It sounds like people aren't putting into the effort to speak. It's the vocal version of the intentional bored look.
Some people have it at full volume and speed and that's just their voice. But a lot of people (and fewer men) it's not their real voice, but an affectation. We get to have opinions on people's affectations still, right?
The point is that vocal fry, even when it is an affectation and not just your normal speech, used to be seen as a marker of eloquence and high class. British actors, male ones, used vocal fry extensively. Sean Connery's James Bond uses it in the famous "Bond. James Bond" introduction [0], for just one example. Or listen to William F Buckley, an American high class conservative (buffoon that presented as an intellectual) using it to sound prim and proper [1].
It is an objective fact that hating vocal fry is just a fad, and that loving it has been a fad for at least as long. You are free to dislike it, but you can't pretend it should be hated on objective grounds, and it definitely doesn't convey boredom or low effort.
[1] https://youtu.be/5Tek9h3a5wQ?t=43m39s - in a debate where Buckley's arguing the "dignified" position that black people shouldn't receive more rights
It's not even close to the same thing. It is what's going on in my link that's annoying as hell where Buckley and Connery might meet some technical definition of it, it is currently being put on to get across that "I'm bored with everything", which is annoying as hell when being spoken to.
You're asking me to compare an actual speech pattern of actual people with actors portraying a stereotype...
Either way, it sounds like you hate a particular attitude which may be meant to convey a certain kind of ironic detachment, just like you would hate people rolling their eyes. You don't actually hate vocal fry, you just hate it when people use it to convey annoyance/boredom at you.
Unfortunately, you may end up associating vocal fry in general, which is simply a speech pattern, to that particular use of it. And this is a problem, since lots of people use vocal fry as a normal part of their speech, no different from their automatic choice of pronouncing certain vowels as short or long.
Vocal fry in the English language is historically associated with British men; it's curious to me that only when women adopted it did we start getting told to hate it.
Told to hate it? Please. I'm British and barely even know of the existence of Kardashian, much less how she speaks and what she's famous for.
My first experience with vocal fry was a Finnish woman at my job who would use it constantly. This was several years ago and I had no idea what vocal fry was until recently. All I knew was I found the way she talked annoying. I liked her, but I did not like the way she talked. I think the most annoying thing is that it's clear it's being done on purpose for some reason. I know she can talk normally and I know I can talk like her, so why is she choosing to talk like that?
Later there was a young guy at work who would drop into vocal fry a lot. I still didn't know what it was called but I still found it very annoying.
I don't know why I don't find men like Bertrand Russell annoying.
But all I know is nobody told me to hate anything. Even people that didn't like the woman I worked with never mentioned her voice.
> I think the most annoying thing is that it's clear it's being done on purpose for some reason. I know she can talk normally and I know I can talk like her, so why is she choosing to talk like that?
This is like complaining someone speaks with a certain accent. Sure, we can all change how we speak, but we speak and certain way and there is nothing wrong with it.
I didn't say there was anything wrong with it. I merely said I find it annoying. Am I not allowed to reflect on what I find annoying? And yes, I do find certain accents annoying too, but my feeling is it's much harder to change one's accent than it is to not do vocal fry. I can't change my accent at will, but I can certainly do vocal fry.
You can of course find anything annoying. But you said that it's annoying that people choose to do this, and you called speaking without vocal fry "speaking normally", implying that it's somehow wrong/abnormal and they should stop. Similarly, it's perfectly OK to find some accent annoying, but it's not OK to say that you wish people would stop using their accent and "speak normally".
And while of course you can do vocal fry or not, once you've established a pattern of speech, it's very hard to change. You can try speaking a whole day only with vocal fry and see how often you'll slip back to your regular speech pattern, and just how weird it will sound to you. Or try saying "aboot" instead of "about" for a whole day, if vocal fry sounds too annoying to you to try out (which, again, you're perfectly entitled to). Either way, the discomfort you'll feel trying to change your speech is exactly the same discomfort someone like your colleague would feel.
Throat singing is just a band-pass filter. Having a rich set of frequencies can be helpful, but it's unnecessary for producing the overtones. Throat singing and "whistle singing" are effectively the same technique, except that in throat singing a wider collection of overtones is selected for (not necessarily wider band, but wider "matching partials" to the fundamental frequency)
Are we talking about the same thing? I mean the Mongolian throat signing in that YouTube link, which has crazy low fundamentals (I have a deep bass voice and it's much lower than I can sing).
No, you aren't, and it isn't vocal fry. Overtone singing is a distinct technique in Tuvan throat singing, and comparing it to a bandpass filter is accurate — as a whole, Tuvan throat singing is a set of techniques designed to induce vocal sounds with extremely rich harmonics, which can then be modulated and selected for by shaping the mouth.
What you're thinking of is called "Kargyraa", a particular subset of Tuvan techniques that involves singing with the vocal cords as normal, but also tightening the voicebox such that your "false vocal cords" (some flaps somewhere in your throat) are struck at a frequency an octave below the sung note — for every full cycle your vocal cords complete, the false vocal cords complete half of 1. It creates a rich sound which can be useful for the "bandpass" technique, but is fundamentally something different.
Take this with a small grain of salt, I came to this technique through the modern beatboxing community who independently discovered it as the standard "throat bass" and only bothered researching the Tuvan equivalent a long time ago.
There is a bass singing technique called "subharmonics" that uses something similar (identical?) to vocal fry to create interference with a sung note for a similar effect.
A friend of mine would do very noticeable vocal fry at the ends of some sentences, when laughingly speaking light-heartedly and enthusiastically about something.
She's also an MIT PhD, and I don't recall any vocal fry when speaking seriously about science or some other topic.
Before I learned that vocal fry was a thing, I thought she might be code-switching to a regional or socioeconomic group accent from where she grew up in the US, or a mannerism that a particular friend group evolved in a more carefree time.
Her voice sounded nice, and a little unique. And you don't want to ask, and risk making someone self-conscious about how they sound or look when they're happy or laughing. Whatever is natural is best.
Worst part is once you learn what the Vocal Fry sounds like, you will start hear it literally everywhere. At best, it was interesting to recognize in the real world; at worst, it ruined some podcast hosts for me.
Why does it bother you? Probably only because you've been taught that you're supposed to hate it. There's nothing inherently wrong about vocal fry: there are human languages where vocal fry is an essential component of native speech.
> Probably only because you've been taught that you're supposed to hate it.
I don't think it has anything to do with some vague notion of "hate".
Some people simply find it to be a distracting phenomenon that can make it harder to understand what somebody else is saying, even when they like the speaker.
It can be used to great effect. This old song serves as a great example of vocal fry and also a great lesson on caring about it/getting aggravated by it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hx4gdlfamo
I’m never going to unhear the vocal fry in that song, which I had never noticed before. Your comment should have come with some sort of spoiler alert…haha. Unfashionable opinion (for my generation): I love(d) that song.
That sentiment is exactly why I chose this specific song, with reference to lyrics as well, and with no advance warning. If you are telling yourself to dislike something you previously liked, then I can see you're out of aces, should fold 'em, and walk away.
Try singing it like he does, fry and all. It's fun and sounds pretty good.
The hatred of vocal fry is just class-oriented bigotry. It's a variation on anti-AAVE.
Previously, uptick speech filled the need for hatred. But then it turned out in studies that uptick was perceived as more intelligent by later Gen Y and all of Gen Z.
I accidentally discovered vocal fry screams (in the context of metal vocals) a decade or so ago. Now that I sing lead in a cover band that does slightly more aggressive music I get to leverage them on a weekly basis; the diaphragm control and breath awareness that I've learned doing heavy vocals has improved my regular singing. I had no idea that talking in this register was so divisive.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 89.1 ms ] threadGo listen to Jeremy Irons or Alan Rickman.
https://youtu.be/Q0yL2GezneU?si=YfHHJXtVYWvqgFlD
Thanks for posting. Made my morning.
Some people have it at full volume and speed and that's just their voice. But a lot of people (and fewer men) it's not their real voice, but an affectation. We get to have opinions on people's affectations still, right?
It is an objective fact that hating vocal fry is just a fad, and that loving it has been a fad for at least as long. You are free to dislike it, but you can't pretend it should be hated on objective grounds, and it definitely doesn't convey boredom or low effort.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b15-P12gIf0&t=1m20s
[1] https://youtu.be/5Tek9h3a5wQ?t=43m39s - in a debate where Buckley's arguing the "dignified" position that black people shouldn't receive more rights
It's not even close to the same thing. It is what's going on in my link that's annoying as hell where Buckley and Connery might meet some technical definition of it, it is currently being put on to get across that "I'm bored with everything", which is annoying as hell when being spoken to.
Either way, it sounds like you hate a particular attitude which may be meant to convey a certain kind of ironic detachment, just like you would hate people rolling their eyes. You don't actually hate vocal fry, you just hate it when people use it to convey annoyance/boredom at you.
Unfortunately, you may end up associating vocal fry in general, which is simply a speech pattern, to that particular use of it. And this is a problem, since lots of people use vocal fry as a normal part of their speech, no different from their automatic choice of pronouncing certain vowels as short or long.
My first experience with vocal fry was a Finnish woman at my job who would use it constantly. This was several years ago and I had no idea what vocal fry was until recently. All I knew was I found the way she talked annoying. I liked her, but I did not like the way she talked. I think the most annoying thing is that it's clear it's being done on purpose for some reason. I know she can talk normally and I know I can talk like her, so why is she choosing to talk like that?
Later there was a young guy at work who would drop into vocal fry a lot. I still didn't know what it was called but I still found it very annoying.
I don't know why I don't find men like Bertrand Russell annoying.
But all I know is nobody told me to hate anything. Even people that didn't like the woman I worked with never mentioned her voice.
This is like complaining someone speaks with a certain accent. Sure, we can all change how we speak, but we speak and certain way and there is nothing wrong with it.
And while of course you can do vocal fry or not, once you've established a pattern of speech, it's very hard to change. You can try speaking a whole day only with vocal fry and see how often you'll slip back to your regular speech pattern, and just how weird it will sound to you. Or try saying "aboot" instead of "about" for a whole day, if vocal fry sounds too annoying to you to try out (which, again, you're perfectly entitled to). Either way, the discomfort you'll feel trying to change your speech is exactly the same discomfort someone like your colleague would feel.
What you're thinking of is called "Kargyraa", a particular subset of Tuvan techniques that involves singing with the vocal cords as normal, but also tightening the voicebox such that your "false vocal cords" (some flaps somewhere in your throat) are struck at a frequency an octave below the sung note — for every full cycle your vocal cords complete, the false vocal cords complete half of 1. It creates a rich sound which can be useful for the "bandpass" technique, but is fundamentally something different.
Take this with a small grain of salt, I came to this technique through the modern beatboxing community who independently discovered it as the standard "throat bass" and only bothered researching the Tuvan equivalent a long time ago.
There is a bass singing technique called "subharmonics" that uses something similar (identical?) to vocal fry to create interference with a sung note for a similar effect.
She's also an MIT PhD, and I don't recall any vocal fry when speaking seriously about science or some other topic.
Before I learned that vocal fry was a thing, I thought she might be code-switching to a regional or socioeconomic group accent from where she grew up in the US, or a mannerism that a particular friend group evolved in a more carefree time.
Her voice sounded nice, and a little unique. And you don't want to ask, and risk making someone self-conscious about how they sound or look when they're happy or laughing. Whatever is natural is best.
I don't think it has anything to do with some vague notion of "hate".
Some people simply find it to be a distracting phenomenon that can make it harder to understand what somebody else is saying, even when they like the speaker.
Try singing it like he does, fry and all. It's fun and sounds pretty good.
Previously, uptick speech filled the need for hatred. But then it turned out in studies that uptick was perceived as more intelligent by later Gen Y and all of Gen Z.
Agreed. Your PP is strangely very strongly invested in it going by the number of comments. I wonder why.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b15-P12gIf0&t=80s&pp=2AFQkAI...
[its bond/connery with the fry]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDfJn1kcQuU