Vocal Fry. How annoying.

Today I learned about vocal fry. What is vocal fry? It's that creaky voice that some women use. I don't know why.

If that doesn't explain well enough what vocal fry is, then just watch the following video and I think you'll understand it real quick.

As you can hear, Vocal Fry is a phenomenon whereby it sounds like someone's vocal cords have been fried (in hot oil) when they speak. 

I had heard vocal fry before (along with uptalk) but I never knew there was a name for it, or that anyone noticed it other than me. 

Now earlier today I was with a certain woman who I know, a woman who has a history of lying, and I noticed that when she was doing her lying she had some vocal fry going on. 

Now I've been reading about the chakras lately, and I noticed that the throat chakra is associated with speaking the truth, and I saw how this woman was lying and she puts on this gravely low quality to her voice when she's doing her lying, so I googled it - creaky voice lying. I wanted to see if anyone else noticed a correlation between people lying and using the creaky voice (vocal fry).

Now I didn't find anything right away about whether or not people who do vocal fry are lying, but one person who I think was lying publicly was using vocal fry. In the Kavanaugh hearings (the supreme court guy), there was that college professor who said Kavanaugh raped her in college. Now I didn't believe the woman and I can't say she was lying or not, but she was also doing the vocal fry thing. And that's what I thought of today when I observed the woman I know doing the vocal fry. 

I'd like to know if she always talks with the creaky vocal fry voice. I can't find many other videos of her speaking besides the recent ones related to Kavanaugh. 

So I don't know if it's totally associated with lying. I think it might be associated with being a phony. Lots of the young women who use this vocal affect seem kind of phony to me.

I found one scholarly type of paper that discusses the vocal fry used by Lady Gaga. The author mentions what he thinks is the "core social meaning" of creaky voice. Some suggestions are made in that vocal fry represents “low emotional energy”. Another suggestion is that “suppressed emotion” is the message sent by using vocal fry.

I don't know, but I think that some women who do this vocal fry thing are simply mimicing famous and powerful women. I think it can be a way to convey fake humility, and it sounds really inauthentic to me no matter who does it.

In the conclusion of that article, the author had this to say about Lady Gaga's use of vocal fry creaking:

Ultimately, creaky voice’s core meaning of “low emotional energy” and the discourse contexts in which it occurs allows Lady Gaga to construct a “candid loser” persona to appeal to her fan base.

Earlier in the article he had mentioned that Lady Gaga maintains a "perpetual underdog" status in the music industry. I agree. 

Now I wish to talk about the woman earlier who I know to be a liar and who was using vocal fry. I think this creaky voice phenomenon does sort of convey a low energy affect which is useful for a person who wants to give a false impression and not seem like she's driving the point too strongly. It's kind of like a "humble brag" way of talking, and I think women use it to make a point that they want to seem very relaxed and unenthused about (in an inauthentic way). 

But what do I know?

I searched for some link to lying with vocal fry, and I think my liar female friend might be the only association with that. Googling for a while yielded no results associatiing vocal fry with lying.

But I did find an interesting article titled, "Keep an eye on vocal fry – it’s all about power, status and gender" and it mentions the Kardashians (I guess the main one, Kanye's lady, does vocal frying).

And here's something interesting from that same article:

In my (unpublished) PhD, undertaken at the University of Sydney, women with croaky voices were perceived as being more neurotic than men with croaky voices. Women who had clear voices were perceived as being less neurotic than men with clear voices.

So neuroticism? Well here's an abstract that links neuroticism to lying. I don't have anything more substantial at this time. Sorry. There's actually a decent amount of pages in Google linking neuroticism to lying. This article I've written is just a lesiurely article without much rigor.

I do think the creaky voice thing is annoying and boy would I like to see it go away, but I do like that for at least one person I know, it seems like an indicator that she's lying.

Oh, and finally, in a study that is related to young women in the labor market, the abstract of it says (sorry, I didn't read the whole thing):

Relative to a normal speaking voice, young adult female voices exhibiting vocal fry are perceived as less competent, less educated, less trustworthy, less attractive, and less hirable. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0097506

Less trustworthy. It's probably good that people don't think people who vocal fry come across as trustworthy, because they're putting on a contrived affect.