Who has the WORST "vocal fry"? HINT: It's not a Kardasian sister,

[pnwmom]

and it's not Christine Blasey Ford, who was mocked for her "vocal fry" when she was holding back tears, giving her emotional testimony before the Senate.

It's Donald John Trump, at any of his rallies, shouting and gurgling away.



If you haven't noticed this before, just listen to him at any rally. And remember HIM, and the pass he always gets, the next time someone in the media talks about the "problem" of women with vocal fry.

[AJT]

1. I have never heard the term 'vocal fry'. What is that?

[pnwmom]

3. More on it here:

http://time.com/5006345/what-is-vocal-fry/

Male vocal fry vs female vocal fry

Women aren’t the only ones who use vocal fry. In a forthcoming study of 18- to 22-year-olds, researchers at Centenary College of Louisiana found that young men not only fry, but they do so more than young women. “Our data showed that men spend about 25% of their time speaking using fry, while women use it about 10% of the time,” says Jessica Alexander, an assistant professor of psychology at the college.

While men were the more frequent fryers, they employed the speech habit differently than women. “Men were dropping down into that lower register on and off throughout their utterances, while women were using it mostly at the end of utterances,” Alexander says.

Men typically have lower overall pitch than women, she says, so their voices descend into fry more easily. “Women have to dip further into their range to go into fry, so we may pick up on it more when women do it,” she adds.


The way some young women are using vocal fry may sound less natural or more pronounced, Klofstad says. “We tend to view behaviors that aren’t normal as untrustworthy,” he says. That may explain the negative bias against women fryers that his research turned up.

And this looks interesting but it's behind a paywall, so I can't read it:

https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2018/10/06/womens-voices-are-judged-more-harshly-than-mens

[dawg day]

4. Progressive Insurance commercial has a good example

The sister on the exercycle says, "Cycling is my passion.'
Total vocal fry.

"I am too existentially exhausted to care." <G>

[nolabear]

5. Nails on a blackboard.

I hate Flo anyway but this makes my ears curl up and weep.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

2. I've reached the point where I can't listen to him at all, so I can't really comment on that -

He does have a really unpleasant voice. Vocal fry is a sort of voice production that can result from a pathology like dysphonia, or when a person tries to speak (or sing) in a register that's unnaturally low for them, and the result is a sort of gravely or grating sound. The reason women are more often criticized for it is probably that it's more noticeable in women's voices; and a recent trend has been identified in which some young women deliberately try for a lower pitch to sound more authoritative, but the result is that unpleasant fry. Maybe that's what Trump is trying to do, too, because his natural speaking voice is rather high-pitched and nasal - could be that he's trying for a lower, more "manly" sound.

It's not working.