Ugh, the bananas got everywhere.
I just know the catapult place is gonna hit
me with a cleaning fee.
Oh, 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.
So, do you use vocal fry?
Have you been criticized for it?
Let us know in the comments!
If you’d like to learn more about vocal
fry, remember to check out these excellent
episodes of Stuff Mom Never Told You.
And you can learn more about the human body
(and the vibrations it makes) over at HowStuffWorks.com!
