You may find vocal fry irritating, but don’t automatically attribute it to womenCavan Images / Alamy
If you have listened to a podcast or watched a video on TikTok lately, you will probably be familiar with vocal fry, even if you didn’t know it had a name. Vocal fry describes the creaky sound that occurs when we speak in our lowest vocal register. It is often considered irritating and is typically associated with young women, but new research suggests there is no good-quality evidence for this stereotype.
Vocal fry occurs when our vocal cords are relaxed but not a lot of air is pushing past them, which naturally happens when we come to the end of an utterance. But it becomes more complicated in the context of popular culture, where it is often presented as a negative – or, more specifically, annoying – characteristic of young women’s speech. Now, Jeanne Brown at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and her colleagues have found that this idea ought to be interrogated.
First, they analysed the speech of 49 Canadian people, collected from online sources. The researchers focused on measurable acoustic markers of vocal fry, such as irregularities in, and small differences between, certain fundamental sound components of each voice, as well as a type of breathiness. They found that these vocal traits were unambiguously more prevalent in men. Additionally, the team found that creakiness increased with the speaker’s age, so neither being young nor being a woman put a speaker in the most creaky group.
