specially the elongated ending.
I always referred to it as the “Elmer Fudd” voice. Bill Clinton was a master at it. I find people (often politicians) use it to gain a sort of “trust” with their audience. Also often found on TV and radio ads.
I watched this video because I knew the term "vocal fry" from singing. It now makes a lot more sense why it's considered bad for your voice when singing because trying to get regular resonance is generally what a classical sound is looking for. For me personally, realizing that I as a male talk with a lot of vocal fry makes me understand why people expect me to be singing the bass part when usually I am among the highest of the tenors in any given choir. It also explains why my comfortable talking "pitch" is about an octave lower than my comfortable singing pitch, and also why I have so low of notes whilst also having high notes. I know you specialize in speech phonology, but I would love to see you tackle difference between singing and talking, especially in English.
Just say: '(That's) why I have such low notes', then you don't have to use strange, new expressions like 'so low of notes'. People already know and understand the word 'such'. (Sorry, just trying to help! No offence intended🙂)
why do you think "you should have?" I find myself partway through this thinking...who cares? and this isn't to insult the video nor the creator, I am an consumer of knowledge for knowledge' sake, the more esoteric the better. But do I expect this to actually change or affect a single choice I make in life? I don't.
It isn't sexist or hateful to think that someone sounds stupid or annoying when they actually do and are doing so intentionally (even if the intention is subconscious). That's just honesty. Something the modern world could use a lot more of.
Agreed! Victim shaming. 😒 If it grates on your last nerve it's because YOU are sexist? Could it simply be that vocal fry in a naturally lower voice is less annoying? Also, let's compare the extent to which it's employed along with other vocal gymnastics, primarily in women, that compound it's cringe, like sing-songing your speech.
Thanks so much for a great talk! I'm a retired speech therapist. I'm surprised that one thing you didn't mention is how the natural pitch differences between men and women play into the phenomenon of vocal fry. Is reached at the very bottom of one's pitch range--below it, actually, since it's the point at which the individual cannot maintain true phonation. The female pitch range averages about an octave above men's. Females are more likely to lower their pitch toward a male's level, especially in business and professional environments, and are therefore more prone to vocal fry. To the extent that a male might try to elevate his stature by lowering his pitch, vocal fry becomes more likely. In the clip where you alternated between the man and woman reciting the Gettysburg address, I was struck by how close their general vocal pitches were. Finally, I think vocal fry is more noticeable in female voices because of the pitch factor, whereas George Sanders, say, who has a deep voice even for a male, has a fry that sounds almost like a natural extension of his low range.
Excellent comment. I was surprised he didn’t address these aspects too. He seemed more interested in de-stigmatizing vocal fry than addressing why people are psychologically drawn to do it. I think you have to make people conscious of the latter to address the former.
I really appreciate this comment!!! I found it somewhat offensive to associate my overall intuitive annoyance upon hearing females with high pitched voices using „up talk“ or „creaky voices“ with some form of „sexism“! We humans surely have an intuitive (what I would call) „musical sensibility“ …and some of us just find this way of speaking by especially females, for good reason, just plain super annoying!!! That’s all!! 🤷🏻♀️
@@ritahenderson6771 Thank you for your comment! I agree about "musical sensibility." It is really a shame that newscasters and other professionals whose voices are central to their work do not as a matter of course receive vocal training. It seems to have been standard many years ago. Among other benefits, women would feel less need to lower their pitches, as a fully developed voice at a more comfortable, higher pitch would sound more natural and more resonant. That in itself would distinguish it from a child's voice, which is otherwise in the same pitch range, more or less, as a woman's.
@@RegulusOrigin This doesn't necessarily make sense. Finnish and the other languages that have vocal fry as a part of the language don't necessarily limit it to particularly low tones, you just hit a point where it becomes hard to not engage in focal fry as you get into your lower vocal capabilities because lowering the pitch is done by relaxing the vocal cords and by nature this creates a point where you cannot lower the pitch much without also introducing vocal fry. So vocal fry isn't necessarily introduced only by being lower in pitch but it can be if you try to move to the far end of your vocal range where you can't make it go away. So this can explain some vocal fry, and is where it's especially noticeable but for example the gentleman reading the gettysburg address did not get particularly low and many of the other male speakers were based on their tone and normal male capabilities where at times talking fairly high in the pitch range.
Fantastic examples. As an older American woman who has lived in France for thirty years I also reacted to vocal fry in young American women with great annoyance and wished they would stop. Now I wonder why I have this reaction since it doesn't bother me in the male actors. Excellent work.
I think it all goes back to the whole valley girl image and accent from the 80s and 90s. TV didn't let that stereotype go for a lonnnng time and now these poor girls are being looked down on just for trying to speak in their regular voice.
The fact that it doesn't bother you or me in male British actors with "posh" RP accents tells me that, despite all Dr. Lindsay's linguistic rocket science, these two vocal phenomena are NOT the same thing. And, as Dr. Lindsay pointed out, it certainly isn't limited to females. Those British male examples annoyed me just as much as the "Valley Girl" extracts, if not more, probably because they are more pretentious.
@@DieFlabbergast I don't think you are using "valley girl" in the right way. The stereotypical "valley girl" speech is extremely different from anything shown in this video. But at any rate, you have obviously missed the point. _You_ are assigning pretention to the ordinary speech of other people. _They_ are not being pretentious, just speaking the way they learned to speak. Nobody has to adopt the dialect you expect them to.
Could it have something to do with the fact that vocal fry makes women's voices sound more low-pitched, which is (at least subconsciously) seen as "unbecoming" to women?
Seriously? It's been a known thing and talked on scientifically for at least 15yrs!!!! 😂🙄 you're only now learning about it? It's not groundbreaking so ya know. 👀
For me as a Finn, I find fry more serious. You could see it here as well in the video, all the examples where from news shows and interviews. I think that when you start using fry in Finland you signal that you are calmer and more serious.
As a Swede, I agree with that. I don't have a negative opinion of it. Rather, the negative aspects of the early examples in the video has more to do with the nasal quality of the voice. The creaking itself isn't relevant to me concerning annoyance.
Yes! It's like things get now really serious...you go down to nitty gritty 😄 Also, those horror story examples are sometimes like our news reposters: "Beware beware, the horror of my news is here!"
Another try to put finns down again. Finns don't talk like that. I am a Finn and live in other countries. Nobody told anything negative about the finnish accent. Vice versa ppl mostly told Finnish accent is pretty.
low baritone vocal fry is something that i've always actually found very pleasing to hear. The voice of Shere Khan and James Bond, but also Peter Cullen's Optimus Prime, are all iconic.
Yes! I just don’t enjoy the yawning version. Most females use it in a laid back way and talk slowly to capture your attention but it just makes me tune out. Whereas when used by someone who is essentially threatening you or someone actually important it can be captivating!
I think it's because when a man with a deep voice does that, there's barely any change of frequency, maybe only 2-3 tones deeper, but when a man with a higher voice or a woman uses vocal fry, there's 1 to 2 octave of contrast between their normal speaking voice and vocal fry...
Well there is a way to use vocal fry to its full potential like those legends (and plenty of good metal bands) do. But most people don't like the video above.
This is the kind of content I'm fascinated by: take something everyone has some shallow opinion about, delve deeply and seriously on it, and bring back a complete, informative content from which prejudice and pseudoscience were judiciously removed. Congratulations!
@@theorncampbell4432 why, it takes time and knowledge to properly justify a point of view, and that video presents both. At least, that's what I think and the reason why I liked it.
@@antoniocjp5824 I research and draft text for a living. This video is an example of spin and loosely related facts used to construct a shaky narrative. It replaces compelling information with trendy editing and pop-culture talking points.
I think an important factor in Male vs Female is the difference in contrast. Men tend to have lower voices so it is easier for the gravely sound of the fry to blend in providing a percusive element, but not as noticable a change to pitch or tambour. Since women often have higher voices, the fry stands out more, both against the their individual voice, but also against expectations of what women's voice should sound like.
When i moved to Finland, it was one of the things that surprised me - everyone was speaking with vocal fry and by the end of the sentence the words vanish into thin air😄
If you ever decide to do a follow up on this you may want to ask a voice pathologist who works with singers their opinion! At least among the low-bass community it is generally acknowledged that frequently practicing fry is actually GOOD for your voice and one of the best/only ways to extend your range. Being extremely proficient/practiced in vocal fry is also basically a prerequisite for a technique used by some bassists called "subharmonics" which essentially ARE fry, but can sound if anything LESS creaky than "chest voice" for the same given note. (See JD Sumner slides versus octave drops.)
Maybe for a si ger it might make sense. But for the general public? No thank you. Immagine attend lectures where lecturer are non stop talking like this?? Annyoing to the point you stop paying attention to the contents...
@@inspiredbubbles0304 Very true! It should probably be noted that just about every use of fry in the video was basically "fry only"; there was no chest voice "on top of it" right? In singing the opposite generally holds. The "growl" you associate with a rock singer? That's fry. In just about all cases these days. Metal even more so if anything. The "fry" that bassists are "supposed to practice" would likely sound a lot more like "Mongolian Throat Singing" to you than what most of the people in the video were using... but mechanically it's just as much "pure fry" as what they're doing. Just far, far less erratic at the vocal folds. Somewhat ironically this is SO prevalent in singing that the subharmonic technique can go completely undiscovered even for many professional bassists because the way it's achieved is essentially by creating a "break" at the transition you've been training the whole time to blend.
@@inspiredbubbles0304Exactly! One of my favorite TH-camrs is a molecular biologist... super interesting guy but the vocal fry kills me. I want to yell at the screen for him to sit up straight and use his diaphragm! (I think he's trying to tone himself down to match the quieter tone of his partner or be 'less threatening?)The other examples I see in real life are women who are trying to mimic emotion to elicit sympathy. Yuck.
Absolutely correct. Im a singer and when you combine the 3-4 biological pathways for harnessing and projecting the voice, adding a well practiced lower register in the vocal cords, among other mechanism to prodouce and project lower frequency sounds, can be heard and goes a long way in singing and creating a nice full voice. It also helps develop control over the vocal cords as it takes more effort/power to control the vocal cords in a useful way when they are vibrating at a lower frequency.
I think female vocal fry is easier to hear because it happens with the voice at a higher pitch, but it still has components that are about as low in frequency (the oscillation where you can hear individual "clicks" or whatever they should be called). I think vocal fry blends in better with the low frequencies it happens at in men, which are also frequencies that people have more difficulty making out details in. (For example, in the logarithmic scale common in music at least, humans have less frequency resolution with lower pitches, instead apparently judging pitch more linearly for low pitches. Also, it's pretty intuitive why time resolution is lower or difficult to get high with lower frequencies, since the waves are longer individually.)
I was also going to comment about this. I feel like the reason people have more of a problem with women doing vocal fry is because of how more noticeable it is. Because of its so noticeable it can become more irritating especially if they actually have an attitude behind it.
You took the words out of my mouth! Also, burping and other unpleasant bodily sounds are low frequency that can remind me of fry. Also, how did you get through this whole meme video without the Miley Cyrus clip?
Plus I think it can be more annoying because we associate deep sound with manliness. So it sounds really off when females do it. It is like when some gay men really trying to speak in that feminine but really just pretentious way.
@@leorobin832 You think men and women do this at comparable rates? I seriously doubt that. There's a reason the term "Valley Girl" was used and then discarded: it became pointless when all young women began to talk this way. Vocal fry espeically combined with "question mark voice" is very female skewed in the United States. I make this claim with no scientific evidence to back it up other than the fact that I have ears and I live on earth.
First time watcher. Cool video! I like the attention to detail. For this particular video, I’m still left with, “Does it matter that much?”, except for how the Kardashians talk. Maybe it’s supposed to be The Voice from Dune. LOL
This video actually helped me normalize something about my voice that's always bothered me: when I speak louder (to be heard, since people tend to interrupt me; one of the youngest kids in a big family) my voice tends to be a bit rougher, almost deep. I first noticed this when I was like 5 and I thought I sounded like a man. This has been a source of distress for me ever since. I HATE how my voice sounds. Hearing myself in recordings makes me extremely uncomfortable. But this video helped me realize that it's just a normal aspect of my voice and not a flaw.
You can never hear your own voice as others hear it (unless you listen to a recording of it) because *you* hear your voice both through the air and through the bone conduction of your face. Others only hear it through the air. Also, high pitched sound elements from your voice are attenuated to *your* ears because they are far more directional than low pitched sounds. But others hear those higher frequencies more loudly!
Adding to what @ronvanwegen already pointed out: Most people don't like the sound of their voice from recordings or at least prefer how they hear themselves directly. It's perfectly normal.
Interestingly enough, I have no problem with vocal fry under most circumstances. Except when it is being exaggerated, or is all of the speech. But even then, a friend of mine who has always had what I would call vocal fry, doesn't really bother me because it is more natural. There is a difference somehow that I can't really put my finger on between a natural form of vocal fry versus the affected type... It would be interesting to find more examples and research on when it actually bothers people and when it doesn't. For example it didn't bother me at all the example of the woman talking about the Wi-Fi. But it did in the skit, or the Kardashians. And what's interesting is I wasn't actually watching the video, I was only listening to the video, and I only realized that they were the Kardashians when it was mentioned in the video because I don't actually listen to them normally. So I suspect that it wouldn't have bothered me at all to have heard you speak even though it bothers you or did in the past
As a millennial American woman with injuries to her vocal chords, I do vocal fry sometimes but I always notice I'm doing it and feel very embarrassed about it. I got really sick as a young teenager and wound up in intensive care isolation unit with no voice at all. My trachea was moments from collapsing when I arrived at the hospital. It took months before I could talk again and years before I could shout again. I had trouble singing for two decades, often not being able to sing more than one song before my voice went out. When I go a few days without taking to people regularly (which does happen since I'm a single autistic female living alone) I lose my voice. Over the next few days while I'm trying to get it back, I'm permanently in vocal fry, but it's embarrassing because people are always asking if I just woke up, no matter what time of day it is. I have found that if I sing a lot on the days I'm alone and not talking to anyone, that helps. It's hard to remember though and to make sure I sing enough songs to prevent it. I really wish I didn't have these problems.
I’m also autistic and I too lose my ‘voice’ if I don’t talk for a long amount of time. I’m a Stay at home Parent and frequently speak in a high register when talking to my five year old. When I’m talking to my spouse and other adults I swap it out for an easier to use lower register, and I get vocal fry because my voice is tired lol.
Speech Pathologist here: Don’t feel bad about it please. So long as people understand what you’re trying to communicate, and it doesn’t interfere with your identity as a communicator, keep on being you with it regardless of how it came about. Fun fact: Vocal fry can be used as a strategy to assist people who stutter to stutter less as is offers more tacticle feedback from within the throat, and it helps to relax muscles of phonation, helping to reduce blocks for people who stutter. 😊
Wow never knew it was called this! There's a movie clip I've seen where a guy goes into a cafe and the girl serving speaks like this the whole time. It's so funny. Great video!
This is interesting to me because, as a music-lover, I associate the term with singing. In genres such as rock, metal, jazz, musical theatre and pop, it's a strong positive point if a vocalist (regardless of gender) can use vocal fry selectively. I hadn't heard it in the context of speech, but I'm guessing this is where musicians got it from? It also clears up my confusion about the description (the bit about people hating it).
I was randomly recommended this video and clicked on it for this reason lol. The only time I had seen it talked about before was in relation to singers like David Draiman.
I’m so happy to have read the TH-cam comments for once in my life just to read this. I didn’t know this was a thing at all and I’m a huge music lover too… I don’t know many singers though, and the ones I do aren’t ever talking about vocal fry (they’re singers for doomy crusty stoner rock type stuff.. why the heck am I not hearing them talk about vocal fry?! 😂)
I'm not a vocalist and I can do that too, to me it really depends also on how tired I am and how much effort I can consciously put into trying to speak perfectly for everyone to be content lol but also, when it is done on purpose and over the top as in the video with the bartender I can see how it is just "trendy" but I genially think that for most people it is very subtle and they do not care as much about it
I'm not much of a music lover, but before this video I hadn't associated the term with anything except music. Though I must confess that exaggerated vocal fry in speech does sound annoying to me. On the flip side, almost any exaggerated vocal pattern gets annoying to listen to.
While watching this, I had an odd thought. Traditionally, women have been expected to use a higher, brighter, and what some say is gentler voice that is not as subject to vocal fry. But using a higher pitch speaking voice has a number of issues. One is the ability to be heard by those with hearing loss. My grandfather was quite hard of hearing. If I used what we jokingly called a "kid voice", he inevitably could not hear me as well. So I spoke lower and slower which tended to manifest some fry even as a kid. Now that I'm a professional adult woman in a medical field (hospital pharmacist) I need to interact with others. I naturally have a low voice anyway (I sing tenor), but speaking with a lower voice rather than a higher pitched one has different results. A lower voice will, for good or ill, get different results from people. I'm seen as more knowledgeable when I use a deeper tone. And the deeper tone comes with some fry if I am also speaking more quietly. Using a "lecture hall/stage voice" as if I were acting or singing sans microphone, has a lot less fry for me even in my natural lower register, but who speaks like that normally? We can also use my daughter's example. When my younger one uses a higher pitched voice in her math class (where is is taking 8th grade prealgebra in 6th grade) or at her robotics team practice, the boys tease her for being a girl and not knowing as much, despite the fact that she has a higher grade in the class than they do. If she uses a lower pitched voice that tends toward a bit of fry, they take her seriously. She is 11!
I totally was wondering about this, with women using vocal fry. I thought about women competing with men, and what if this has inadvertently made them lower their voice, especially at the end of phrases, like, bam. By competing, I mean, women are CEOs now, and they're kind of in a man's world, where low voices are taken more seriously. It would be interesting to see how much "fry" women CEOs have, and those who don't.
I’m sorry to hear your daughter is dealing with this level of sexism at 11!! Who is telling these boys that their female peers can’t do math or robotics and suggesting high-pitched voices are a sign of weakness? (ie femininity = weakness). Can’t we all appreciate differences and abilities in one another without feeing threatened?
@@limespider8 I don't think so, I think it's human nature - even if the "sexism thing" were to be stomped out some other "thing" would rise to replace it...humans are incapable of creating utopia, no matter how smart we think we are, evidenced by thousands of years of history. My truth source is God: Jeremiah 17: "9“The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it? 10“I, the LORD, search the heart; I test the mind, Even to give to each man according to his ways, According to the results of his deeds." Thankfully I look to God to know my true worth. Not society. God is my rock and salvation. Human society is built on sand, constantly shifting and and sinking and not good for growth. ❤️ I pray for all children and what they have to deal with these days.
I'm a Finnish person. Anglophone. I got a violent reaction from you pointing out that Finns use so much vocal fry. I KNEW it on some level, but I had never connected it to the vocal fry I hear in English. Oh GOD this is a massive revelation. Probably why I found myself a British therapist instead of using a Finnish one. OMFG I'm still reeling over this. THAT'S why I hate listening to most Finnish speakers and most Finnish TV (and I genuinely have avoided anything in Finnish media for like 15 years.) Ugh. Thank you Doctor!
Well now I'm an old lady in my 60s I just turned 67 and now my whole voice whether I want to or not is vocal fry it's all fried I call it old lady voice and I can't sing anymore I know that with younger women it's not due to age but in my case it is definitely due to age. I wish I could restore my voice. I noticed when I was a young woman and I took the birth control pills that my vocal cords because I was a singer that my vocal cord smoothed out even more and my voice was even slightly better I was once a wonderful wonderful singer with a huge five octave range now I'm just a creaky old lady if there's any way to restore your voice I sure would like to know about it.
I moved to Finland 11 years ago, can speak Finnish fluently apart from grammar inconsistencies, but never got rid of my accent. Now, I know Finnish language is all about deep vocal sounds, but I never quite understood to what extend, since vocal fry is subconsciously means I went too deep with my voice and should raise it back up. This video finally explained the thing no one truly could.
Vocal fry has less to do with the tone of voice and more to do with stress on vocal cords, or in this case lack thereof. If you actually try to deepen your voice, well you’ll just get a deep voice, if you try to imitate vocal fry you can see it’s not deep at all.
I always associated vocal fry with running out of breath. When I played the trumpet and I would run out of breath I would often do similar things to the flow of air that would cause a creaky voice. I feel that if you ask someone who does not have vocal fry to speak for a very long time without taking a new breath you will hear it. People can you vocal fry in order to use less air volume to speak, as it takes a lot of air to avoid the transition in glottal stops (you use air to keep the vocal folds completely separated).
I don't think it has anything to do with running out of breath, as it appears even at the end of short sentences. It's a tactic to make the speaker sound confident in what they are saying, even slightly arrogant. "Frying" the end of the thought also creates less opportunity for anyone to talk over them.
Thank for for this, kinda. I repeated the word "yes" over and over again until I ran out of breath, and then still kept going until I physically couldn't anymore. It wasn't very fun haha, but yes my voice did start doing that near the end.
@@giovanna722 Well, your central argument here is that vocal fry is an affectation, not a result of an adaptation to the literal energetics and physics of controlling your vocal cords. In order to adequately argue your "intentionality" case against the "physics" case, you would need to provide, for lack of a better term, rigorously PROVE that someone is intentionally using vocal fry when they could, and are more easily capable of, doing otherwise. A tall order to be sure. But you definitely can't argue the case of someone else's intentions by declaration because you can't read minds.
Top notch as usual. When the topic is related to some kind of prejudice people have towards one kind of speech or another, you do an excellent job of introducing and explaining the concept in a way that might reach the people that hold those views and have them think about why they have them. I'd also like to add something regarding the "disinterested" perception of vocal fry. I'm American and I distinctly remember, around when my classmates and i started puberty, other boys would do this to try and artificially deepen their voices and to project a sense of cool aloofness. So perhaps there are adult men who still connect vocal fry with the the "cool guy" that they disliked in middle school who intentionally added that feature to his speech.
I think, at least for the movie example, it wasn't the vocal fry alone, but the combination of the vocal fry and the, er, what I think of as "Valley Girl" affect. But maybe that was just used to reinforce the effect? It kind of seemed like either cheating or missing the point, TBH.
Wow this was such a cool video. I initially consider vocal fry annoying because I found it lazy and a doctored way to sound nonchalant, but when you pointed out how it’s perceived positively for men, negatively for women, and considered it a “skill”, it completely changed my perspective. Thanks!
I feel like rich British men are looking down their noses at you for not being "our kind of people" in the examples he showed. Even Bond sounded blasé and disdainful. But we like him and we're on his side, so he's cool. But he's still being a dick throughout most of the movies. Hell, look at how he kept making hand-related puns to Dr. No WHO LOST HIS HANDS IN A NUCLEAR ACCIDENT!!!.
Fantastic video, well explained as always. You took me on a wild ride from “Oh, so that’s why I hate the sound of my voice” to “Everyone must hate the sound of my voice as much as I do” and to “Oh, is it because I’m British?” 😂 and finally, to “Well it’s just the way I speak, people can get over it!” 🎉 Love it. Love your work. Great vid!
Thank you so much for speaking about the male vocal fry. I’m a non-native english speaker and that always sounded unpleasant for me but I hate how it’s always blamed on young women… when it’s actually 1) totally not new 2) not a feminine thing.
I worked with a girl at a fast food type place. She was a freshman when she got the job. She left for half a year and when she came back, total vocal fry. TOTAL. I never asked her what happened to her voice but I noticed it was way worse when her friends or (hot) guys were around. That was the year I noticed this became a thing. We called them growlers.
So she lived some where else for a year and picked up a local accent like many people do. Not sure the concept of someone speaking differently with a coworker vs their friends and people they are romantically interested in are around is a mind blowing concept
@@PlsWaLuigiDomMeim pretty sure you do it too. Its called code switching and basically everyone does it. It's how you talk differently to your MIL than to your buddies with whom you drank your 6th can already.
@@DrGeoffLindsey I must second the other writer's thoughts - this is the first I've watched of yours and I found it both illuminating and hugely amusing. Edited and analyzed so deftly, your production has great timing! Being American of a boomer age I found upspeak annoying, and worshipped the creativity behind Moon and Frank Zappa's "Valley Girl". Though I doubt many recognized their own voices and resolved to rid themselves of it, precisely because it was so prevalent in their social circles. And like slow drawl was used dramatically as shorthand for implications of stupidity and perhaps Southern-ness, upspeak initially associated with vacuousness. The migration of creak into American usage has also been noticeable but I have not found it quite as bad. Though I had certainly picked up on its longstanding association with British class distinctions. The only problem with having it pointed out so clearly is that now I won't be able to un-hear it to the point of distraction from the person/message. I know someone who is of Finnish descent but who speaks almost none of the language, and she has a /lot/ of creak. Unsure if it's from her parents or not!
god i love your channel so much. i don't think i've ever found a channel on quite a niche topic that dives in so deep into the subject that actually change the way i look at the world! i love your work please keep up the amazing work!!!!!
I would also like to add that there is different kinds of creaky voice that have different connotations. The kind everybody hates is quite specifically the Cali vocal fry that is the annoyed teenager/Kardashian sound
One of my favourite kinds of video. Packed with interesting info, brilliantly presented, and generously garnished with surprisingly funny and clever moments. Loved the ending, too!
As a non-native English speaker, my complaint about vocal fry is that it makes it much harder to understand what is being said. The male main actor (the father, I forgot his name) in the movie Interstellar spoke almost entirely in vocal fry and that was when I actually realized what vocal fry was. I had to turn up the volume to hear and understand what he said.
As a native english speaker this happens to me with japanese. Japanese male speech has a hefty bit of vocal fry making it a lot more difficult to understand since you're basically just taught neutral or female speech in books and classes.
If you had the power to turn up the volume, that means you weren't watching in a theater. The sound mixing in _Interstellar_ is a big middle finger to people who watch at home on anything but a high-end sound system. It's pretty much designed on purpose so that you can't hear anything unless you have surround sound to separate channels and are playing it at high volume. I assume they wanted a movie that only rich people can watch.
You really go the extra mile to educate people on the difference between facts and opinions, and from my limited experience, it is always an uphill battle. Another great video, Geoff!
The Scottish tennis player, Andy Murray, is a king of vocal fry. His voice communicates "I'm so chill that I can barely get the words out. I am just soooo laaaaid baaaack." I assumed he did it to offset his on-court behavior.
Andy Murray’s problem is that he doesn’t control his emotions, he’s just too ebullient. And an amazing tennis player. The first sentence is irony, or course.
Something just clicked in my brain. I'm autistic, which - in verbal communication - results in relatively flat affect. I also have quite a bit of vocal fry naturally. And I'm well studied on a great many topics and love sharing knowledge with people. People used to think of me as some pompous asshole who thinks he's better than everyone for most of my childhood and teen years and even sometimes throughout my adult life so far. It just occured to me when you were talking about the psychological implications in the listeners' mind, that the vocal fry added to the "know-it-all" image when I was younger and as I grow older and better at communicating not just on the rational plane but also the emotional and interpersonal ones, it's working to my benefit more and more as people interpret wisdom into it. Very interesting video I randomly stumbled upon there, thank you!
@@AstroGremlinAmericanyou're right, that's a really important detail. Reformulating the story to make it appear more general and not so particular makes it more interesting for listeners. It makes everything more relatable and less like one is talking to himself
At least for those of us in the mild end of the spectrum, usually the only external difference from neurotypicals is that we take longer to learn this kind of thing, i.e. we end up evolving the "theory of mind" more slowly. But if you keep an open mind, the improvement never stops
I'm a native Spanish speaker that learned English at school, and I never had creaky voice, until I started to learn Mandarin, which is a tonal language, and one of it's tones is called "falling rising tone" (third tone), which is actually more frequently pronounced as a low pitch tone. The thing is that in the process of learning more and more Chinese, my pronunciation in other languages also had that "3rd tone influence" in the form of a creaky voice. So, as presented in this video, I also think people that say that "creaky voice can be detrimental to your throat" don't realize that there's a lot of tonal languages that literally require you to do it so that you can me understood. I mean, have they ever heard the ã tone in northern Vietnamese? To me sounds like a combination between creaky voice and a glottal stop, but ppl use it all the time to speak.
Wow, I never thought about it, but I use vocal fry in Chinese as well! That's coming from English, where I've used it since my teenagehood. Interesting.
@@juliaagrippina917 - Is that actually the norm? or actually related? what about elderly Finnish people? I can't imagine all their voiced are screwed in their old age.
This is an interesting concept to me because as a non-native speaker, I wasn't aware of this term or the negative associations that people seem to have with it, but I was aware the moment it was mentioned that this is something I could relate to. My speech always has this creaking voice quality to it, regardless of the language I'm speaking. I had also, on some level figured that this was because my voice had a low tone in general, and it was fascinating to find out that the negative associations are often paired with a higher tone.
Yeah. German here, so not a native speaker, either. I'm not a subscriber and specifically clicked on the video, because I had never heard that term 'vocal fry' before. Nor was I aware, that it is a widespread issue (in the USA?). I seem to only be able to hear it in extreme cases though. I kinda 'got' the case of the barista and her customer. They did sound annoying. But as for the examples at the beginning...nope. Did not sound unusual or annoying to me. Weird, huh? Maybe some people are more sensitive to it than others. I did notice in the past, though, that American women tend to just overall speak in a higher voice than German women. So I must not be completely tone-deaf 🫣
The thing is I don't actually think actual vocal fry DOES generate that kind of reaction, at least not on it's own. It provokes a negative reaction when paired with other attributes of speech, in particular how syllables are emphasized (valley girl talk). I think the majority of (non-linguists) complaining about it don't - as per the video - even really understand what it is, so we can't trust them to properly identify what they find annoying, vs. just tossing out a term. And I think Dr. Lindsey had some additional motives with his conclusion that it was all down to sexism (an explanation I would emphasize blithely ignores some very real negative stereotypes around the British male examples)
As portrayed in the Loudermilk clip, it's not necessarily the vocal fry that is deemed to be annoying. It's when the beginning of a phrase or sentence starts higher and then ends with a vocal fry combined with a tailing off or uptalk. It almost sounds like a progression of the "valley girl" voice from the 80's & 90's.
The dude in that clip is 100,000 times more annoying than any regional way of speaking could ever be for simple lack of manners and boundaries. IRL he'd be 86'd and have to go drink gas station coffee or something...but unfortunately IRL people often model their behavior based off fictional emotional outbursts that no reasonable and decent person should emulate. I think this is just a recent example of older people being upset at how younger people talk for like the 900 millionth time in recorded history - and just like all the other times the older folks should try to realize that small cultural changes like this have never signs of any impending societal apocalypse. The sky isn't falling because accents have shifted over the years.
Valspeak relies on overdoing what's considered markers of seriousness, dragged out final phoneme, and the rollercoaster pitch changes, all implying immaturity. At least, that's how Moon Zappa did it.
@@CircsC Did you watch the whole video? The linguist showed examples of vocal fry going back 100 years. So is it those out of touch 120 year olds just ticked off at all those crazy young people?😂 Or could it be that some peole just find the scratchy, uneven rhythm of vocal fry annoying? Nothing to do with youth vs age. For example, vibrato has been used in singing for centuries. Some people are good with it. Others detest it. Personal preference.
The example that comes to my mind is Yukana from My First Girlfriend Is A Gal, who I immediately connected with the "valley girl". Gals as a subculture are always given this accent in anime (in my experience).
You didn't learn the lesson stated here @@CircsC, this is not a regional way of talking. If you want to be taken seriously drop the fry. Hope I did not overstep your cultural boundaries by saying as much.
This video has absolutely destroyed my ability to enjoy casual conversation. I don’t have vocal fry myself, but now that you’ve pointed it out, I hear it everywhere-like a relentless mosquito buzzing in my ear. I didn’t ask for this superpower, but here I am, annoyed and hyper-aware. Thanks a lot, I guess?
As a voiceover director, vocal fry is most annoying when the actor doesn't know they're doing it and can't stop. It's especially annoying when it's a man who's using it to sound like they have a deeper voice. Also, as a voice actor myself, I'm in the "vocal fry envy" club, because I can't do it to save my life. Sometimes it's appropriate for a specific character, and I'm not able to utilize the technique! 😅
@@VesnaVK It's not a matter of not knowing how to do it. In fact, I can use vocal fry for the first 10 or 15 minutes after I wake up in the morning. But once my voice is warmed up, it's gone. 😆
My theory about the annoyance factor is that since vocal fry sounds like it comes from the very back/bottom of a person's throat, and the majority of women have higher-pitched voices, the clear pitch change from one to the other is what makes it sound intentional, affected, and annoying. Whereas, a lower-voiced woman or in male speakers, there is much less pitch-variation when switching from normal voice to fry voice so it barely registers on our mental radar. Regardless, I find the whole subject fascinating!
Muahah, you should hear me when I switch back and forth between my alto and bass registers. Always makes people do a double take even if I don't add any fry. If I add subharmonics I can reliably get down to G-0, and I can hit C-1 reliably with a clean chest voice.
@@SolutionsWithin What?? He never said it was always an intentional decision. If anything he said the opposite, pointing out how it shows up in other languages and how we dont even notice men doing it.
HaHa, I only made it 55 seconds, I also don't like that the people are often emulating the exact people that shouldn't be their role models. - Also, it's bad for your vocal cords and has a tendency to cause "nodes."
As a philosopher, language enthusiast and English teacher, I learnt so much from this video and from the comments. I understood so many things. I'm definitely re-watching this. And also, the comments are very interesting.
Just goes to show much of our communication is not words alone, but their tone, frequency, and volume too. Language is incredibly interesting. Thanks for lifting the curtain for me.
This has been in my suggestions for about a year, I finally watched it and now I'm having to quit watching any video where the presenter has vocal fry. I'd never even noticed it before! But now I have a mental image of vocal cords every time I hear it. THANKS THEN.
Vocal fry can sound annoying, but I find it hard to identify when it does, because it's not always the case. Part of it seems to be how much is use, but then there's some of the examples you show that sound annoying even though there's very little of it and some with a lot of it that don't sound annoying. Actually, listening to the specific examples that annoy me again, I don't think it's actually the vocal fry that's causing the annoyance. I think it's the "bored know-it-all" part that annoys me. And I think that's more caused by the upward inflection at the end of sentences rather than the vocal fry.
I know what you mean. I should have made it clearer that it's really part of an *intonation pattern* which I think can trigger a reaction whether there's much creak or not. So it really makes a pair with Uptalk.
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I love your videos. You have given me an insight, and knowledge into a subject I would have never known about. Not only have oyu educated on linguisitics, but you've provided cultural context in an objective way. I love it
As someone who developed vocal fry from an esophageal disorder + acid reflux, I’d really appreciate a video on how your voice can be damaged by illness, disease, or even tobacco and alcohol.
Is it the same as the robotic voice you can do by breathing in while talking instead of breathing out?
Dr Lindsey, I think you need to check out the throat singing phenomena, isn't it basically only vocal fry?
Actually, watching this, I think that the use of vocal fry at the end of sentences is actually unintentional genius.
We've all sometimes talked over each other because we failed to recognise when another person had actually finished speaking. Mistaking a mere pause for the end of a sentence. Often compounded if one's talking to a work colleague over Zoom or Teams, as there's also some unavoidable latency to sending the data over the Internet to account for as well.
But if everyone naturally signalled sentence end with vocal fry, we'd know when it was safe to speak. And if it's expected for everyone to do so, then we'd have a natural mechanism of conceding the conversation.
This would be so much more orderly. Why don't languages naturally have such universal "signals" for sentence / thought ending already? It'd be so useful.
In the Southern US, we still use the term "creaky voice.'
I know. We rejected something fried. What a mind bender!
Witty comment!
😂
A southern accent with a vocal fry is a trip to listen to, by the way.
I call it "vocal deep fried"
In Michigan, I've only ever heard a creaky or croaky voice.
@@haleyguthrie3113 That’s funny! I can just see some ol’ lawman sitting at a desk giving it to a junior in vocal fry.
I have a masters in English that’s been collecting dust for 14 years and this video tickled my grey matter just right. Thank you so much
i think i hate that phrase
😂😂😂😂
Vocal fry makes my CSF boil.
Mine has been caked in dust for 20 years….. mine is just a BS, so there’s that.
You have a Master's?
As a linguist who has spent time in Finland and speaks the language, I feel incredibly stupid now for never noticing how pervasive vocal fry is in Finnish.
Yeah finns are very creaky sounding
Well I'm a Finn, and while not a linguist, I'm still pretty interested in languages and this video gave me an existential crisis, as I've never realised our tendency to speak with creaky voices. If vocal fry is this prevalent in Finland and I'm not going to be able to unhear it from now on, what do I do? Leave the country? 😂
@@manchagojohnsonmanchago6367❤]pp😢
Then there's me, a third year linguistics student
I've lived in Finland and spoken Finnish my whole life....
@@FINNSTIGAT0R Oil your countrymen.
Now I saw this video I cannot unsee it and all those voices are driving me crazy now.
Welcome aboard
Exactly this!😤😖
Additonal Pet peeve😅
Same here 😅😅
I got an ad in the middle of this that had so much vocal fry that I thought it was another example.
😂😂😂😂😂
😂
The Colgate one? I thought it was a part of the video he was ending on to set up the next section!
This made me chuckle :)
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As an American woman, neither a teenager nor rich, I must admit I never noticed this notion called "vocal fry". However, now I won't ever be able to unhear it.
It seems I find it a bit less noticeable. A lot of the clips he showed, I was barely hearing it. But that Air B&B ad, I was only even understanding the words at the end of her sentences through context...nothing but creak to my ears.
Texan here. I think you will find it heavily on the west coast. Personally, I hate to listen to vocal fry. To me it sounds pretentious and lazy.
@@michellesuter9259 Okay, I'm in Virginia and don't watch reality TV. I guess I've only ever heard it rarely.
Yes! Same here
I now have yet another pet peeve to get annoyed over.
This brings to mind the stereotypical airlane pilot cabin announcements, "Uuuuhhhh, ladies and gentlemen, uuuuhhhh, we're now at, uuuuhhhh, 30,000 feet..."
Omg, that's a perfect example! 🤣
@@Tracy-gj6kvYES!! 😮
👏🤩
It's quite telling that no one complains when high status generally older men do it.
😭😭😭 Irks me
This is a very enlightening video on this subject. I'm elderly and, by and large, this vocal fry is relatively new amongst the general public. I used to think that maybe some people had a sore throat. I even asked about early on. How embarrassing. Anyway, it is annoying because I have a hard time catching the tail end of the sentence as it drops off into the fry abyss. It certainly is unprofessional, too.
It grates ..
The scientific reasoning behind hating the Kardashians I always wanted.
This is an underrated comment. I’m a scientist and concur.
Those Kardashians, whew! Their voices are so annoying!
And kids copy it sounding like a old woman.
I love this comment. It's so much nicer than the way I've spoken about them😅
😂😂
I’ve never noticed vocal fry before, never knew it was a thing. Now I’m afraid I’ll hear it everywhere and it will drive me insane.
Me either…….what/who gave it a ‘name’???
Same...didn't realize it was a thing, yet I speak with it exclusively...
I knew something about voices bothered me
I have noticed most women in Seattle and half the men do it.
Now I know why some people annoyed me even they didn't do anything bad to me 😆
Raven from Teen Titans was the queen of the vocal fry. Actually, her actress described it as a "rolling rasp", which works too
yeah but her voice was hot lol
Ironically that character is the epitome of exactly what loudermilk was talking about. She’s the gothy, distant, emotionless, sarcastic walking eye roll that this guy insists doesn’t exist.
And yes, I understand she’s a fictional character, but she’s a stereotype of a lot of teen girls attitudes.
@@travispratt6327 But by doing it all the time it ends up sounding more natural, as if that's just her regular talking voice. People doing it at the end of every sentence sound a lot more annoying and unnatural to me.
@@travispratt6327 And hot AF
i had always interpreted a constant vocal fry as a form of mumble! or, in some cases in women on camera/mic, an intentional way to sound "sexy" or "alluring." this was an informative video!
The one thing that bugs me about vocal fry is, once it is pointed out, it is so hard to not focus on.
I heard vocal fry while reading your comment
The thing that bothers me about it, is that it makes everything the person says, sound like a question. It makes the speaker sound incredibly unsure of their own statements, and I instinctively feel they are subconsciously admitting to not being a reliable source of information.
Personally it drives me to madness making the person sound like some West Coast drug addict with no brains
Agreed!!
@@carultch I don't think it sounds all like a question. What sounds like a question to me is "up speak." 😀
Speech Pathologist here: Vocal fry can be used as a fluency strategy for people who stutter, especially for those who struggle with blocks. It offers additional tactile feedback with phonations and relaxes muscles involved in phonation.
Fascinating!!! Good to be aware of!!! Thank you!!
Or you can scat, like Scatman!
The human brain is so amazing
that’s so neat!! i’ve thought about going back to school to become a speech pathologist. do you like it?
Oh.... I didn't even know this... I'm a stutterer, I'll try it.
I think part of the reason it seems to stand out more in women's voices is that men's voiced tend to be deeper, so there's less contrast between 'normal' voice and vocal fry.
i have also always thought this and it seemed so clear in the eric singer example. surprised dr lindsey didn't mention it!
I agree! Although the spectrogram also showed that the woman's fry was more efficient / energetic in an absolute sense
Keen observation, @ansatsusha8660.
nah its equally as obvious to me, but i think people expect women to have high and smooth voices all the time and dont like it when we have noticable vocal fry
Exactly.
I'm 67 living in the San Fernando Valley,. Moon Unit Zappa started local fry with her doing " Valley Girls " song , when the Zappa family lived in Encino....
Hey, were people using the term Valley Girl before the song came out? Because I drive through Laurel Canyon every day, where he used to live.
Your edit of George Saunders and Bond vs Loudermilk was absolute comedy gold, Doc! Would love even more of those even by themselves at some point in the future either to illustrate concepts or just because they're funny. You have a good feel for them, clearly.
Yeah, but Loudermilk did say it was something rich people do and those examples were from people that at least appear to be rich! Dr G did kinda prove their point
@@charliejoseph6465 I see what you mean but I don't think Dr G did prove Loudermilk's point. If their point was just that rich people use it then that would be right, but their point was that it's a sound "rich people use to sound like they don't give a shit" and particularly in the jack scenes he very much does give a shit. And aside from that literal point there's also the very clear insinuation from Loudermilk about vocal fry being negative, there isn't the same insinuation in those clips
Lol second meme channel Dr Geoff Memesay. Just cut the humorous/interesting clip edits without the explained xD.
TRULY!!!!
@@mevans6910 I guess as a socialist of cockney descent, the sound of their voices is more upsetting to me than most 😆
This has been so eye-opening, especially the part where you mention uptalk vs. vocal fry. Looking back I’m realizing that I (young American woman) truly do use uptalk when I’m trying to sound non-threatening or unauthoritative, and I use vocal fry when I’m relaxed or even confident around the other person. In hindsight I understood how each would be perceived but only subconsciously. Until today. Phenomenal video!!! :)
Thank you! But it's extremely common for speakers to use both Uptalk and vocal fry, in the same sentence.
@@DrGeoffLindsey Wouldn't that combination be precisely what people find annoying? Not vocal fry per se, which would explain why vocal fry examples from Britain etc. are not an object of criticism.
Thank you too! The older generations hear constant vocal fry as pretentious affectation and assume the speaker is as stupid as a Kardashian. But often enough, vocal fryers aren't even aware.
At that point all I could really think of is how men tend to do drop octaves and increase the base when they want to be authoritative and heard, and increase it when we want to be generally ignored or seem non-threatening. So I wonder, since getting to vocal fry and lowering the register of your voice are pretty similar movements, women do it easier because their access to the lower register "cuts off" earlier producing vocal fry, whereas you might see men might finally hit vocal fry at a far lower frequencies.
Uptalking, vocal fry and pushing the sound through their nose. A horrible combination we never heard in America just 20 years ago. Mostly women and effeminate men.
As a Finnish person aware of vocal fry, I never really realised how common it was in Finnish. Only ever really paid attention to it in English.
My experience as an American working with a team of Finns is that most sound like they smoke a dozen cigarettes a day (and well, many of them do 😂)
Same for me being English and hearing finnish in the examples. Maybe that's because my only exposure to Finnish nowadays is the cha cha cha guy.
@@charleskatzer2210a dozen? thats rookie numbers
I'm part Finnish but had to learn Finnish myself, and i thought it was incredibly noticeable in Finnish, so much so that i automatically mimicked it quite early on. my mum's comment: "älä puhu kuin ukkisi"
As a non finn here, it's the first thing I noticed about finns, it is hard for me to do it Finnish when I tried to speak finnish 😂
that splice convo of Loudermilk and George Sanders is brilliant, this whole video is hilariously good medicine!
My mother was a speech pathologist. She passed away 21 years ago, and I know she would have loved this video. Although I did not follow in her footsteps, I was engaged for the whole video and found it informative, funny and thought provoking.
May you find many other lovely ways to reconnect with her memory. ❤
This is so sweet. I must say I love the field of speech pathology.
When I was in university, I had a professor whose voice made it sound like he was being sarcastic about everything. He had to preface every new class by warning people that he wasn't attacking them or anyone; his voice just had that drawl and fry naturally. Watching this is incredibly enlightening.
And his warning also was sarcastic 😏
Which is why it is weird to me that this guy said it was young women. It's both men and women
ddi you even watch the video?@@CarolinaSearching
@Waitingforwhatcomes He notes its stereotypically seen in American women and that it's more common in women and Finland as an accent. He notes males have it too, and Hollywood portrayals created the attack like 60 years ago, and also modern Hollywood and media creating it. He also notes that some of the attacks that pretend to be professional are fake and increased viewers to believe it and that it's not dangerous nor any of what false information has put on it to attack it. Also, just noting women also seems better at being able to use it, which the voice box is smaller with women due to testosterone levels in males generally increasing sizes in everything. So it makes a lot of sense why the voice varies between male in female voices just the same.
@@WinoaKaronhiatens Yes, I heard that. I said, it is not 'stereotypically' seen in women, it is just pointed out in women much more than it is in men.
I'm FInnish but also very fluent in English. After watching this, I realized I use vocal fry almost all the time when speaking in Finnish, but very little when I'm speaking English. It's mindblowing!
There is the BBC use as a vehicle for dative conveyance of information,and of course the abuse and brow beaters.😉
Yeah, me too. And talking when breathing in, I can easily do that in Finnish but not in any other language!
Oh that's why my English sounds foreign. Fried like bacon 😂
You’re confusing whiskey voice with vocal fry. Whiskey voice is cool. Vocal fry is for people who think they are too cool to bother breathing while they speak to you. Finns are so cool they can speak breathing IN as well as out, effortlessly!
@@chriskelvin248 Thanks, we are cool. It's the weather.
Fry, Up Talk and fast talking …. The trilogy that drive me insane
I hate it when they make a statement that ends in a question.
You might consider never coming to Australia then as up talk is pretty much standard in our way of speaking.
Matthew McConaughey is a vocal fry Olympian btw
He's probably the only guy who does it that I don't want to punch in the face.
Really ??? Oh no... I've never heard his original voice (or maybe once) so I didn't know... 😢
Yess, but it ACTUALLY sounds sexy coming from him, he does it right!!! 🥰😎
Hes got nothing on steve-o.
@@Debbie-qs2xo Steve-o doesn't do the anoying crackly voice, in fact, he has a soft sexy raspy voice, I for sure would never ask him to leave my house mmm 🥰😋😎
The mention about speaking Finnish without vocal fry really opened up my eyes. I'm a Finn working in customer service, and I get a lot of non-Finnish customers who can say Finnish words picture perfect, but without the vocal fry my brain is still assuming they're speaking English their own native language and thus I cannot comprehend the familiar word as being Finnish. Just another reason why Finnish is such a difficult language to learn.
vocal fry sijamuotoihin verrattuna on helppo nakki😭
What's interesting with finnish is that even heterosexual men speak with vocal fry.
@@user-nj9mh7ly2nmy Finnish music teacher said that people who are too lazy to use their vocal cords, sound like that. It might be part of speech here or there but some people talk like that all the time. I’m a woman and my Finnish voice is a LOT lower than my English one but I don’t necessarily use vocal fry still. I think I would mainly sound like that when pondering something or back channelling. However, aside for those people always speaking as if they’re trying to imitate a creaky door, the vocal fry in Finnish and in those American clips sounds very different to me. Maybe because Finnish is already very monotonous and often spoken in a lower voice so any short vocal fry wouldn’t be very noticeable, definitely not as noticeable as when speaking English.
@@user-nj9mh7ly2nalso in Finnish, I associate it way more to men specifically, and of certain age, around 40-60 years old as well as teenage boys
@ragdoll86 this is fascinating! Do you think this "finnish creak" is less nasal than the american fry?
I was hearing it at work around 2012, and noticed something since then, that happens nearly every time. When there is 1 *_vocal-fryer_* attending a meeting with others who do *not* vocal fry, the *_non-fryers_* will start to *vocal fry,* following subconsciously the creaky lead of the vocal-fryers. It's annoying but a funny phenomenon.
Yeah, that's sheeple group dynamics. I would certainly do the exact opposite.
@@dkpianist shut up incel
I know of one woman who is very unfashionable.. my partner … and I am grateful
I definitely DO NOT do what you're saying. 😬
There's an ad playing right now, before the video begins and I'm sure she's frying. But, I'll click skip in a moment to be sure frying is what I think it is.
I thought it was just me getting old and cranky.😂 Thanks for letting me know I wasn’t going crazy! Started noticing people talking this was over 10 years ago. Drives me nuts! 😬
@SmittySmithsonite Me too! Lol 🤣 and also I notice some people talk like they are asking a question every single sentence! ...and I am like what's wrong with them?! 🤣
@@arualv2027 YES! That too! 😂
@@SmittySmithsonite 🤣👍
👏 The Loudermilk clip edits were pure gold! Great video!
This made me remember a line from Terry Pratchett's books which said a character's voice sounded so posh that he was practically speaking in a modulated yawn.
😅 I remember that line!
Rest in peace Terry. I can't bring myself to read his last book because then the adventure will be over 😢
Wasn't that was the two horsey girls schooling with Susan - who could put 4 vowels into 'oh' - 'oeuwa' 🤣
@nixm9093 oh don't punish yourself. Very worth it 😁👍 ps just do wut I do and restart with 'Colour'...carpet people..truckers..Johnny...
Im dead😂
16:27 absolutely floored me as a native Finnish speaker, never realized just how omnipresent vocal fry is in our day-to-day speaking
Idk, I live in Oulu, and feels like vocal fry happens more in southern Finland. That's why I rarely visit Helsinki. Have to keep my ears open, maybe it's here too and I haven't paid so much attention to it.
@@JakeKilka So the reason you rarely visit in Helsinki is the vocal fry? 😂
@@ElicuuKit I suppose any reason for not visiting places is good for a solitary Finn
@@ElicuuKit Just my dry humor. Seems like I got you laughing though.
@@JakeKilka You did. Thanks for yhat 😂
Hahaha! The editing in these clips is outstanding! (especially at around 15 minutes).
I've often wondered why the american women's vocal fry irritates me SO MUCH! Thanks for this video. It helps! 😂😂
I cleared my throat so much during this video
You are not the only one
I drank half a leter of water during this video just to keep my throat from drying
@@TrolledBy "leter"??
Relieved to see that it wasn't just me
Lol yes!!!!
As a foreigner living in Finland and who has a strong vocal fry when speaking in English, this study about the importance of vocal fry in Finnish is giving me hope 😂
I think the reason the Finnish speak that way is because so many of them are emotionless psychopaths.
I am learning Finnish and I catch myself! I am trying to remember,. switch back! I do sound different in other languages.
😂😄🤣
It's not "important". It's just common (these days) and horrible.
@@valkoharja Regardless of if you think it sounds ugly or not, it's still important for non-native speakers trying to sound more native.
Dr. Lindsey, I think what annoys people isn't just the vocal fry but the elongated ending of the words together with the fry but specially the elongated ending.
And up speak that makes everything sound like a question
"Why are you talking like thaAaAatTtTt?"
Nope, it's sexism because he says so.
I always referred to it as the “Elmer Fudd” voice. Bill Clinton was a master at it. I find people (often politicians) use it to gain a sort of “trust” with their audience. Also often found on TV and radio ads.
Now that you pointed this out, I can't unhear it and it drives me nuts 🙉
SAME! Now I hate talking to people even more!
@@RogueAlchemist Vocal fry is a Roko's Basilisk. Don't look up Roko's Basilisk or you're done, just like I am.
@Crossfirev the fact that you even mentioned it has doomed dozens.
@@jailoutafreecard4414 this was partially the point. Humans will seek, even if warned not too 🥲
I just developed a new allergy: vocal fry.
I watched this video because I knew the term "vocal fry" from singing. It now makes a lot more sense why it's considered bad for your voice when singing because trying to get regular resonance is generally what a classical sound is looking for. For me personally, realizing that I as a male talk with a lot of vocal fry makes me understand why people expect me to be singing the bass part when usually I am among the highest of the tenors in any given choir. It also explains why my comfortable talking "pitch" is about an octave lower than my comfortable singing pitch, and also why I have so low of notes whilst also having high notes. I know you specialize in speech phonology, but I would love to see you tackle difference between singing and talking, especially in English.
Fun fact: in metal vocal fry is often used to produce distorted vocals and many singers have been singing professionally with extreme fry for decades.
@@BorghBorgh I also got interested in the video because I knew the term vocal fry from metal and the like genres
things like Mongolian throat singing wouldn't exist or be what they are, without vocal fry, so it does have its place.
Just say: '(That's) why I have such low notes', then you don't have to use strange, new expressions like 'so low of notes'. People already know and understand the word 'such'. (Sorry, just trying to help! No offence intended🙂)
I second this!
I would LOVE a Lindsey video about native English speakers changing their accent to sing, which speakers using which accents and why!
This was ridiculously educational about a subject I've never considered but should have.
the reasoning is a bit subjective.
I wouldn't say the reasoning was subjective. I think he examined real-life examples and previous scholarship, and thus came to a conclusion.
I always thought there was something toady about those people. Infact..
I read “have” here with a strong vocal fryyyyyy
why do you think "you should have?" I find myself partway through this thinking...who cares? and this isn't to insult the video nor the creator, I am an consumer of knowledge for knowledge' sake, the more esoteric the better. But do I expect this to actually change or affect a single choice I make in life? I don't.
It isn't sexist or hateful to think that someone sounds stupid or annoying when they actually do and are doing so intentionally (even if the intention is subconscious). That's just honesty. Something the modern world could use a lot more of.
Agreed! Victim shaming. 😒 If it grates on your last nerve it's because YOU are sexist? Could it simply be that vocal fry in a naturally lower voice is less annoying? Also, let's compare the extent to which it's employed along with other vocal gymnastics, primarily in women, that compound it's cringe, like sing-songing your speech.
Putting the strong can exception in the sponsor section was genius, can’t believe I was actually motivated to pay attention to an ad
I don't understand the strong/weak can('t)
Thanks so much for a great talk! I'm a retired speech therapist. I'm surprised that one thing you didn't mention is how the natural pitch differences between men and women play into the phenomenon of vocal fry. Is reached at the very bottom of one's pitch range--below it, actually, since it's the point at which the individual cannot maintain true phonation. The female pitch range averages about an octave above men's. Females are more likely to lower their pitch toward a male's level, especially in business and professional environments, and are therefore more prone to vocal fry. To the extent that a male might try to elevate his stature by lowering his pitch, vocal fry becomes more likely. In the clip where you alternated between the man and woman reciting the Gettysburg address, I was struck by how close their general vocal pitches were. Finally, I think vocal fry is more noticeable in female voices because of the pitch factor, whereas George Sanders, say, who has a deep voice even for a male, has a fry that sounds almost like a natural extension of his low range.
Excellent comment. I was surprised he didn’t address these aspects too. He seemed more interested in de-stigmatizing vocal fry than addressing why people are psychologically drawn to do it. I think you have to make people conscious of the latter to address the former.
I really appreciate this comment!!! I found it somewhat offensive to associate my overall intuitive annoyance upon hearing females with high pitched voices using „up talk“ or „creaky voices“ with some form of „sexism“!
We humans surely have an intuitive (what I would call) „musical sensibility“ …and some of us just find this way of speaking by especially females, for good reason, just plain super annoying!!! That’s all!! 🤷🏻♀️
@@ritahenderson6771 Thank you for your comment! I agree about "musical sensibility." It is really a shame that newscasters and other professionals whose voices are central to their work do not as a matter of course receive vocal training. It seems to have been standard many years ago. Among other benefits, women would feel less need to lower their pitches, as a fully developed voice at a more comfortable, higher pitch would sound more natural and more resonant. That in itself would distinguish it from a child's voice, which is otherwise in the same pitch range, more or less, as a woman's.
@@RegulusOrigin This doesn't necessarily make sense.
Finnish and the other languages that have vocal fry as a part of the language don't necessarily limit it to particularly low tones, you just hit a point where it becomes hard to not engage in focal fry as you get into your lower vocal capabilities because lowering the pitch is done by relaxing the vocal cords and by nature this creates a point where you cannot lower the pitch much without also introducing vocal fry.
So vocal fry isn't necessarily introduced only by being lower in pitch but it can be if you try to move to the far end of your vocal range where you can't make it go away.
So this can explain some vocal fry, and is where it's especially noticeable but for example the gentleman reading the gettysburg address did not get particularly low and many of the other male speakers were based on their tone and normal male capabilities where at times talking fairly high in the pitch range.
@@dozekarTheCursedThank you, that make sense.
Fantastic examples. As an older American woman who has lived in France for thirty years I also reacted to vocal fry in young American women with great annoyance and wished they would stop. Now I wonder why I have this reaction since it doesn't bother me in the male actors. Excellent work.
I think it all goes back to the whole valley girl image and accent from the 80s and 90s. TV didn't let that stereotype go for a lonnnng time and now these poor girls are being looked down on just for trying to speak in their regular voice.
The fact that it doesn't bother you or me in male British actors with "posh" RP accents tells me that, despite all Dr. Lindsay's linguistic rocket science, these two vocal phenomena are NOT the same thing. And, as Dr. Lindsay pointed out, it certainly isn't limited to females. Those British male examples annoyed me just as much as the "Valley Girl" extracts, if not more, probably because they are more pretentious.
@@DieFlabbergast I don't think you are using "valley girl" in the right way. The stereotypical "valley girl" speech is extremely different from anything shown in this video. But at any rate, you have obviously missed the point. _You_ are assigning pretention to the ordinary speech of other people. _They_ are not being pretentious, just speaking the way they learned to speak. Nobody has to adopt the dialect you expect them to.
Could it have something to do with the fact that vocal fry makes women's voices sound more low-pitched, which is (at least subconsciously) seen as "unbecoming" to women?
@@uyttebPersonally I find that low voices in women sound fantastic. Think Lauren Bacall, and all those soul singers.
I never heard of any such thing and I'm not bothered by it until now thank you!
I always hated "vocal fry" but didn't know what to call it!!!! Now I do! Thank you Dr. Lindsey!!!
Seriously? It's been a known thing and talked on scientifically for at least 15yrs!!!! 😂🙄 you're only now learning about it? It's not groundbreaking so ya know. 👀
@@6HauntedDays Yes, seriously. I never researched it, but just hated it! I thought of it as voice crackling.
Same!
@@HeatherSaysItI heard "vocal fry" referenced in a behavior panel video once and was like, Is that what you call it?
I always say "stop creaking" to people who talks like that.
I keep being amazed just how hilarious you can be while also being kinda laid-back and also still so educational
British humor - an acquired taste.
For me as a Finn, I find fry more serious. You could see it here as well in the video, all the examples where from news shows and interviews. I think that when you start using fry in Finland you signal that you are calmer and more serious.
As a Swede, I agree with that. I don't have a negative opinion of it. Rather, the negative aspects of the early examples in the video has more to do with the nasal quality of the voice. The creaking itself isn't relevant to me concerning annoyance.
Public Note to Self: Never go to Finland.
Yes! It's like things get now really serious...you go down to nitty gritty 😄 Also, those horror story examples are sometimes like our news reposters: "Beware beware, the horror of my news is here!"
@@AnotherDuck This is an excellent point! It's the nasalness that's annoying, not the fry as such.
Another try to put finns down again. Finns don't talk like that.
I am a Finn and live in other countries. Nobody told anything negative about the finnish accent. Vice versa ppl mostly told Finnish accent is pretty.
I've always had an issue with this, but kept it to myself aince it's just a me problem. I'm glad you gave me the info to this I didn't have.
low baritone vocal fry is something that i've always actually found very pleasing to hear. The voice of Shere Khan and James Bond, but also Peter Cullen's Optimus Prime, are all iconic.
Yes 🙌🏽 I love those guys 🥰😎🙏🏽
Whaaat Optimus Prime has vocal fry?!
Yes! I just don’t enjoy the yawning version. Most females use it in a laid back way and talk slowly to capture your attention but it just makes me tune out. Whereas when used by someone who is essentially threatening you or someone actually important it can be captivating!
I think it's because when a man with a deep voice does that, there's barely any change of frequency, maybe only 2-3 tones deeper, but when a man with a higher voice or a woman uses vocal fry, there's 1 to 2 octave of contrast between their normal speaking voice and vocal fry...
Well there is a way to use vocal fry to its full potential like those legends (and plenty of good metal bands) do. But most people don't like the video above.
This is the kind of content I'm fascinated by: take something everyone has some shallow opinion about, delve deeply and seriously on it, and bring back a complete, informative content from which prejudice and pseudoscience were judiciously removed. Congratulations!
what the heck is "criteriously "?
I still hate it
You're fascinated by smoke and mirrors in long format? That's nothing to be proud of.
@@theorncampbell4432 why, it takes time and knowledge to properly justify a point of view, and that video presents both. At least, that's what I think and the reason why I liked it.
@@antoniocjp5824 I research and draft text for a living. This video is an example of spin and loosely related facts used to construct a shaky narrative. It replaces compelling information with trendy editing and pop-culture talking points.
I think an important factor in Male vs Female is the difference in contrast. Men tend to have lower voices so it is easier for the gravely sound of the fry to blend in providing a percusive element, but not as noticable a change to pitch or tambour. Since women often have higher voices, the fry stands out more, both against the their individual voice, but also against expectations of what women's voice should sound like.
Exactly. It sounds like you’re whispering out of nowhere. Very jarring.
Sorry for being unnecessarily pedantic but I think the word you were looking for was "timbre". I know what I did was more annoying than a vocal fry.
@@rohitchaojiit wasn't more annoying. Nice try though
@@anonymousbloke1 Naah being pedantic about spelling is definitely more annoying.
On a bus recently was a male female couple both talking virtually the entire time with each other using vocal fry. Seemed like an intimacy thing.
Thank you! I thought I was going insane all alone hearing this noone else seemed to hear! Now I can go mad more calmly knowing I’m not alone 😅
When i moved to Finland, it was one of the things that surprised me - everyone was speaking with vocal fry and by the end of the sentence the words vanish into thin air😄
Hearing those clips it sounds unbearable, but im more afraid i will get used to it
@MrFirefox not only you will get used to it, you will yourself start speaking Finnish in the same manner!! 😆🫣
If you ever decide to do a follow up on this you may want to ask a voice pathologist who works with singers their opinion! At least among the low-bass community it is generally acknowledged that frequently practicing fry is actually GOOD for your voice and one of the best/only ways to extend your range. Being extremely proficient/practiced in vocal fry is also basically a prerequisite for a technique used by some bassists called "subharmonics" which essentially ARE fry, but can sound if anything LESS creaky than "chest voice" for the same given note. (See JD Sumner slides versus octave drops.)
Super interesting. Didn’t know but it makes sense. It’s adjacent to throat singing
Maybe for a si ger it might make sense.
But for the general public? No thank you. Immagine attend lectures where lecturer are non stop talking like this?? Annyoing to the point you stop paying attention to the contents...
@@inspiredbubbles0304 Very true! It should probably be noted that just about every use of fry in the video was basically "fry only"; there was no chest voice "on top of it" right? In singing the opposite generally holds. The "growl" you associate with a rock singer? That's fry. In just about all cases these days. Metal even more so if anything. The "fry" that bassists are "supposed to practice" would likely sound a lot more like "Mongolian Throat Singing" to you than what most of the people in the video were using... but mechanically it's just as much "pure fry" as what they're doing. Just far, far less erratic at the vocal folds.
Somewhat ironically this is SO prevalent in singing that the subharmonic technique can go completely undiscovered even for many professional bassists because the way it's achieved is essentially by creating a "break" at the transition you've been training the whole time to blend.
@@inspiredbubbles0304Exactly! One of my favorite TH-camrs is a molecular biologist... super interesting guy but the vocal fry kills me. I want to yell at the screen for him to sit up straight and use his diaphragm! (I think he's trying to tone himself down to match the quieter tone of his partner or be 'less threatening?)The other examples I see in real life are women who are trying to mimic emotion to elicit sympathy. Yuck.
Absolutely correct. Im a singer and when you combine the 3-4 biological pathways for harnessing and projecting the voice, adding a well practiced lower register in the vocal cords, among other mechanism to prodouce and project lower frequency sounds, can be heard and goes a long way in singing and creating a nice full voice. It also helps develop control over the vocal cords as it takes more effort/power to control the vocal cords in a useful way when they are vibrating at a lower frequency.
I think female vocal fry is easier to hear because it happens with the voice at a higher pitch, but it still has components that are about as low in frequency (the oscillation where you can hear individual "clicks" or whatever they should be called). I think vocal fry blends in better with the low frequencies it happens at in men, which are also frequencies that people have more difficulty making out details in. (For example, in the logarithmic scale common in music at least, humans have less frequency resolution with lower pitches, instead apparently judging pitch more linearly for low pitches. Also, it's pretty intuitive why time resolution is lower or difficult to get high with lower frequencies, since the waves are longer individually.)
I was also going to comment about this. I feel like the reason people have more of a problem with women doing vocal fry is because of how more noticeable it is. Because of its so noticeable it can become more irritating especially if they actually have an attitude behind it.
@@leorobin832 "An attitude" is a really vague thing to say.
You took the words out of my mouth!
Also, burping and other unpleasant bodily sounds are low frequency that can remind me of fry.
Also, how did you get through this whole meme video without the Miley Cyrus clip?
Plus I think it can be more annoying because we associate deep sound with manliness. So it sounds really off when females do it. It is like when some gay men really trying to speak in that feminine but really just pretentious way.
@@leorobin832 You think men and women do this at comparable rates? I seriously doubt that. There's a reason the term "Valley Girl" was used and then discarded: it became pointless when all young women began to talk this way. Vocal fry espeically combined with "question mark voice" is very female skewed in the United States. I make this claim with no scientific evidence to back it up other than the fact that I have ears and I live on earth.
First time watcher. Cool video! I like the attention to detail. For this particular video, I’m still left with, “Does it matter that much?”, except for how the Kardashians talk. Maybe it’s supposed to be The Voice from Dune. LOL
This video is so much more entertaining and informative than I expected. Many tha-a-a-a-nks.
I see what you did there
😂
😂
Cringe 😅
@@ChineduOpara cri-i-i-i-nge
This video actually helped me normalize something about my voice that's always bothered me: when I speak louder (to be heard, since people tend to interrupt me; one of the youngest kids in a big family) my voice tends to be a bit rougher, almost deep. I first noticed this when I was like 5 and I thought I sounded like a man. This has been a source of distress for me ever since. I HATE how my voice sounds. Hearing myself in recordings makes me extremely uncomfortable. But this video helped me realize that it's just a normal aspect of my voice and not a flaw.
Ahh that sucks to have felt so bad about your own voice! I'm glad the video helped you 🫂
You can never hear your own voice as others hear it (unless you listen to a recording of it) because *you* hear your voice both through the air and through the bone conduction of your face. Others only hear it through the air. Also, high pitched sound elements from your voice are attenuated to *your* ears because they are far more directional than low pitched sounds. But others hear those higher frequencies more loudly!
Adding to what @ronvanwegen already pointed out:
Most people don't like the sound of their voice from recordings or at least prefer how they hear themselves directly. It's perfectly normal.
@@ronvanwegen but she was bothered by the deepness of her voice, not the high parts. so that might be a different thing
Interestingly enough, I have no problem with vocal fry under most circumstances. Except when it is being exaggerated, or is all of the speech. But even then, a friend of mine who has always had what I would call vocal fry, doesn't really bother me because it is more natural. There is a difference somehow that I can't really put my finger on between a natural form of vocal fry versus the affected type... It would be interesting to find more examples and research on when it actually bothers people and when it doesn't. For example it didn't bother me at all the example of the woman talking about the Wi-Fi. But it did in the skit, or the Kardashians. And what's interesting is I wasn't actually watching the video, I was only listening to the video, and I only realized that they were the Kardashians when it was mentioned in the video because I don't actually listen to them normally. So I suspect that it wouldn't have bothered me at all to have heard you speak even though it bothers you or did in the past
As a millennial American woman with injuries to her vocal chords, I do vocal fry sometimes but I always notice I'm doing it and feel very embarrassed about it. I got really sick as a young teenager and wound up in intensive care isolation unit with no voice at all. My trachea was moments from collapsing when I arrived at the hospital. It took months before I could talk again and years before I could shout again. I had trouble singing for two decades, often not being able to sing more than one song before my voice went out. When I go a few days without taking to people regularly (which does happen since I'm a single autistic female living alone) I lose my voice. Over the next few days while I'm trying to get it back, I'm permanently in vocal fry, but it's embarrassing because people are always asking if I just woke up, no matter what time of day it is. I have found that if I sing a lot on the days I'm alone and not talking to anyone, that helps. It's hard to remember though and to make sure I sing enough songs to prevent it. I really wish I didn't have these problems.
I don't think you should be embarrassed.
I never noticed it before this video.
I’m also autistic and I too lose my ‘voice’ if I don’t talk for a long amount of time.
I’m a Stay at home Parent and frequently speak in a high register when talking to my five year old. When I’m talking to my spouse and other adults I swap it out for an easier to use lower register, and I get vocal fry because my voice is tired lol.
You guys just do you. Most people would never notice and all the nice people would never judge 😊
Speech Pathologist here: Don’t feel bad about it please. So long as people understand what you’re trying to communicate, and it doesn’t interfere with your identity as a communicator, keep on being you with it regardless of how it came about. Fun fact: Vocal fry can be used as a strategy to assist people who stutter to stutter less as is offers more tacticle feedback from within the throat, and it helps to relax muscles of phonation, helping to reduce blocks for people who stutter. 😊
If it helps, most people I know think the "just woke up" voice sounds really pleasant.
Wow never knew it was called this! There's a movie clip I've seen where a guy goes into a cafe and the girl serving speaks like this the whole time. It's so funny. Great video!
This is interesting to me because, as a music-lover, I associate the term with singing. In genres such as rock, metal, jazz, musical theatre and pop, it's a strong positive point if a vocalist (regardless of gender) can use vocal fry selectively.
I hadn't heard it in the context of speech, but I'm guessing this is where musicians got it from? It also clears up my confusion about the description (the bit about people hating it).
I was randomly recommended this video and clicked on it for this reason lol. The only time I had seen it talked about before was in relation to singers like David Draiman.
yeah, same
I’m so happy to have read the TH-cam comments for once in my life just to read this. I didn’t know this was a thing at all and I’m a huge music lover too… I don’t know many singers though, and the ones I do aren’t ever talking about vocal fry (they’re singers for doomy crusty stoner rock type stuff.. why the heck am I not hearing them talk about vocal fry?! 😂)
I'm not a vocalist and I can do that too, to me it really depends also on how tired I am and how much effort I can consciously put into trying to speak perfectly for everyone to be content lol but also, when it is done on purpose and over the top as in the video with the bartender I can see how it is just "trendy" but I genially think that for most people it is very subtle and they do not care as much about it
I'm not much of a music lover, but before this video I hadn't associated the term with anything except music. Though I must confess that exaggerated vocal fry in speech does sound annoying to me. On the flip side, almost any exaggerated vocal pattern gets annoying to listen to.
While watching this, I had an odd thought. Traditionally, women have been expected to use a higher, brighter, and what some say is gentler voice that is not as subject to vocal fry. But using a higher pitch speaking voice has a number of issues. One is the ability to be heard by those with hearing loss. My grandfather was quite hard of hearing. If I used what we jokingly called a "kid voice", he inevitably could not hear me as well. So I spoke lower and slower which tended to manifest some fry even as a kid. Now that I'm a professional adult woman in a medical field (hospital pharmacist) I need to interact with others. I naturally have a low voice anyway (I sing tenor), but speaking with a lower voice rather than a higher pitched one has different results. A lower voice will, for good or ill, get different results from people. I'm seen as more knowledgeable when I use a deeper tone. And the deeper tone comes with some fry if I am also speaking more quietly. Using a "lecture hall/stage voice" as if I were acting or singing sans microphone, has a lot less fry for me even in my natural lower register, but who speaks like that normally?
We can also use my daughter's example. When my younger one uses a higher pitched voice in her math class (where is is taking 8th grade prealgebra in 6th grade) or at her robotics team practice, the boys tease her for being a girl and not knowing as much, despite the fact that she has a higher grade in the class than they do. If she uses a lower pitched voice that tends toward a bit of fry, they take her seriously. She is 11!
I have smoked for 20 years, unfortunately, and my entire voice sounds like this 😞
@@stephanipeloquin4631fat rip. All that cancer but none of the benefits 😢
I totally was wondering about this, with women using vocal fry. I thought about women competing with men, and what if this has inadvertently made them lower their voice, especially at the end of phrases, like, bam. By competing, I mean, women are CEOs now, and they're kind of in a man's world, where low voices are taken more seriously. It would be interesting to see how much "fry" women CEOs have, and those who don't.
I’m sorry to hear your daughter is dealing with this level of sexism at 11!! Who is telling these boys that their female peers can’t do math or robotics and suggesting high-pitched voices are a sign of weakness? (ie femininity = weakness). Can’t we all appreciate differences and abilities in one another without feeing threatened?
@@limespider8 I don't think so, I think it's human nature - even if the "sexism thing" were to be stomped out some other "thing" would rise to replace it...humans are incapable of creating utopia, no matter how smart we think we are, evidenced by thousands of years of history. My truth source is God: Jeremiah 17: "9“The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it? 10“I, the LORD, search the heart; I test the mind, Even to give to each man according to his ways, According to the results of his deeds."
Thankfully I look to God to know my true worth. Not society. God is my rock and salvation. Human society is built on sand, constantly shifting and and sinking and not good for growth. ❤️
I pray for all children and what they have to deal with these days.
I'm a Finnish person. Anglophone. I got a violent reaction from you pointing out that Finns use so much vocal fry. I KNEW it on some level, but I had never connected it to the vocal fry I hear in English.
Oh GOD this is a massive revelation.
Probably why I found myself a British therapist instead of using a Finnish one.
OMFG I'm still reeling over this. THAT'S why I hate listening to most Finnish speakers and most Finnish TV (and I genuinely have avoided anything in Finnish media for like 15 years.)
Ugh.
Thank you Doctor!
Lol
Well now I'm an old lady in my 60s I just turned 67 and now my whole voice whether I want to or not is vocal fry it's all fried I call it old lady voice and I can't sing anymore I know that with younger women it's not due to age but in my case it is definitely due to age. I wish I could restore my voice. I noticed when I was a young woman and I took the birth control pills that my vocal cords because I was a singer that my vocal cord smoothed out even more and my voice was even slightly better I was once a wonderful wonderful singer with a huge five octave range now I'm just a creaky old lady if there's any way to restore your voice I sure would like to know about it.
EmOtIoNaL dAmAgE😂😂😂
Stunningly brave of you being so honest & open-minded these days!So very refreshing.🤗 Thank you!😘
Ahahaha anglophone there's only an iPhone
I was just going to watch a couple of minutes of this, but it was so fascinating...
I moved to Finland 11 years ago, can speak Finnish fluently apart from grammar inconsistencies, but never got rid of my accent. Now, I know Finnish language is all about deep vocal sounds, but I never quite understood to what extend, since vocal fry is subconsciously means I went too deep with my voice and should raise it back up. This video finally explained the thing no one truly could.
Vocal fry has less to do with the tone of voice and more to do with stress on vocal cords, or in this case lack thereof. If you actually try to deepen your voice, well you’ll just get a deep voice, if you try to imitate vocal fry you can see it’s not deep at all.
I always associated vocal fry with running out of breath. When I played the trumpet and I would run out of breath I would often do similar things to the flow of air that would cause a creaky voice. I feel that if you ask someone who does not have vocal fry to speak for a very long time without taking a new breath you will hear it. People can you vocal fry in order to use less air volume to speak, as it takes a lot of air to avoid the transition in glottal stops (you use air to keep the vocal folds completely separated).
I don't think it has anything to do with running out of breath, as it appears even at the end of short sentences. It's a tactic to make the speaker sound confident in what they are saying, even slightly arrogant. "Frying" the end of the thought also creates less opportunity for anyone to talk over them.
@@giovanna722 well I do, I only notice this change in my voice when I'm speaking too fast, getting out of breath and wanting to keep talking.
As mentioned, vocal fry is very efficient compared to breathy voice.
Thank for for this, kinda. I repeated the word "yes" over and over again until I ran out of breath, and then still kept going until I physically couldn't anymore. It wasn't very fun haha, but yes my voice did start doing that near the end.
@@giovanna722 Well, your central argument here is that vocal fry is an affectation, not a result of an adaptation to the literal energetics and physics of controlling your vocal cords. In order to adequately argue your "intentionality" case against the "physics" case, you would need to provide, for lack of a better term, rigorously PROVE that someone is intentionally using vocal fry when they could, and are more easily capable of, doing otherwise. A tall order to be sure.
But you definitely can't argue the case of someone else's intentions by declaration because you can't read minds.
Top notch as usual. When the topic is related to some kind of prejudice people have towards one kind of speech or another, you do an excellent job of introducing and explaining the concept in a way that might reach the people that hold those views and have them think about why they have them.
I'd also like to add something regarding the "disinterested" perception of vocal fry. I'm American and I distinctly remember, around when my classmates and i started puberty, other boys would do this to try and artificially deepen their voices and to project a sense of cool aloofness. So perhaps there are adult men who still connect vocal fry with the the "cool guy" that they disliked in middle school who intentionally added that feature to his speech.
I met one of those boys 20 years later, and his voice still sounded fake, but all the people around him didn't know any different
What prejudice is that?
@@WreckItRolfe In this case it would be that women who speak in this way are doing it intentionally to signal their indifference and so on.
I think, at least for the movie example, it wasn't the vocal fry alone, but the combination of the vocal fry and the, er, what I think of as "Valley Girl" affect. But maybe that was just used to reinforce the effect? It kind of seemed like either cheating or missing the point, TBH.
Yeah, everybody trying to sound strong and fierce and distinguished just like Shir Khan 😂😅😊
You can literally feel the hundreds of hours of research that go into every one of these videos, thank you!
Wow this was such a cool video. I initially consider vocal fry annoying because I found it lazy and a doctored way to sound nonchalant, but when you pointed out how it’s perceived positively for men, negatively for women, and considered it a “skill”, it completely changed my perspective. Thanks!
It hurts my ears no matter who is doing it.
It’s not perceived positively for men at all…men have deeper voices so it may not be as noticeable, if it still grates enormously. I hate it.
I had the same experience!
I feel like rich British men are looking down their noses at you for not being "our kind of people" in the examples he showed.
Even Bond sounded blasé and disdainful. But we like him and we're on his side, so he's cool. But he's still being a dick throughout most of the movies. Hell, look at how he kept making hand-related puns to Dr. No WHO LOST HIS HANDS IN A NUCLEAR ACCIDENT!!!.
I can’t take anyone seriously, male or female, who speaks like this.
Fantastic video, well explained as always. You took me on a wild ride from “Oh, so that’s why I hate the sound of my voice” to “Everyone must hate the sound of my voice as much as I do” and to “Oh, is it because I’m British?” 😂 and finally, to “Well it’s just the way I speak, people can get over it!” 🎉
Love it. Love your work. Great vid!
Thank you so much for speaking about the male vocal fry. I’m a non-native english speaker and that always sounded unpleasant for me but I hate how it’s always blamed on young women… when it’s actually 1) totally not new 2) not a feminine thing.
I worked with a girl at a fast food type place. She was a freshman when she got the job. She left for half a year and when she came back, total vocal fry. TOTAL. I never asked her what happened to her voice but I noticed it was way worse when her friends or (hot) guys were around. That was the year I noticed this became a thing. We called them growlers.
Growlers 😂
So she lived some where else for a year and picked up a local accent like many people do. Not sure the concept of someone speaking differently with a coworker vs their friends and people they are romantically interested in are around is a mind blowing concept
Attention seekers really
@@PlsWaLuigiDomMeim pretty sure you do it too. Its called code switching and basically everyone does it. It's how you talk differently to your MIL than to your buddies with whom you drank your 6th can already.
@@PlsWaLuigiDomMesorry, just realised you make the same point as I do. Well, then at least i added additional context :)
OMG the writing for this segment was just phenomenal! Nicely. done.
Wow, thank you!
@@DrGeoffLindsey I must second the other writer's thoughts - this is the first I've watched of yours and I found it both illuminating and hugely amusing. Edited and analyzed so deftly, your production has great timing!
Being American of a boomer age I found upspeak annoying, and worshipped the creativity behind Moon and Frank Zappa's "Valley Girl". Though I doubt many recognized their own voices and resolved to rid themselves of it, precisely because it was so prevalent in their social circles. And like slow drawl was used dramatically as shorthand for implications of stupidity and perhaps Southern-ness, upspeak initially associated with vacuousness. The migration of creak into American usage has also been noticeable but I have not found it quite as bad. Though I had certainly picked up on its longstanding association with British class distinctions.
The only problem with having it pointed out so clearly is that now I won't be able to un-hear it to the point of distraction from the person/message. I know someone who is of Finnish descent but who speaks almost none of the language, and she has a /lot/ of creak. Unsure if it's from her parents or not!
god i love your channel so much. i don't think i've ever found a channel on quite a niche topic that dives in so deep into the subject that actually change the way i look at the world! i love your work please keep up the amazing work!!!!!
I would also like to add that there is different kinds of creaky voice that have different connotations. The kind everybody hates is quite specifically the Cali vocal fry that is the annoyed teenager/Kardashian sound
One of my favourite kinds of video. Packed with interesting info, brilliantly presented, and generously garnished with surprisingly funny and clever moments. Loved the ending, too!
As a non-native English speaker, my complaint about vocal fry is that it makes it much harder to understand what is being said. The male main actor (the father, I forgot his name) in the movie Interstellar spoke almost entirely in vocal fry and that was when I actually realized what vocal fry was. I had to turn up the volume to hear and understand what he said.
yes! Mathew McConaughey. it's impossible to understand him
As a native english speaker this happens to me with japanese. Japanese male speech has a hefty bit of vocal fry making it a lot more difficult to understand since you're basically just taught neutral or female speech in books and classes.
The mixing levels of Interstellar are notoriously bad, and Nolan does it knowingly. It’s not a good indication of anything.
If you had the power to turn up the volume, that means you weren't watching in a theater. The sound mixing in _Interstellar_ is a big middle finger to people who watch at home on anything but a high-end sound system. It's pretty much designed on purpose so that you can't hear anything unless you have surround sound to separate channels and are playing it at high volume. I assume they wanted a movie that only rich people can watch.
Now I get, why I couldn’t understand Vin Diesel in pitch black
You really go the extra mile to educate people on the difference between facts and opinions, and from my limited experience, it is always an uphill battle. Another great video, Geoff!
As a trained singer, and a multi-instrumentalist. I do vocal fry because I tend to hear the baseline well when I sing.
Fascinating video. Thanks for the information.
The Scottish tennis player, Andy Murray, is a king of vocal fry. His voice communicates "I'm so chill that I can barely get the words out. I am just soooo laaaaid baaaack." I assumed he did it to offset his on-court behavior.
Andy Murray has the most boring voice of all!
Andy Murray is an amazing man, and advocate for fellow players.
@@claire-amel I'm sure he is but his voice is still very boring to listen to!
@@claire-amel That doesn't excuse vocal fry lol. In all seriousness, I don't see how that's relevant.
Andy Murray’s problem is that he doesn’t control his emotions, he’s just too ebullient. And an amazing tennis player. The first sentence is irony, or course.
Something just clicked in my brain. I'm autistic, which - in verbal communication - results in relatively flat affect. I also have quite a bit of vocal fry naturally. And I'm well studied on a great many topics and love sharing knowledge with people. People used to think of me as some pompous asshole who thinks he's better than everyone for most of my childhood and teen years and even sometimes throughout my adult life so far. It just occured to me when you were talking about the psychological implications in the listeners' mind, that the vocal fry added to the "know-it-all" image when I was younger and as I grow older and better at communicating not just on the rational plane but also the emotional and interpersonal ones, it's working to my benefit more and more as people interpret wisdom into it.
Very interesting video I randomly stumbled upon there, thank you!
Count the number of "I"s in every utterance. Replace with "you" when possible.
@@AstroGremlinAmericanyou're right, that's a really important detail. Reformulating the story to make it appear more general and not so particular makes it more interesting for listeners. It makes everything more relatable and less like one is talking to himself
At least for those of us in the mild end of the spectrum, usually the only external difference from neurotypicals is that we take longer to learn this kind of thing, i.e. we end up evolving the "theory of mind" more slowly. But if you keep an open mind, the improvement never stops
me too! i have a deep voice because high voices hurt my ears lol
Thank you for sharing your experience! Not autistic but still can relate to being misunderstood!
I'm a native Spanish speaker that learned English at school, and I never had creaky voice, until I started to learn Mandarin, which is a tonal language, and one of it's tones is called "falling rising tone" (third tone), which is actually more frequently pronounced as a low pitch tone. The thing is that in the process of learning more and more Chinese, my pronunciation in other languages also had that "3rd tone influence" in the form of a creaky voice.
So, as presented in this video, I also think people that say that "creaky voice can be detrimental to your throat" don't realize that there's a lot of tonal languages that literally require you to do it so that you can me understood.
I mean, have they ever heard the ã tone in northern Vietnamese? To me sounds like a combination between creaky voice and a glottal stop, but ppl use it all the time to speak.
Yeah, the ã tone like in ngã is creaky and has a glottal stop. I was always so focused on the latter, that I didn't notice the former.
Wow, I never thought about it, but I use vocal fry in Chinese as well! That's coming from English, where I've used it since my teenagehood. Interesting.
They were talking about people who STAY in vocal fry, to which the response is, Finnish people.
Ohhh yes and unfortunately it destroys the vocal chords.. ever noticed how unhealthy female voices sound in Vietnamese speakers become with age?
@@juliaagrippina917 - Is that actually the norm? or actually related? what about elderly Finnish people? I can't imagine all their voiced are screwed in their old age.
That was an unexpected 27 min. I'm glad I stumbled on to this. thanks
This is an interesting concept to me because as a non-native speaker, I wasn't aware of this term or the negative associations that people seem to have with it, but I was aware the moment it was mentioned that this is something I could relate to. My speech always has this creaking voice quality to it, regardless of the language I'm speaking. I had also, on some level figured that this was because my voice had a low tone in general, and it was fascinating to find out that the negative associations are often paired with a higher tone.
Either way, your voice is your own. Don't let anyone bully you into trying to change it.
Yeah. German here, so not a native speaker, either. I'm not a subscriber and specifically clicked on the video, because I had never heard that term 'vocal fry' before. Nor was I aware, that it is a widespread issue (in the USA?).
I seem to only be able to hear it in extreme cases though. I kinda 'got' the case of the barista and her customer. They did sound annoying. But as for the examples at the beginning...nope. Did not sound unusual or annoying to me. Weird, huh? Maybe some people are more sensitive to it than others.
I did notice in the past, though, that American women tend to just overall speak in a higher voice than German women. So I must not be completely tone-deaf 🫣
The thing is I don't actually think actual vocal fry DOES generate that kind of reaction, at least not on it's own. It provokes a negative reaction when paired with other attributes of speech, in particular how syllables are emphasized (valley girl talk).
I think the majority of (non-linguists) complaining about it don't - as per the video - even really understand what it is, so we can't trust them to properly identify what they find annoying, vs. just tossing out a term. And I think Dr. Lindsey had some additional motives with his conclusion that it was all down to sexism (an explanation I would emphasize blithely ignores some very real negative stereotypes around the British male examples)
Ppppp
0:50....someting Hannibal Lecter would say
Awesome!
😆
🤣🤣🤣
Jeffrey Dahmer too 🌚
As portrayed in the Loudermilk clip, it's not necessarily the vocal fry that is deemed to be annoying. It's when the beginning of a phrase or sentence starts higher and then ends with a vocal fry combined with a tailing off or uptalk. It almost sounds like a progression of the "valley girl" voice from the 80's & 90's.
The dude in that clip is 100,000 times more annoying than any regional way of speaking could ever be for simple lack of manners and boundaries. IRL he'd be 86'd and have to go drink gas station coffee or something...but unfortunately IRL people often model their behavior based off fictional emotional outbursts that no reasonable and decent person should emulate.
I think this is just a recent example of older people being upset at how younger people talk for like the 900 millionth time in recorded history - and just like all the other times the older folks should try to realize that small cultural changes like this have never signs of any impending societal apocalypse. The sky isn't falling because accents have shifted over the years.
Valspeak relies on overdoing what's considered markers of seriousness, dragged out final phoneme, and the rollercoaster pitch changes, all implying immaturity. At least, that's how Moon Zappa did it.
@@CircsC Did you watch the whole video? The linguist showed examples of vocal fry going back 100 years. So is it those out of touch 120 year olds just ticked off at all those crazy young people?😂
Or could it be that some peole just find the scratchy, uneven rhythm of vocal fry annoying? Nothing to do with youth vs age.
For example, vibrato has been used in singing for centuries. Some people are good with it. Others detest it. Personal preference.
The example that comes to my mind is Yukana from My First Girlfriend Is A Gal, who I immediately connected with the "valley girl". Gals as a subculture are always given this accent in anime (in my experience).
You didn't learn the lesson stated here @@CircsC, this is not a regional way of talking. If you want to be taken seriously drop the fry. Hope I did not overstep your cultural boundaries by saying as much.
This video has absolutely destroyed my ability to enjoy casual conversation. I don’t have vocal fry myself, but now that you’ve pointed it out, I hear it everywhere-like a relentless mosquito buzzing in my ear. I didn’t ask for this superpower, but here I am, annoyed and hyper-aware. Thanks a lot, I guess?
As a voiceover director, vocal fry is most annoying when the actor doesn't know they're doing it and can't stop. It's especially annoying when it's a man who's using it to sound like they have a deeper voice.
Also, as a voice actor myself, I'm in the "vocal fry envy" club, because I can't do it to save my life. Sometimes it's appropriate for a specific character, and I'm not able to utilize the technique! 😅
Can you do a Lurch? From the original 60s Addams Family? You might start there.
@@VesnaVK It's not a matter of not knowing how to do it. In fact, I can use vocal fry for the first 10 or 15 minutes after I wake up in the morning. But once my voice is warmed up, it's gone. 😆
@@AlexWalkerSmith interesting. I can do it at will anytime, I think. I wonder how come the difference.
I absolutely detest vocal fry. It is like fingernails scraping down a chalkboard annoying.
Lil Wayne does it. Goes for the deeper voice effect hahahhaa.
My theory about the annoyance factor is that since vocal fry sounds like it comes from the very back/bottom of a person's throat, and the majority of women have higher-pitched voices, the clear pitch change from one to the other is what makes it sound intentional, affected, and annoying. Whereas, a lower-voiced woman or in male speakers, there is much less pitch-variation when switching from normal voice to fry voice so it barely registers on our mental radar. Regardless, I find the whole subject fascinating!
My theory is people have been told that it's hated so they adopt that behaviour. Most people think the same as the screens they watch tell them.
Muahah, you should hear me when I switch back and forth between my alto and bass registers. Always makes people do a double take even if I don't add any fry. If I add subharmonics I can reliably get down to G-0, and I can hit C-1 reliably with a clean chest voice.
In a lot of people it IS intentional. How else do you explain the fact that so many only started over-using it as adults?
@@iunnox666 Nah, that like saying people do not like fingernails on a chalkboard because they were told that it's annoying.
@@SolutionsWithin What?? He never said it was always an intentional decision. If anything he said the opposite, pointing out how it shows up in other languages and how we dont even notice men doing it.
I was just going to watch for like 2 minutes to get some examples of this, but ended up watching the entire thing.
Lol...Same!
goodjob
Same I realized I kind of have it lol. Not nearly as nasally and obnoxiously as the Kardashian clan lol.
HaHa, I only made it 55 seconds, I also don't like that the people are often emulating the exact people that shouldn't be their role models.
- Also, it's bad for your vocal cords and has a tendency to cause "nodes."
@@donaldnelsonbarger2978maybe you should watch the whole video and you’d realise both point you just made are incorrect
I've hated vocal fry from both men and women since it began showing up. It grates on my ears.
This completely explains why I don't have friends. I knew it wasn't my personality.
😂😂
Ya you probably have vocal fry and nobody wants to be around you
Maybe it’s your aroma… you & sandalwood both make me vomit. 🤔 😁
Maybe it’s your aroma… you and sandalwood both make me vomit. 🤔 😆
😂😂 You can improve it.
As a philosopher, language enthusiast and English teacher, I learnt so much from this video and from the comments. I understood so many things. I'm definitely re-watching this.
And also, the comments are very interesting.
Just goes to show much of our communication is not words alone, but their tone, frequency, and volume too. Language is incredibly interesting. Thanks for lifting the curtain for me.
Look into mandarin. Tone and pitch matter!
Tone, pitch, inflection. They matter very much and I think it’s a commonly known thing by people that speak languages other than English
I love ur pfp
@@DrFyder Thanks. I do too lol
This has been in my suggestions for about a year, I finally watched it and now I'm having to quit watching any video where the presenter has vocal fry. I'd never even noticed it before! But now I have a mental image of vocal cords every time I hear it. THANKS THEN.
That AirBNB ending was phenomenal, Dr. Lindsey! Thanks for another awesome video!
AIЯᙠИᙠ
Man… that was literally the smoothest ad transition I’ve ever seen.
I thought the same thing! Lol
Sucked me in.
I know right!
There was an ad?
Vocal fry can sound annoying, but I find it hard to identify when it does, because it's not always the case. Part of it seems to be how much is use, but then there's some of the examples you show that sound annoying even though there's very little of it and some with a lot of it that don't sound annoying.
Actually, listening to the specific examples that annoy me again, I don't think it's actually the vocal fry that's causing the annoyance. I think it's the "bored know-it-all" part that annoys me. And I think that's more caused by the upward inflection at the end of sentences rather than the vocal fry.
I know what you mean. I should have made it clearer that it's really part of an *intonation pattern* which I think can trigger a reaction whether there's much creak or not. So it really makes a pair with Uptalk.
@@DrGeoffLindsey The trailing off.... and the chin moving in strangulation, triggers empathic sensations of discomfort.
Indeed, it's even worse when vocal fry is combined with upspeak
But isn’t fry more pleasant than voices that don’t seem to have it?
@@wormsnebraska If your Parents were on meth then l guess you would be habituated to harsh unmelodic strangulated sounds.
27 minute informative setup. Good job lmao!