Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Oh my god, I know they like had to take the catapult back to the rental place and she didn't even remember to put the blood back and the freezer. Oh oh, hello brain stuff. I'm Christian Sagar, and today we're going to talk about the human voice, specifically the much discussed and much reviled register of vocal fry. You've heard it, You've heard people complain about it, and you're very likely used to at least a little bit of yourself. I I'm
particularly guilty of it. You might have heard it in previous episodes of this, But how does it actually work? What is happening inside your throat when you fry? Human beings have three main vocal registers, falsetto, modal, and vocal fry. In addition to being able to whistle. The modal register is what you probably think of when you imagine somebody's normal speaking voice. When you speak in the modal register, you use your diaphragm to push air from your lungs
up through your larynx and out your mouth. But on the way up that air meets your vocal folds, also known as your vocal chords. The vocal folds are two pieces of membraneous tissue that you can manipulate in several ways. You can move them together and apart, and you can draw, taught or relax them all to control the pitch and quality of your voice. As the air from your lungs passes up through the slit between your vocal folds, called the glottis, it causes the folds to vibrate like the
red and a clarinet or a saxophone. This vibration then resonates through the cavities in your head to produce the fundamental sound of your voice. The falsetto register is the highest frequency register, and I'll try to do it. You've probably we heard people use it when they talk to babies and pets. Oh, yes, you have it. That's the best I can do. In the falsetto register, you pull your vocal folds tight, allowing only the edges to vibrate
rather than the whole folds. But the lowest vocal register is the vocal fry register, and you might know it as creaky voice. A characteristic feature of this type of phonation is an irregular popping sound, like a big basket of breaded calamari rings plopping down into a deep fryer. So what causes the creaky sound of vocal fry and
how is it different from the modal register. Well, when people talk about vocal fry, they're often combining a few different types of a typical sound production, primarily slower vibration and irregular or a periodic vibration. Slower vibration is what might properly be called creaky voice. This is when you use your vocal folds to create a sound that is so low it is not perceived as a single pitched tone,
but as a rapid series of individual pulses. All sound produced by the voice is made of a rapid series of pulses, with faster vibrations leading to higher pitched sounds and lower vibrations leading to lower pitches. However, there is a point, let's say around seventy hurts, where the pitch is so low we no longer perceive it as a single continuous note, but instead start to hear each of
the individual pulses. The irregular or a periodic vibration is another part of the vocal fry phonation, and this is what some would consider vocal fry proper. This simply means that the pulses don't occur at a steady rhythm, and thus there is a somewhat noisy, chaotic, or apparently random, popping sound within the voice. According to linguist Mark Lieberman, this random or chaotic vibration is a normal part of
physical systems like the muscles that create human speech. If we were to look inside your larynx, what we would probably see during vocal fry is that the vocal cords are pressed together but not stretched longitudinally, creating a loosely closed glottis where breath can bubble out between the slackened vocal chords, creating pulses as the vocal cords rattle. It's kind of like using your vocal cords in the same way you use somebody's skin when you make a motor
boat sound on their stomach. In recent years, vocal fry has been a huge subject of debate. Is it super annoying? Well, let me tell you. I will say that vocal fry is nothing to panic about. Studies show that it is a fairly common feature of human speech, used most often right at the end of sentences or phrases. It's sort of the opposite of up talk, where you raise your pitch at the end of phrases as if everything were
a question. Some studies have shown that people are more likely to use vocal fry in regular speech than in sustained vowel production tests, meaning that it's likely part of our learned speech patterns rather than widespread changes in laryngeal health and anatomy. Check out the brainstuff channel on YouTube, and for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.