It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a pensioner in possession of a good amount of free time must be in want of something to complain about. Last week it was how Silicon Valley is “full” and traffic is “already so bad”, so housing developments must be stopped. The week before, it was the creeping communism implicit in Starbucks red cup Christmas promotion. Today we’ll be chatting about the nefarious elderly’s newest target:  young people’s voices sound funny, and this is cause for “serious concern™” .

But what in particular about young folx’s voices are sparking ire this time? It’s the phenomenon of “vocal fry”. Vocal fry is when someone’s vowel sounds have a pronounced creak to them. Linguists define it as “a subclass of creaky voice phonation that has recently been differentiated from other forms of creaky voice; vocal fry being described as a constricted glottis, low fundamental frequency, and more often periodic with a high damping of pulses” which is a highly precise and perfectly useless definition. Imagine the tasteful sound of opening the front door door to a house long abandoned, quiet that sound by about half, and superimpose it onto someone saying “aaaah” at the doctor’s office.  That’s vocal fry! Primarily critical of women’s voices, complaints about vocal fry burgeoned after a highly popular article on the prevalence of vocal fry in young people’s voices in the illustrious magazine, Science. For example (cw violence), an anonymous youtube user  commented on 5/12/2019 on a video of the glottal source of vocal fry that vocal fry is unhealthy because “It makes the listener want to stab you in the throat.” Yikes! 

College professor Penny Eckert conducted an informal study that suggests that older people find vocal fry more aggravating than younger people. And especially more aggravating in young women. This prompts the question: are old folks so cruel to innocent young speakers because they are old, or because the group of people who happen to be old right now are especially cruel? Over the next few weeks we at Radio Free Glottis will construct an experiment to attempt to systematically distinguish these two  explanations.  But first we owe it to you, dear listeners to provide a brief overview on what is known about vocal fry.

First comes prevalence. The hullabaloo is mostly around young women’s voices, but how prevalent is vocal fry in young American men? Researchers Abdelli-Beruh, Wolk, and Slavin find in a 2013 study that even though young American men certainly have detectable vocal fry, it is measurably less frequent than the rates supported for young American women, which is found habitually in around 2/3 of speakers. That 2/3 figure was obtained by the same three researchers in a 2011 study. There is also evidence that the frequency of vocal fry usage depends on who is being spoken to. Borrie and Delfino found in 2016 that young American women use vocal fry to match their conversational partner’s usage: more often when it’s used at them and less often when it isn’t. 

Usage also can be measurably mapped to opinions. Ligon, et. al find in 2018 that vocal fry usage in young American women is associated with adjectives like “vain, apathetic, disinterested, sleepy, chill, bored”. Not a good look apparently. However, the picture may be more complicated than it looks: Parker and Borrie find in 2017 that vocal fry in young American women is rated as favorable when the speaker speaks quickly with a high pitch and unfavorably when the speed is kept and the pitch is lowered. This suggests that many factors could possibly be at play.

For our methodology, we will use our unconscionably large budget to survey a wide range of people on their fry opinions from across the USA, aging from young to old. This ought to give us enough data to use more sophisticated statistical techniques to evaluate the difference between our age and cohort effects.

We hope that these findings will be helpful in Radio Free Glottis’s upcoming work trying to narrow down precisely who doesn’t like vocal fry, and why. Who knows, maybe being a grouch is a universal truth…

 

References:

http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvoice.2011.04.007

http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvoice.2013.08.011

http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvoice.2016.02.005

http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvoice.2016.12.005

http://doi.org/10.1016@j.jvoice.2017.08.002

http://doi.org/10.1016@j.jvoice.2018.03.010