Study suggests "the bias is real but socially constructed, rather than grounded in how women actually sound."
Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav Vocal fry, aka “ creaky voice ,” is a distinctive drop in pitch, usually at the end of sentences, associated with the speech patterns of young women in particular. Britney Spears is the go-to example of the trend, having famously used it in her 1998 smash hit, “Hit Me Baby (One More Time),” and she’s far from the only one.
But what if that popular gender-based stereotype is wrong? Jeanne Brown, a graduate student at McGill University, has found that vocal fry is actually more common in men than women, detailing her experimental findings in a talk at this week’s meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Philadelphia. Per Brown, we perceive it as more prominent in young women.
Vocal fry is the lowest of the human vocal registers, the others being the modal and falsetto registers, as well as the whistle register. It’s caused when the vocal cords slacken, leading to irregular vibration and an audible cracking or rattling sound as air is released in spurts. Vocal fry is characterized by very low fundamental frequencies of around 70 Hz. (The lowest end of the range of human hearing is 20 Hz.) Ten years ago, I reported on an experiment by John Nix, a voice professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio, who concluded that singers like Spears, Katy Perry, and Lady Gaga use vocal fry in pop music because it enhances expressiveness. “Unamplified styles, such as classical music, tend to disguise effort and express emotion in more subtle ways,” Nix told me at the time. “Amplified styles, such as popular music, tend to display effort as something genuine, intimate, raw, exciting, and emotional. Fry may be one way to communicate such effort, or honest, raw emotions.” Nor is vocal fry exclusively used by female singers: Justin Bieber, Tim Storms (who holds the world record for lowest note produced by a human), and gospel bassists like Mike Holcomb have also used it.
The growing prevalence of vocal fry in speech started making headlines in the 2010s, beginning with a study concluding that US women in California used vocal fry significantly more frequently than US men. Another 2014 study had similar findings: women used vocal fry four times more often than men. It’s been documented in Oregon and the Midwest, too, not just California. Yet another study found that women who employ vocal fry during job interviews are perceived more negatively than men who do so. (Anecdotally, Ira Glass, host of This American Life , has said he frequently uses fry in his podcasts and has never received a single complaint, yet often gets hate mail complaining about female staffers’ voices.) It’s pitch, not gender There has been some criticism of the methodologies used in such studies, but nonetheless, the narrative has taken hold. “Linguists have highlighted this as a case of linguistic discrimination, in which people are criticizing young women’s voices as a proxy for direct discrimination against this group,” Brown said during a media briefing. She decided to run her own experiments to test whether there really is a strong gender bias for vocal fry.
Spectrogram of vocal fry, aka creaky voice.
Credit: Jeanne Brown Spectrogram of vocal fry, aka creaky voice.
Credit: Jeanne Brown Brown collected speech examples of 49 Canadians from online sources and analyzed the samples using the telltale acoustic markers of vocal fry, such as low and/or irregular pitch, spectral tilt (differences in amplitude between the first and second harmonics), and harmonics-to-noise ratios. “Creaky voice is more associated with low-frequency noise, whereas something like breathiness is related to high-frequency noise,” said Brown.
The results: Not only did men use vocal fry more than women, but the use of creaky voice increased with the speaker’s age. So why do we associate vocal fry so much with young women? Brown conducted a second experiment. She recorded her voice using vocal fry and then manipulated the recordings so the level of fry varied and the speech was gender-ambiguous. Then she recruited 40 subjects, all of whom received training to accurately identify creaky voices and provide less subjective ratings. The subjects would listen to short notes, each paired with an image of either a man or a woman, and then rate the degree of vocal fry in those recordings.
Brown found a reverse acoustic bias: The primary marker for identifying vocal fry was low pitch, not gender. “This shows that the popular narrative reflects more of a sociocultural bias than empirical reality,” said Brown. “So the question, ‘Why do women creak so much?’ should be shifted to something like, ‘Why do we perceive and judge creak the way we do?’ I believe that is where the real puzzle lies. What is going on in these women’s voices that make us identify creak differently than for other social groups? It’s not just about the voice itself. It could be related to higher pitch versus lower pitch perception, along with a lot of other socially stigmatized variants in language.” “The conflict between [our findings] and everyday perception, where women are routinely flagged as creakier, suggests the bias is real but socially constructed, rather than grounded in how women actually sound,” said Brown . Furthermore, “Telling women to avoid vocal fry to protect their careers [and] social perception puts the burden on speakers rather than challenging listeners’ biases, and that framing does real harm.” Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.
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