Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, "LOL Vocal Fry Rules U R All Dumb", Jezebel 7/30/2015: This week, in shit-hot stuff happening on the internet, once-great feminist pundit Naomi Wolf wrote a column about how vocal fry is Keeping Women Down, and then other women across the internet rebutted her, rightly positing that when your dads bitch about […]
Jaya Saxena, "Examples of Male Vocal Fry", The Toast 7/22/2015, presents YouTube videos of a bunch of well-known males (human and otherwise) exhibiting so-called vocal fry. There's no textual commentary — but the choice of examples, and the word "male" in the title, underlines the fact that young women are currently being criticized for a phenomenon that can be […]
Earlier today, Jianjing Kuang pointed out to me something interesting and unexpected about the sounds in a LLOG post from last month, "Vocal creak and fry, exemplified", 2/7/2015.
Jen Olenizcak, "Are Spanx Causing Vocal Fry?", Huffington Post 6/17/2014: New Yorkers are incredibly tense. Articles have been written about our anxiety issues — most adults are incredibly tense. And the butt tension! I hear so many pinched, throaty Kardashian voices, and when lamenting about the correlation I saw between this body image pulling-it-all-in problem […]
. . . but not being yourself just might. There's been a lot of media interest recently in a new study of "vocal fry", sparked in part by an unusually detailed magazine article — Olga Khazan, "Vocal Fry May Hurt Women's Job Prospects", The Atlantic 5/29/2014. Other coverage: Gail Sullivan, "Study: Women with creaky voices — also […]
Josef Fruehwald has an excellent post "On vocal fry". (For some background, see "Vocal fry: 'creeping in' or 'still here'?", 12/12/2011.) He observes that the media coverage has been an intellectual "train wreck", and he promises to explore the whys and wherefores in a future post. I'll look forward to his analysis — but I […]
According to Marissa Fessenden, "'Vocal Fry' Creeping into U.S. Speech", Science Now 12/9/2011: A curious vocal pattern has crept into the speech of young adult women who speak American English: low, creaky vibrations, also called vocal fry. Pop singers, such as Britney Spears, slip vocal fry into their music as a way to reach low […]
"Vocal Fry" has been in the media yet again, thanks to the recent flurry of interest over "TikTalk" (2/16/2024). As mentioned there, and in my 2011 post "Vocal fry: 'creeping in' or 'still here'?", this speaking style (and media interest in it) has always been with us, with a famous fry influencer from olden days […]
The recent flurry about "TikTalk" seems to have started with Rochelle Barrand, "TikTok: 'Influencer speak' on social media platforms is likely to be the future of the English accent – expert", NationalWorld 11/22/2023: A language expert said a "TikTok voice" which is often used by influencers on social media platforms is likely to be "the […]
The next-most-recent xkcd: Mouseover title: "Slowly progressing from 'how do protons behave in relativistic collisions?' to 'what the heck are protons even doing when they're just sitting there?'"
Today's topic is a simple solution to a complicated problem. The complicated problem is how to estimate "pitch range" in recordings of human speakers. As for the simple solution — wait and see. You might think that the many differences between the perceptual variable of pitch and the physical variable of fundamental frequency ("f0") arise […]
During the 2016 presidential campaign, there was a lot of negative commentary about Hillary Clinton's voice. Some examples from across the political spectrum are compiled and discussed here, and even-the-liberal-The-Atlantic published on "The Science Behind Hating Hillary's Voice". Since Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump pretty much got a pass for vocal characteristics analogous to Hillary's, it was […]
In the context of the current political season, I've started taking a look at rhetorical styles, including the aspects of rhythm, pitch, and voice quality for which linguists generally use the cover term "prosody". Our enormously over-long list of topic categories didn't include "prosody", so I've added it — and in the process of labeling […]