Even though ciswomen do it, trans women should beware the “vocal fry”.
Both men and women, in fact all of us, do it sometimes. We allow our voices to dip down as low as they can go and produce a sound that sounds rough and uneven. Usually, this happens at the ends of sentences or at the end of multi-syllable words. This sound is known as ‘vocal fry’ or ‘creak’.
Producing voice at this lowest vocal register has become a popular vocal style amongst young women, made popular by Kim Kardashian and Britney Spears. It results from compression of the vocal folds for an extended time during the vibratory cycle, but the vocal folds are relatively loose and thick. That vocal fold position, combined with insufficient airflow (I call it “Lazy Voicing”) lowers the rate of vibration of the vocal folds and creates the crackling and popping sound of the voice as the vocal folds vibrate aperiodically.
There is some disagreement amongst voice professionals as to whether this type of vocal production is harmful. Cate Madill of the University of Sydney writes,
This type of vocal cord vibration results in increased collision force of the true vocal folds…This increase in force during vibration of the vocal folds can be traumatic and cause injury to the vocal folds if it occurs a lot – injuries such as laryngitis, vocal fold swelling, and vocal nodules, to name just a few.
Young women seem to have adopted this style of voicing for several reasons. It is perceived as a lowering of the vocal pitch, and even though the sound is uneven, it has come to be associated with power.
The reason I warn against adopting this vocal style for transwomen is that the lowering of the fundamental frequency may result in the voice being perceived by listeners as a more masculine voice. This idea is supported by the UCSF Transgender Care Guidelines, which reads:
Similarly, pitch floor (the bottom of the pitch range) and the proximity of the usual speaking pitch to this floor is thought to influence the perceived maleness of voice, rather than the speaking pitch alone.
In addition, a study in 2016 which looked at whether gender made a difference in how vocal fry affected listeners’ attitudes toward the speaker revealed that
both male and female speakers were found to be less intelligent, less educated, less feminine, more masculine, less confident, and more hesitant when using creaky voice phonation as compared to the modal register.
If you want to avoid the fry, you need to be mindful to maintain your average pitch and sustain your airflow all the way to the end of your utterance. Energy within the vocal signal carried by appropriately supported airflow is the key – you can’t afford to be lazy.