Short and cheap advice I can offer (gleaned from a few years of voice lessons, the standard kind for classical singing):
1. Make sure you're speaking with good support from your diaphragm, as you may have learned if you ever participated in a school or church choir. I find that sitting up straight like I'm back in choir helps me get into the right frame of mind.
2. Say "Mm-hm" like you're brightly agreeing with a boss or adviser you want to please. (You can even roughly locate the second pitch on a piano to remember about how high it is in your voice.) Aim to speak roughly around the pitch of the second syllable ("hm").
3. If in doubt, listen to a few interviews on YouTube with classically trained tenors or baritones and just fake speaking like them around the house until you arrive at something that feels like a very well supported version of your own voice.
I do the soprano/female version of this when I'm speaking in public, and it helps a lot. Since vocal fry is often associated with younger speakers, it also helped me feel like I sounded more mature back when I was still worried about sounding too young in professional contexts.
I love when Jesse does your #2 suggestion about the Mm-hm with the second syllable pitched up. He does this sometimes when Katie describes some unbelievably wack thing someone said or did, and it cracks me up every time. IтАЩve incorporated it into my own repertoire.
As a Millennial with vocal fry, I don't mind it! No criticism intended. :-) But I do think knowing how to lose it when you want to can be valuable for social settings where vocal fry is judged negatively.
I did a little bit of it years ago and I really helped me feel more confident. It's not for everybody, though. Sometimes a person's voice can change naturally as they age, too.
Mmm, you sound fine to me. I don't know if complaints about vocal fry are somehow misogynistic/homophobic, or if it's like cilantro, some people just can't tolerate it for some other reason.
The reason people don't like it is that it is an affectation. Some people naturally have a husky voice, sometimes called a "whiskey voice". Most people do not have this.
Years ( decades!) ago, young women began speaking with vocal fry. The notion was that it conferred gravitas along with kind of a detached intellectual quality.
Over the years, NPR men started doing it too. It often goes hand in hand with up talk.
To many listeners, it comes off as the affectation of a young person.
My voice absolutely isnтАЩt an affectation. IтАЩd like to learn to speak in an affected way so it wonтАЩt distract people as much, but for better or worse, this is just how I sound and have sounded.
It's not always an affectation. Sometimes it's more to do with breathing disorders and speaking from the chest rather than the diaphragm. With Trace it definitely sounds like this, and this puts his voice under strain. Seeing a voice therapist or coach would probably help him a lot.
You're absolutely right that there's an element of bigotry underpinning the norms of what is considered "proper" speech. Uptalk, filler words, stutters, vocal fry, lisps, certain regional dilects, and so on began to be maligned due to their association with certain groups (women, black people, gay people, disabled people, lower income people, etc.) The tricky thing about sociological phenomena like this is that they're often deeply embedded in our psychology, so shifting these norms takes patience and time. Granted, prejudice is not the only reason for these "rules," but it's a contributing factor.
I will note as an aside that vocal fry is the only quirk of the bunch I listed with potential physical drawbacks. It's unlikely that it causes any kind of long-term damage, but it does wear your voice out faster and make your hoarse more easily if you have to talk for long periods of time. For instance, it could cause problems for a professor expected to give lectures, or a singer who performs a lot.
Yeah, it's something I briefly looked into at one point and will probably take a closer look at down the line. You're not wrong.
Short and cheap advice I can offer (gleaned from a few years of voice lessons, the standard kind for classical singing):
1. Make sure you're speaking with good support from your diaphragm, as you may have learned if you ever participated in a school or church choir. I find that sitting up straight like I'm back in choir helps me get into the right frame of mind.
2. Say "Mm-hm" like you're brightly agreeing with a boss or adviser you want to please. (You can even roughly locate the second pitch on a piano to remember about how high it is in your voice.) Aim to speak roughly around the pitch of the second syllable ("hm").
3. If in doubt, listen to a few interviews on YouTube with classically trained tenors or baritones and just fake speaking like them around the house until you arrive at something that feels like a very well supported version of your own voice.
I do the soprano/female version of this when I'm speaking in public, and it helps a lot. Since vocal fry is often associated with younger speakers, it also helped me feel like I sounded more mature back when I was still worried about sounding too young in professional contexts.
I love when Jesse does your #2 suggestion about the Mm-hm with the second syllable pitched up. He does this sometimes when Katie describes some unbelievably wack thing someone said or did, and it cracks me up every time. IтАЩve incorporated it into my own repertoire.
As a Millennial with vocal fry, I don't mind it! No criticism intended. :-) But I do think knowing how to lose it when you want to can be valuable for social settings where vocal fry is judged negatively.
I did a little bit of it years ago and I really helped me feel more confident. It's not for everybody, though. Sometimes a person's voice can change naturally as they age, too.
Your voice is distinctive and not at all grating to me. Just another opinionтАж
Mmm, you sound fine to me. I don't know if complaints about vocal fry are somehow misogynistic/homophobic, or if it's like cilantro, some people just can't tolerate it for some other reason.
The reason people don't like it is that it is an affectation. Some people naturally have a husky voice, sometimes called a "whiskey voice". Most people do not have this.
Years ( decades!) ago, young women began speaking with vocal fry. The notion was that it conferred gravitas along with kind of a detached intellectual quality.
Over the years, NPR men started doing it too. It often goes hand in hand with up talk.
To many listeners, it comes off as the affectation of a young person.
My voice absolutely isnтАЩt an affectation. IтАЩd like to learn to speak in an affected way so it wonтАЩt distract people as much, but for better or worse, this is just how I sound and have sounded.
It's not always an affectation. Sometimes it's more to do with breathing disorders and speaking from the chest rather than the diaphragm. With Trace it definitely sounds like this, and this puts his voice under strain. Seeing a voice therapist or coach would probably help him a lot.
People with misophonia struggle with this and it has nothing to do with misogyny or homophobia.
You're absolutely right that there's an element of bigotry underpinning the norms of what is considered "proper" speech. Uptalk, filler words, stutters, vocal fry, lisps, certain regional dilects, and so on began to be maligned due to their association with certain groups (women, black people, gay people, disabled people, lower income people, etc.) The tricky thing about sociological phenomena like this is that they're often deeply embedded in our psychology, so shifting these norms takes patience and time. Granted, prejudice is not the only reason for these "rules," but it's a contributing factor.
I will note as an aside that vocal fry is the only quirk of the bunch I listed with potential physical drawbacks. It's unlikely that it causes any kind of long-term damage, but it does wear your voice out faster and make your hoarse more easily if you have to talk for long periods of time. For instance, it could cause problems for a professor expected to give lectures, or a singer who performs a lot.