As with the Valley Girl uptalk of the 1980s, or the supposed overuse of the word “like” in the 1990s, vocal fry remains a divisive conversation topic over 10 years on. The term refers to that distinctively creaking or crackly tone heard in the voices of certain individuals…or whales. But at least in humans, it’s often used while expressing apathy at the end of a word or phrase. Think of celebrities like Aubrey Plaza, Britney Spears, or Kim Kardashian. But as those examples may imply, the debate about vocal fry’s prevalence and irksomeness frequently devolves into gender-based generalizations. Meanwhile, the actual linguistic data on the subject remains sparse.
To fill in some of these research gaps, researchers in Australia recently conducted some much-needed, concrete analysis based on over three decades of data on language patterns. Their findings clearly indicate an inordinate amount of vocal fry criticism is directed towards women. At the same time, the study published last month in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America also shows how vocal fry is on the rise.
According to Macquarie University linguist and study co-author Felicity Cox, the project first started due to the seemingly lopsided focus on women’s vocal fry.
“We found it interesting that changes in vocal characteristics like creaky voice have been attributed mainly to girls, even though no one had really collected data to support that suggestion,” she said in a statement.
To remedy this, it was important for Cox and her colleagues to select a sample population whose English language usage not only remained stable over generations, but also lacked diversity over that same time period. Cox had just the population in mind. It’s a group she first began studying over 35 years ago in 1989—teenagers from Sydney’s suburban Northern Beaches region. While Greater Sydney has diversified its population in recent decades, English-only households here have remained strikingly steady: 88.7 percent in 1986 versus 87.4 in 2021.
“The fact that it’s one of the least linguistically diverse parts of Sydney makes the Northern Beaches an ideal place to study changes in spoken English over time,” Cox explained.
Cox’s team first dug up her original sample recordings, then amassed a new data set taken from present day Northern Beach teens. Next, they used a combination of acoustical analysis tools including automated creak detection to assess the prevalence of vocal fry in each sample group.
Their findings may shock some vocal fry critics. Cox and her colleagues determined that about 19 percent of both male and female speakers employed the creaky tone in their speech. They also found that vocal fry is more likely to occur pre-pausal (ahead of a conversational pause), no matter the speaker. That said, males were more likely to use vocal fry outside the pre-pausal situations.
So why all the attention on women’s vocal fry? Study co-author Joshua Penney framed it a bit more charitably than many other people likely would if asked the same question.
“It may be that creak is simply more noticeable in female speakers because there tends to be a larger pitch difference between a higher ‘normal’ voice and the lower-frequency creaky voice in females,” he offered. “In other words, listeners may be less sensitive to creak in male voices, so the increase in creak in female voices has been salient enough to trigger comment and criticism.”
Although vocal fry percentages are equal across men and women today, the study’s results did show this wasn’t always the case. Compared with the audio collected in 1989, authors saw a “significant increase in creak prevalence” among today’s females. However, the flipside to this finding is that men used to speak with a vocal fry more than the stereotyped woman today. As an example, Penney offered one of the most “macho” figures in pop culture history.
“Listen to Sean Connery say ‘Bond. James Bond’ and you’ll hear creak,” he says. “But it attracts less attention in males.”
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