![]() On The Mickey Mouse Club, where she got her start, she sang the Staple Singers’s “I’ll Take You There,” in her natural contralto (before her future boyfriend and fellow Mouseketeer Justin Timberlake emerged, rapping, inexplicably, in patois). On Star Search, she belted “Love Can Build a Bridge” in a preternaturally deep voice despite her tiny ten-year-old frame. ![]() Early tapes of Britney sound almost completely different. On “…Baby One More Time” Britney Spears croaked out her first words, “Oh baby, baby,” her light Louisiana drawl twisting “baby” into “Bay-bay.” Her voice is thin, an effect heightened by the track’s hyper-compressed vocals, and dips in and out of vocal fry, punctuating her high-pitched, nasal voice with a low flutter in the beginning and end of her tones.įans and critics alike wondered if this voice was put on. I noticed the way the voice said ‘NOW’ on the radio clearly glottal fry.” In fact, it seemed that these concerned citizens condemned vocal fry because it linked today’s teenage girls with a new wave of valley-girl celebrities: Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, and, most infamously, Britney Spears. Abdelli-Beruh noted: “My son, who is a teenager, listens to 92.3 NOW in NYC. She said, in an interview with MSNBC, “Anecdotally, vocal fry is judged to be annoying by those who are not as young as the college students we tested.” Though Abdelli-Beruh and her critics may have disagreed about the effects of vocal fry, they agreed about the trend’s cause: pop music. Though critics were quick to condemn vocal fry, Abdelli-Beruh withheld judgment. These tics make women sound like “an empty-headed clotheshorse for whom the mall represents the height of culture.” Combined with “uptalk” and filler words, vocal fry made women easier to dismiss, less likely to get jobs, and unable to command respect.Īccording to Hofstra fine arts professor emerita Laurie Fendrich, vocal fry and the “Valley Girl lift,” “reveals an unexplainable lack of confidence in one’s opinions and a radical uncertainty about one’s place in the world.” Although uptalk and vocal fry are different sounds, impossible to use at the same time, Fendrich links them together-to her, they are equally annoying. According to the over-forty pundits that pumped out these scaremongering op-eds, vocal fry was annoying, unlistenable, and maybe even damaging to the vocal cords. Yet this finding was enough to unleash a torrent of think pieces about this apparently dangerous teen trend. Abdelli-Beruh found that two-thirds of the women she tested used vocal fry, a slightly larger number than she thought. She gathered thirty-four college girls to read aloud into a mic, and then assessed when and how long they slipped vocal fry into their sentences. ![]() She, along with some other speech psychologists, decided to investigate. Abdelli-Beruh noticed that her students were speaking with “vocal fry,” a raspy, deep tone caused by the slow fluttering of the vocal cords. In 2011, Nassima Abdelli-Beruh, a speech psychologist at Long Island University, conducted a study on the way teen girls talked.
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