Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: I know they like had to take the catapult back
Speaker 1: to the rental place and she didn't even remember to
Speaker 1: put the blood back and the freezer. Oh oh, hello
Speaker 1: brain stuff. I'm Christian Sagar, and today we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about the human voice, specifically the much discussed and
Speaker 1: much reviled register of vocal fry. You've heard it, You've
Speaker 1: heard people complain about it, and you're very likely used
Speaker 1: to at least a little bit of yourself. I I'm
Speaker 1: particularly guilty of it. You might have heard it in
Speaker 1: previous episodes of this, But how does it actually work?
Speaker 1: What is happening inside your throat when you fry? Human
Speaker 1: beings have three main vocal registers, falsetto, modal, and vocal fry.
Speaker 1: In addition to being able to whistle. The modal register
Speaker 1: is what you probably think of when you imagine somebody's
Speaker 1: normal speaking voice. When you speak in the modal register,
Speaker 1: you use your diaphragm to push air from your lungs
Speaker 1: up through your larynx and out your mouth. But on
Speaker 1: the way up that air meets your vocal folds, also
Speaker 1: known as your vocal chords. The vocal folds are two
Speaker 1: pieces of membraneous tissue that you can manipulate in several ways.
Speaker 1: You can move them together and apart, and you can draw,
Speaker 1: taught or relax them all to control the pitch and
Speaker 1: quality of your voice. As the air from your lungs
Speaker 1: passes up through the slit between your vocal folds, called
Speaker 1: the glottis, it causes the folds to vibrate like the
Speaker 1: red and a clarinet or a saxophone. This vibration then
Speaker 1: resonates through the cavities in your head to produce the
Speaker 1: fundamental sound of your voice. The falsetto register is the
Speaker 1: highest frequency register, and I'll try to do it. You've
Speaker 1: probably we heard people use it when they talk to
Speaker 1: babies and pets. Oh, yes, you have it. That's the
Speaker 1: best I can do. In the falsetto register, you pull
Speaker 1: your vocal folds tight, allowing only the edges to vibrate
Speaker 1: rather than the whole folds. But the lowest vocal register
Speaker 1: is the vocal fry register, and you might know it
Speaker 1: as creaky voice. A characteristic feature of this type of
Speaker 1: phonation is an irregular popping sound, like a big basket
Speaker 1: of breaded calamari rings plopping down into a deep fryer.
Speaker 1: So what causes the creaky sound of vocal fry and
Speaker 1: how is it different from the modal register. Well, when
Speaker 1: people talk about vocal fry, they're often combining a few
Speaker 1: different types of a typical sound production, primarily slower vibration
Speaker 1: and irregular or a periodic vibration. Slower vibration is what
Speaker 1: might properly be called creaky voice. This is when you
Speaker 1: use your vocal folds to create a sound that is
Speaker 1: so low it is not perceived as a single pitched tone,
Speaker 1: but as a rapid series of individual pulses. All sound
Speaker 1: produced by the voice is made of a rapid series
Speaker 1: of pulses, with faster vibrations leading to higher pitched sounds
Speaker 1: and lower vibrations leading to lower pitches. However, there is
Speaker 1: a point, let's say around seventy hurts, where the pitch
Speaker 1: is so low we no longer perceive it as a
Speaker 1: single continuous note, but instead start to hear each of
Speaker 1: the individual pulses. The irregular or a periodic vibration is
Speaker 1: another part of the vocal fry phonation, and this is
Speaker 1: what some would consider vocal fry proper. This simply means
Speaker 1: that the pulses don't occur at a steady rhythm, and
Speaker 1: thus there is a somewhat noisy, chaotic, or apparently random,
Speaker 1: popping sound within the voice. According to linguist Mark Lieberman,
Speaker 1: this random or chaotic vibration is a normal part of
Speaker 1: physical systems like the muscles that create human speech. If
Speaker 1: we were to look inside your larynx, what we would
Speaker 1: probably see during vocal fry is that the vocal cords
Speaker 1: are pressed together but not stretched longitudinally, creating a loosely
Speaker 1: closed glottis where breath can bubble out between the slackened
Speaker 1: vocal chords, creating pulses as the vocal cords rattle. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like using your vocal cords in the same
Speaker 1: way you use somebody's skin when you make a motor
Speaker 1: boat sound on their stomach. In recent years, vocal fry
Speaker 1: has been a huge subject of debate. Is it super annoying? Well,
Speaker 1: let me tell you. I will say that vocal fry
Speaker 1: is nothing to panic about. Studies show that it is
Speaker 1: a fairly common feature of human speech, used most often
Speaker 1: right at the end of sentences or phrases. It's sort
Speaker 1: of the opposite of up talk, where you raise your
Speaker 1: pitch at the end of phrases as if everything were
Speaker 1: a question. Some studies have shown that people are more
Speaker 1: likely to use vocal fry in regular speech than in
Speaker 1: sustained vowel production tests, meaning that it's likely part of
Speaker 1: our learned speech patterns rather than widespread changes in laryngeal
Speaker 1: health and anatomy. Check out the brainstuff channel on YouTube,
Speaker 1: and for more on this and thousands of other topics,
Speaker 1: visit how stuff works dot com.