Vocal Fry, also known as “squeaky voice“, is a distinctive drop in pitch, usually at the ends of sentences, associated with the speech patterns of young women in particular. Britney Spears is the preferred example of this trend, having used it in her 1998 smash hit, “Hit Me Baby (One More Time),” and she is far from the only one.
But what if that popular gender stereotype is incorrect? Jeanne Brown, a graduate student at McGill University, found that vocal coldness is actually more common in men than women, and detailed her experimental findings in a talk at this week’s meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Philadelphia. According to Brown, we perceive it to be 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 occurs when the vocal cords loosen, causing irregular vibrations and an audible crackling or rattling as air is gushed out. Vocal Fry is characterized by very low fundamental frequencies, around 70 Hz. (The lowest end of the human hearing range is 20 Hz).
Ten years ago, I reported based 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 fried vocals in pop music because it improves expressiveness. “Unamplified styles, like classical music, tend to disguise effort and express emotions in more subtle ways,” Nix told me at the time. “Amplified styles, like popular music, tend to show effort as genuine, intimate, raw, exciting and emotional. Fry can be a way to communicate that effort or honest, raw emotions.” Nor are vocal voices used exclusively by female singers: Justin Bieber, Tim Storms (which holds the world record for lowest note produced by a human), and has also been used by gospel bassists such as Mike Holcomb.
