Last week "This American Life" featured a short segment on vocal fry or creaky voice, focused specifically on how some listeners vehemently criticize the women reporters on NPR for the creak in their voices. (Thanks for the heads-up, Eric!) It is Act Two, "Freedom Fries" (8.5 minutes). I'm struck by the vitriol in the listener comments. And as Ira Glass points out, this is just the latest complaint about younger women's voices on the radio. If you want to hear Bob Garfield get cranky about creaky voice, check out this 2013 Lexicon Valley podcast, "Do You Creak?" The podcast also provides more details about some of the more empirical studies of creaky voice.
Have you noticed creaky voice in your own speech or in others? Have you also had a strong reaction or has this not been on your radar? (Had you ever noticed it in Ira Glass's voice before?) I'm curious to hear your thoughts about the ideologies at play here in condemning this linguistic feature (which is not as new as many people think it is) as "annoying" and/or in hearing it as "professional."
For more information, here is the piece from Science Magazine, and here's the abstract of the article from the Journal of Voice. And here's a 2014 article in The Atlantic about a study that suggested vocal fry might hurt women's job prospects.
The first thing that comes to mind while listening to this is the fact that Ira Glass does something that’s at least similar all the time. And, as he says, nobody’s ever mentioned him while complaining about creaky voice. So, as the conversation suggests, this is clearly yet another way to complain about an aspect of the speech patterns of young people in general and young women in particular. An interesting possibility might be a comparison of this vocal creaking with hyper-masculinized vocal gruff – something like either Clint Eastwood characters might’ve spoken or too-many-cigarette singers like Tom Waits might be associated with (in actual speech, not spoken word performances). Both might actually work comparably. It seems like their growliest moments raise in intonation, though they can occur early in utterances too, unlike Ira Glass’s description of creak. The Do you feel lucky, punk – well, do ya? certainly raises intonation on the latter words and lays on the creak (or growl) pretty heavily. For men, this is considered the height of postured masculinity though – empowerment and a self-certain threat of violence – which might be part of the reason for the vehement response to women creaking. Rather like the Part 1 troll who hounded his target because of her self-assuredness, the performance of a husky voice by a young woman might just be too reminiscent of self-empowerment for some misogynists to bear.
ReplyDeleteThe whole episode’s focus on the radically aggressive pragmatics of Internet language is really worth discussing too. It is a contact zone with no actual contact – a space devoid of empathy except for totally performed sentimentality.