I have a new obsession thanks to boing boing: listening for vocal fry. This speech pattern, in which the voice dips down into a gravelly lower register, was once considered a defect, but is now apparently common, especially among college-aged women. As my daughter is too young for this and I don't recall hearing my nieces do it, I appealed to a friend who is a college professor, who responded,
Yes! So obnoxious. Makes the speaker sound like an idiot. Started in the early oughts, yes? Some reality tv celeb or something popularized it. Teenage girls eat it up. Hear it all the time in classes. Grating.
When I pressed for an example, he told me to try the Kardashians. So I did. I picked a random 14-second clip from Kim Kardashian's youtube page and heard at least two, and possibly three examples.
Now I'm not going to be able NOT to hear this.
Why is this a Best Noon Thing? Because I like learning new things, even if I have to encounter Kardashians to do it.
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Sound more "Valley Girlish" to me.....Grating the nerves, absolutely......
Well, at least you had the guts to push the button. Not me. I return from lunch, click on Maddowblog and there is a Kardashian looking at me.
Looking at me from a post on the Maddowblog. The end, truly, is nigh.
LOL!!! I hadn't done lunch yet.....
I took voice and speech last year in school before I switched from theatre to critical media studies and got yelled at ALL the time for vocal fry. They used to show us creepy videos of the vocal cords and how they looked when you screamed/whispered/spoke with vocal fry/etc and it is rather frightening. On top of vocal chords generally being weird to see, watching how they move when you do bad things is a pretty effective way of deterring people from doing it. It's a bad habit I'm still trying to break.
90.5 FM NPR station hires ONLY annoying vocal fry correspondents! So sorry speech class is no longer a requirement for graduation from high school like it was 50 years ago!
Well, it's a requirement for all radio stations these days to hire the most annoying voice they can find, particularly in the morning. Here in DC there's a show called "Elliot in the Morning" who has perfected the most annoying laugh possible, and makes it a point to use it at least 5 times per minute (I believe it's part of his contract).
For radio and TV, annoying = more ratings.
Not sure if this is better than when young women's voices rise as they're finishing a declarative sentence? As if they're asking a question? Or looking for agreement? At work, it just about drives me crazy? Even more so when I hear a reporting doing it?
At least "vocal fry" sounds slightly more assertive, although all these nasal-ly little girl voices are annoying.
OMG now I hear it EVERYWHERE! And I think I just did it.
Tricia, you hear it everywhere because it's part of the normal range of the human vocal expression. It has to be trained out of people not trained in. I don't know how the idea of "vocal fry" escaped the artistic realm.
Just a theory: Perhaps focal fry is considered "sexy" because it resembles a purring sound, and men subconsciously register the sound as a turn-on. Often, people will behave in ways that are encouraged or reinforced by the opposite sex (for example when they give positive-feedback like "good" attention).
So men (or women): Sexy, or obnoxious?
Mae West used the vocal fry to good effect. Of course, Mae West could get away with a lot of things that wouldn't work for the rest of us.
I think a vocal fry may be overcompensating for a tendency many young women have to have their voices go up at the end of statements as if they were asking a question.
I had to listen twice for it, and even then it just seemed like she was ending her sentences or phrases on a downward run. No one objects when men do the same thing. In fact, I know voiceover talent that gets paid for their ability to dip into the gravelly zone. If this is vocal fry, I much prefer it to the opposite, which is ending sentences on an upward trajectory into the childish squeal zone.
Huh. I listened to this three times and still don't really know what "vocal fry" is. Just sounded like someone talking to me. And really, I'd rather young women talk in gravelly voices than those silly falcesto voices I hear women using whenever I flip past the Christian radio stations. What's that about?
Oh thanks, I thought I was the only one. I'm just not hearing it.
Listen when she says "your shoes", "glam squad", and "Equinox". It's there and now that someone's pointed it out to me it will drive me nuts. Thanks Tricia!
I also teach at the college level and have never noticed any vocal trends that bother me. If I can get my students to speak at all, in any kind of voice, I'm happy.
I don't know. I've been told all my life that I have a low, gravelly voice, and I'm 44. Now that I know that it has a name and that it annoys so many people, I'll have to try to change ... NOT. ;-)
I hear "Grammar Girl" Mignion Fogarty do this all the time. I started hearing goth girls doing this first.
Wow - I check Grammar Girl all the time for grammar rules I can never remember, but never listened to her podcasts. I just did and it's a great example. The ends of sentences and emphasized words are dragged out in the vocal fry registry. And it makes her sound MUCH younger than I'm sure she is.
One more thing I have to teach my two daughters NOT to do.
Pauley Perrette of NCIS speaks this way, but hers is natural, as is Blythe Danner's. However, when thousands of young women walk around on a daily basis intentionally sounding this way, if will drive one absolutely batty. I tend to zone out of a conversation with someone who does this, especially since I know they spoke in a normal voice during their earlier childhood years. My granddaughters, who are in their teens, thankfully have not embraced this ridiculous trend.
Now I know what this is called. I have even heard men do it. One example is NDP leadership hopeful Brian Topp. Hear him speak beginning at the 2:20 minute mark.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=mQeRhkyuu9c#t=140s
"[H]ow can autonomy be claimed while using the language of the oppressors? How can a new epistemological commons come to be if not by the crafting of an alternative language?"
- Nicolas Mendoza, Aljazeera
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/12/201112884026597856.html
Oops! My computer did something odd and something else got pasted in the post. Apologies all.
Rachel, Rachel, Rachel...other than my wife. who is a psychotherapist, you're the woman I'd most want to have dinner with, to exchange gossip and opinions and laughs. In fact, I think you should have quarterly dinners for, say, 20 people who are fans and think you are the cat's meow.
I love that idea!
Doesn't anyone still keep about a 15-to-20-person Fantasy Dinner Guest list in their heads anymore? Of COURSE Rachel has a spot at the table!
I have noticed a lot of women who I assume are really educated adopting the "valley girl" and vocal fry speech styles. It is weird to be sitting in a cafe right next to Columbia, NYU, Yale, Harvard, etc, and hear this kind of speech constantly. What is even odder to me are the men who are with them that eat it up. While I find speech like this grating, I have a feeling there are many men who find it non-threatening. My theory is that it is a way for women who are otherwise educated and strong to appear less threatening to men, and so attract them "in spite of" their better attributes.
I am reminded of the line of Madonna's song "For a Girl". "When you are trying hard to be your best, could you be a little less?". It is sad there are women who feel they have to do this, and men who like or even expect it.
The question remains: who cares?
Yes, allow me to add my own hearty "Who cares?" Just another "kids these days" gripe.
"They" used to say "kids thse days" about me and my friends. Now I somehow feel giulty even thinking it -- though I do think it -- so I guess I am "They" now.
Life'll bite'cha in de butt everytime if you stick 'round long enuf.
If that little growl is the extent of this "defect," I'll take it a million times over the rising intonaTION? Made famous by Valley GIRLS? And, like, 80s Mall CultURE?
Kathy Ireland is an excellent example of someone who overcame a SERIOUS case of vocal fry to become a (gasp!) voiceover talent. It's just a bad habit that can be easily corrected.
What exactly makes it bad or a habit? Why does it have to be corrected?
really?... really?... is this TMZ? I thought it was the Maddow Blog
Kind've my sentiments. Of all the things to gripe about in the world- really, how people talk? I wonder how many people here realize women also do this as part of puberty and that for many women this is completely natural.
Who's griping? I found it fascinating.
@Tricia- I appreciate that you're looking at it more from the fascination of cultural and/or biological trends. I am more referencing this in the post you wrote:
As well as many other posts:
Who is griping indeed =P
Frialect?
a more noticeable example is the girl on the "grammar girl" podcast. i didn't notice it until i read a post on it on reddit. some people were saying it was derived from the valley girl accent which was influenced by the stoner-surfer culture. i don't mind it much but i'm also around the kardashians in age.
yes, let's speak in the "correct" registers, for goodness sakes. we wouldn't want anyone to be "offended" by our natural speech patterns, would we?
What a ridiculous idea, that a woman can only sound or speak a certain way to be "proper."
Because apparently people aren't afraid to adhere to the pretentious stereotype that liberals so often bitch about having applied to them?
I'm w/ you on this one John.
I did click on it. I wanted to see if she's as funny as her SNL counterpart. Not so much! But I did have to look up one of the SNL skits, and this woman does have the "vocal fry" bit down pretty good. And the blank stares, etc.
http://youtu.be/9p8wLR-h8Gs
I know, anything you complain about brings about just about as much complaining in kind about the complaint, but hey, this can be irritating. Just not as irritating as inappropriate apostrophes......now please get right on that one, TRMS!
Hi Ms. Kardashian, I wish I could upload an image of a drawing I made of you. It is drawn in graphite, and submitted as part of my final project in a design class. After studying a source of you, and drawing from it, I can conclude that you're a raging beauty. If I were Praxitiles, you would be the next Knidian Aphrodite.
I've heard this a lot from female Ph.D. students and younger female faculty, and always wondered if it wasn't because they were pitching their voices too low in order to be taken seriously by their male colleagues. Clearly that's not the issue with Ms K. Who knew it was a trend!