How Does Vocal Fry Work?
You’ve probably heard people complaining about vocal fry, and you’ve certainly heard it used in conversation, but what causes it? Lauren explains the science of fry and creak in this episode of BrainStuff.
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Hello BrainStuff! I’m Lauren, and today we’re going to talk about the human voice – specifically, vocal fry -- the vocal register that launched a thousand panicky trend pieces.
You’ve heard it in conversation, you’ve heard people complain about it, and you very likely use at least a little bit of it yourself. But how does it actually work? What’s happening inside your throat when you fry?
To explain this, we first need to consider how we humans make sound with our voices. So, imagine you’re saying something normal, like, “Let go of my pizza, Ted, or prepare to feel the hot iron of vengeance.”
When you begin to speak -- or sing, chant, or babble -- you relax your diaphragm to push air from your lungs up through your larynx and out of your mouth.
And on the way up, that air passes between your vocal folds, also known as your vocal cords. The vocal folds are two strips of membranous tissue that you can manipulate in a few ways to control the pitch and quality of your voice:
If you move your vocal folds together as the air from your lungs passes up through the slit between them (known as the glottis, by the way), it causes the folds to vibrate, like the reed in a clarinet or a saxophone. This vibration then resonates through the air in the cavities of your head to produce the fundamental sound of your voice.
Now, human beings have three main vocal registers: falsetto, modal, and fry.
The modal register is most commonly used in normal speaking voices, and it’s what I’m using now.
The falsetto register is the highest frequency register, and you’ve probably heard people use it when they talk to babies and pets, oooh, yes you have!
When you go into the falsetto register, you pull your vocal folds tight, allowing only the edges to vibrate, rather than the entire folds.
The lowest vocal register is the fry vocal register. You might have also heard people call it “creaky voice.”
What we would see during the use of vocal fry is that the vocal cords are pressed together but not stretched longitudinally, which creates a loosely closed glottis gap. Breath “bubbles” out between the slackened folds, creating pulses as the vocal cords “rattle” against each other.
You can see the same kind of chaotic rattling happen with a guitar string if you tune your instrument low enough!
In recent years, vocal fry has been a huge subject of debate. Is it super annoying? Or is it super annoying when people criticize it?
If you want to learn more about all that, you can check out my compatriot Cristen Conger’s excellent Stuff Mom Never Told You video on the subject, by clicking here. In which I have a cameo.
But in short, vocal fry is nothing to panic about, culturally speaking. Studies show that it’s a fairly common feature of human speech across demographics, used most often right at the end of sentences or phrases.
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