【AI前沿】Men use "vocal fry" more than women, counter to stereotype

oh, baby, babyMen use “vocal fry” more than women, counter to stereotypeStudy suggests “the bias is real but socially constructed, rather than grounded in how women actually sound.”Jennifer Ouellette–May 14, 2026 5:32 pm|84Britney Spears became the poster child for vocal fry with her 1998 song “Hit Me Baby (One More Time)“Credit:YouTune/Britney SpearsBritney Spears became the poster child for vocal fry with her 1998 song “Hit Me Baby (One More Time)“Credit:YouTune/Britney SpearsText settingsStory textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidthStandardWideLinksStandardOrange Subscribers onlyLearn moreMinimize to navVocal fry, aka “creaky voice,” is a distinctive drop in pitch, usually at the end of sentences, associated with the speech patterns of young women in particular. Britney Spears is the go-to example of the trend, having famously used it in her 1998 smash hit, “Hit Me Baby (One More Time),” and she’s far from the only one.But what if that popular gender-based stereotype is wrong? Jeanne Brown, a graduate student at McGill University, has found that vocal fry is actually more common in men than women, detailing her experimental findings in a talk atthis week’s meetingof the Acoustical Society of America in Philadelphia. Per Brown, we perceive it as more prominent in young women.Vocal fry isthe lowestof the human vocal registers, the others being the modal and falsetto registers, as well as the whistle register. It’s caused when the vocal cords slacken, leading to irregular vibration and an audible cracking or rattling sound as air is released in spurts. Vocal fry is characterized by very low fundamental frequencies of around 70 Hz. (The lowest end of the range of human hearing is 20 Hz.)Ten years ago, Ireportedon an experiment by John Nix, a voice professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio, who concluded that singers like Spears, Katy Perry, and Lady Gaga use vocal fry in pop music because it enhances expressiveness. “Unamplified styles, such as classical music, tend to disguise effort and express emotion in more subtle ways,” Nix told me at the time. “Amplified styles, such as popular music, tend to display effort as something genuine, intimate, raw, exciting, and emotional. Fry may be one way to communicate such effort, or honest, raw emotions.” Nor is vocal fry exclusively used by female singers: Justin Bieber,Tim Storms(who holds the world record for lowest note produced by a human), and gospel bassists like Mike Holcomb have also used it.Thegrowing prevalenceof vocal fry in speech started making headlines in the 2010s, beginning witha studyconcluding that US women in California used vocal fry significantly more frequently than US men. Another2014 studyhad similar findings: women used vocal fry four times more often than men. It’s been documentedin Oregonand the Midwest, too, not just California. Yetanother studyfound that women who employ vocal fry during job interviews are perceived more negatively than men who do so. (Anecdotally, Ira Glass, host ofThis American Life,has saidhe frequently uses fry in his podcasts and has never received a single complaint, yet often gets hate mail complaining about female staffers’ voices.)It’s pitch, not genderThere has been some criticism of the methodologies used in such studies, but nonetheless, the narrative has taken hold. “Linguists have highlighted this as a case of linguistic discrimination, in which people are criticizing young women’s voices as a proxy for direct discrimination against this group,” Brown said during a media briefing. She decided to run her own experiments to test whether there really is a strong gender bias for vocal fry.Spectrogram of vocal fry, aka creaky voice.Credit: Jeanne BrownSpectrogram of vocal fry, aka creaky voice.Credit:

      Jeanne BrownBrown collected speech examples of 49 Canadians from online sources and analyzed the samples using the telltale acoustic markers of vocal fry, such as low and/or irregular pitch, spectral tilt (differences in amplitude between the first and second harmonics), and harmonics-to-noise ratios. “Creaky voice is more associated with low-frequency noise, whereas something like breathiness is related to high-frequency noise,” said Brown.The results: Not only did men use vocal fry more than women, but the use of creaky voice increased with the speaker’s age. So why do we associate vocal fry so much with young women? Brown conducted a second experiment. She recorded her voice using vocal fry and then manipulated the recordings so the level of fry varied and the speech was gender-ambiguous. Then she recruited 40 subjects, all of whom received training to accurately identify creaky voices and provide less subjective ratings. The subjects would listen to short notes, each paired with an image of either a man or a woman, and then rate the degree of vocal fry in those recordings.Brown found a reverse acoustic bias: The primary marker for identifyin