This Is the Voice
Page 16
Hollywood also played a critical role. Movies of the mid-1940s (reflecting women’s wartime liberation from the home) were suddenly filled with fast-talking, wisecracking dames27—female characters who, in the pitch, pace, and content of their speech, could hold their own in verbal jousts with their male costars (Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby). Lauren Bacall was a nineteen-year-old former model who made her screen debut in the 1944 film To Have and Have Not and instantly became famous for speaking in deep, bassoon-like tones never before heard in a leading lady. In her 1978 memoir, By Myself, Bacall revealed that this was not her natural pitch: she trained her voice for the role by reading aloud in a low, loud voice, for hours on end.28 She did this at the urging of the film’s director, Howard Hawks, who hoped to create with Bacall’s character a vision of the newly liberated woman, one whose “masculine” vocal pitch and assertive attitude only enhanced her erotic appeal—“a girl,” as Hawks later said, “who is insolent, as insolent as Bogart, who insults people, who grins when she does it, and people like it.”29
People did like it. A huge star of the 1940s, Bacall became a leading role model for feminists of the 1970s, including Germaine Greer, who extolled the empowering message conveyed by the actress’s deep voice and badass bearing. But Greer also lamented what happened to Bacall’s career when the war ended and movies began to reflect a society in which, as Greer put it, “women were back in the bedroom and the kitchen, working on the baby boom.” Bacall’s career foundered in the 1950s as movie directors began casting actresses with voices whose pitch and timbre communicated something very different to Bacall’s “insolent” and sexually assertive characters of the 1940s. Even Hawks capitulated to the new postwar zeitgeist: his “next starring ladies,” Greer wrote, “would be Marilyn Monroe and Joan Collins in the cinch-waisted, pointy-breasted, simpering 1950s.”30 According to Gloria Steinem, another leading feminist, these “simpering” actresses set a dangerous example for women seeking equal pay and equal rights with men. In a 1981 essay in Ms. magazine, she warned: “A childlike or ‘feminine’ vocal style becomes a drawback when women try for any adult or powerful role.”31
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There is abundant evidence that the female voice, no matter how it’s pitched, is a drawback in Western societies. The classical scholar and feminist Mary Beard has traced how women’s voices have been systematically silenced since antiquity. She begins her book Women & Power (2017) with a scene from Homer’s Odyssey, when Penelope, wife to the absent wanderer Odysseus, asks a ballad singer performing for a large group of her suitors to play a less lugubrious number. Her son, Telemachus, barks at her: “Mother, go back up into your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff… speech will be the business of men.”32 Telemachus uses the term muthos for “speech,” which in this context specifically refers to authoritative public speech, “not,” Beard adds sardonically, “the kind of chatting, prattling or gossip” that women were believed to be solely capable of. Ancient attitudes to consigning female voices to the domestic sphere have changed less than you might expect (especially if you’re male). Today, when women have made considerable strides in the corporate, professional, and political worlds, their voices continue to be shut down, or blandly appropriated by men. Beard reprints a cartoon from the satirical magazine Punch in which a CEO addresses five corporate underlings, only one of whom is a woman. “That’s an excellent suggestion, Miss Triggs,” the CEO says. “Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it.” The cartoon is thirty years old, but many women I know, young and old, find it a little too accurate to be funny.
When men are not blithely ventriloquizing ideas stated moments earlier by the women in their midst, they are speaking over them. In 2017, researchers at the Pritzker School of Law at Northwestern University studied transcripts of U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments going back fifteen years. Male justices and male lawyers “interrupt the female justices approximately three times as often as they interrupt each other.”33 Recently, the male tendency for oblivious, blowhard-like interruption and holding-forth has been called “mansplaining,” a term inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s viral essay, Men Explain Things to Me (2014), which begins with her tale of being lectured to by a wealthy alpha male about a book on Eadweard Muybridge.34 Solnit is too nonplussed to stop the man and explain that the book he is talking about was written by her. Solnit’s friend, Sallie, tries to interject: “That’s her book.” Sallie has to say it three or four times before the man finally hears—and falls silent. Solnit admits that “people of both genders” can hold forth self-importantly, “but,” she adds, “the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered.”35
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No contemporary discussion of women’s voices can fail to discuss vocal fry. Also known as “creaky” voice, the fry is a low-pitched, crackling, croaking sound—a little like frying bacon, from which the voice got its name. Scientists first took note of its ubiquity in young women in a fall 2010 paper in American Speech.36 A raft of news reports followed describing (and decrying) the phenomenon. Mark Liberman, a professor and creator of a popular linguistics website, Language Log, meticulously catalogued references to vocal fry in the lay press, including an announcement, by This American Life host Ira Glass, about the flood of hate mail that NPR was receiving about Glass’s young female cohosts.37 “Listeners complain about their ‘vocal fry,’ ” Glass said, and went on:
These are some of the angriest emails we ever get. They call these women’s voices unbearable, excruciating, annoyingly adolescent, beyond annoying, difficult to pay attention to, so severe as to cause discomfort.
The reaction wasn’t confined to NPR listeners. Scholarly articles proliferated, measuring the sociological ill effects of vocal fry on speakers. The mannerism made them sound “hesitant, nonaggressive, and informal.”38 Owing to how irritating it is, the fry “may undermine the success of young women.”39 Nevertheless, vocal fry has continued to spread, like a contagion.
That vocal styles are highly contagious was a fact I first learned about years ago when reading Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, which documents the training of the first NASA astronauts, who were all recruited from the ranks of test pilots for the Army Air Force, including test pilot Chuck Yeager, who had become famous in 1947 as the first human to break the sound barrier in a supersonic jet. Yeager, who was born in a coal-mining community in West Virginia, spoke in an unhurried drawl so effective in communicating imperturbability from the cockpit that his awestruck fellow pilots couldn’t resist imitating it. “Military pilots and then, soon, airline pilots, pilots from Maine and Massachusetts and the Dakotas and Oregon and everywhere else, began to talk in that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl,” Wolfe wrote, “or as close to it as they could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.”40 It’s also the drawl that every (male) commercial pilot in North America speaks in to this day, regardless of where they were born—a voice that instantly communicates to all on board that the guy behind the controls has got this. Tom Farrier, the former director of safety for the Air Transport Association, recently posted reflections on the Yeager-drawl, including the observation that most pilots maintain it even during the most dire emergencies.41 This was recently demonstrated by Captain Chesley (Sully) Sullenberger when double engine failure on takeoff from LaGuardia Airport obliged him to land his aircraft in the Hudson River. Cockpit recordings (available on YouTube) reveal that throughout the four-minute ordeal Sullenberger’s voice never loses its laconic, low-pitched, slightly drawling tone.42 Pure Yeager.
Investigators on a similar epidemiological quest to learn the origins of today’s vocal fry traced its viral popularity to reality television star Kim Kardashian, whose immensely popular show, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, debuted in 2007. The first reports of the vocal fry epidemic began to appear as the show reached peak viewership in
201043—a synchrony of Kardashian popularity and creaking-voice-ubiquity that certainly suggests Kim (who speaks in a perpetual, pronounced vocal fry) is the epidemic’s Patient Zero. But nobody has been able to explain why, exactly, her speaking style proved so catching—beyond the general tendency for people to emulate the behavior of celebrities and to turn those behaviors into short-lived fads. This is no short-lived fad. Kim’s vocal fry has operated more like Yeager’s drawl—it has colored the way women speak across the culture, which suggests that it has tapped deeply into how women want to be perceived. In short, it’s time to start thinking of it as a zeitgeist-defining phenomenon. But what larger truth could vocal fry be telling us about women today, how they feel and what they want to project?
My initial explanation focused on how the fry reduces the voice to a monotone crackle, erasing prosody, and thus emotion, from speech. This seemed to be how Kim used it. Working in concert with her heavily made-up, masklike facial features, her monotonic voice projected an impression of blasé detachment, which contributed to her “brand” as a Beverly Hills diva whose wealth cocooned her from ordinary earthly concerns (and thus emotions). She had attained the condition to which the popular culture urges everyone to aspire—indeed, to keep up with: unimaginable wealth and fame with zero effort and no discernible talent. My theory was that Kim’s fans, understandably envious of her serenely untroubled life, began to emulate her attitude, so that they might at least sound equally invulnerable. The fry was thus an adaptive vocal survival mechanism like any other.
But I have come to believe that the fry’s use in women has, since the presidential election of 2016 and the subsequent rise of the #MeToo movement, morphed into something quite different. The fry (which is the lowest pitch that a voice can attain) has become a way for women to level the vocal playing field with men, who (as we have seen) use their more baritone voices to dominate in conversations. The fry is only partially successful in this because it also reduces volume, which hardly helps when trying to be heard over a mansplainer—but this is perhaps mitigated by another message that is woven into our DNA. Vocal fry is produced by the same set of laryngeal muscles that nonhuman animals use when facing off against an aggressor: muscles that stiffen the vocal cords so that air from the lungs passes through them in discrete pops. Vocal fry is literally a growl. Not, “I am woman, hear me roar.” Vocal fry is a more potent signal. Roars have a theatrical, bluffing quality. A growl says: Watch it: I mean business.44
For all the heat that young women have taken for vocal fry, the speech habit is not limited to females. One study, in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America in 2016, found that it was in fact more prevalent in men—although not as instantly identifiable since a low, deep, nonprosodic tone seems less anomalous coming from male lips. Indeed, we expect it. Language Log’s Mark Liberman pointed out that even as NPR’s Ira Glass reported on the storm of angry emails about his female cohosts’ strong vocal fry, Glass was speaking in a strong vocal fry.45 And I can think of at least one famous and successful male movie actor whose pronounced fry is critical to lending his voice the murmuring, low-pitched monotone that no critic has ever described as irritating, affected, “hesitant,” or likely to “undermine… success.” Indeed, it only bolsters the impression of unruffled cool for which he is famous. George Clooney. Since noticing this, I have started to hear the prominent fry in the voices of Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio—indeed, every single popular male actor you can name.
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The sexual dimorphism of the human voice clearly has a cultural component, but one that is merely layered atop a strong biological one. The producers of Seinfeld, to create a voice in Dan indistinguishable from that of a woman, had to post-dub a female actress’s voice.46 And people who transition to another gender often find their voices to be stubbornly stuck in their gender of origin. For transwomen (who have transitioned from male to female), estrogen treatment will effectively feminize the physical appearance (smoothing the skin, plumping the breasts) but it cannot reverse the effects of puberty on the larynx and vocal cords. Someone who transitions after puberty will in all likelihood be saddled with a voice that signals an XY, male, chromosomal makeup.
This is not a trivial consideration for transwomen who wish to successfully “pass” as biological females, nor is it trivial even for those transwomen content to project a more ambiguous, or androgynous, identity. Trans people of every shade are a population especially vulnerable to job discrimination, family rejection, and transphobic violence; and for transwomen with a sexual orientation toward men, a stubbornly male-sounding voice can rob the speaker of a major signal by which humans alert potential partners of their romantic interest, leaving some feeling dangerously isolated, or condemned to a life alone. (Not for nothing do transgender people have a suicide rate nine times that of the rest of the population.47) For female-to-male transmen, the situation is different, at least regarding the voice. Testosterone replacement therapy will not only masculinize a biological female’s appearance (increasing muscle mass, spurring beard growth, even initiating male pattern baldness), it masculinizes the voice by binding to androgen receptors on the vocal cords and larynx, making them expand rapidly in size. The voice naturally deepens.
Surgeries for feminizing the voice in transwomen exist: one procedure permanently pulls apart the cartilages to which the opposite ends of the vocal cords attach: the increased tension on the membranes raises pitch. But the procedure often limits the cartilage’s mobility, diminishing variation in prosody. People who have undergone this surgery often speak in a one-note falsetto. A more effective procedure, called endoscopic glottoplasty, reduces the amount of vibratory tissue by shortening the vocal cords. This raises pitch and retains prosody. But because operating on the delicate vocal cords carries significant risk and can even make a voice sound raspy and ragged (as Julie Andrews learned), doctors recommend such surgery only as a last resort.48
Most transwomen are first urged to try conventional speech therapy. This can be remarkably effective in feminizing the voice, but the techniques (which involve an ingenious manipulation of vocal auditory physics) can be difficult to master. The speaker lifts the larynx in the neck and holds it in a permanent, elevated “swallowing” position, while also subtly raising the tongue toward the palate and pushing it forward while speaking and, at the same time, pulling the lips in slightly against the teeth. By thus shrinking the resonance chambers of throat and mouth, the speaker boosts the higher frequencies in the voice spectrum and mutes the lower ones. The voice not only sounds higher, but the timbre has the lighter, brighter quality suggestive of a smaller female body. But the muscular strength and coordination necessary for permanently elevating the larynx and reshaping the oral cavity while speaking requires extensive practice. Some never get the hang of it. Meanwhile, yawns, coughs, and sudden bursts of laughter—all “fixed action patterns” that emerge from the brainstem and thus circumvent conscious control—can be treacherous: a sudden masculine sound can interrupt the female-sounding flow of speech, with jarring results.
Many trans voice tutors also warn that sounding convincingly female is not solely a matter of pitch and timbre. Whether through innate differences, or cultural conditioning, women tend to speak with a slightly different prosody than men. Feminizing the formerly male voice requires greater “flow” across speech sounds, blending the transitions between individual phonemes, and a reduction of sudden, wide pitch contrasts, to rid it of the more angular, jagged way men usually talk.49
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There is a third style of sexual vocal signaling in humans, distinct from the dimorphic male and female voices: this is the so-called gay voice. (If any reader somehow fails to know what I am referring to, I encourage them to listen to some of the more flamboyant stars of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.) Linguists who have analyzed the features of gay voice say that it includes wider than usual swoops in pitch from high to low, exaggerated vowels (where the back of the tongue is dramatic
ally lowered on the ah and uh sounds, often stereotyped in the utterance faaaahb-u-luuhs)50 and by longer, higher-pitched hissing on s and z.51 Not all gay men speak this way, of course, and not all men who do are gay, but the statistical correlation between these “gay voice” features and same-sex orientation is sufficiently high that, in controlled tests, listener-judges can predict with 80 percent accuracy which speakers are homosexual through voice alone.52
A corresponding “lesbian voice” is less well defined, acoustically. Some listeners associate a low-pitched, raspy, or assertive voice with a lesbian orientation (presumably because of the stereotypically “masculine” acoustic cues), but there’s no evidence that these voice qualities are statistically higher in lesbian than in straight women. Which is why I say that there are three distinct sexual voices in humans, rather than four—although some researchers have detected a very subtle feature typical of lesbian voices, a tendency to pronounce the vowels with a slightly lowered back of the tongue, which boosts the lower frequencies in the voice spectrum.53
Early studies on gay and lesbian voices in the 1980s included speculation that the speech patterns and timbre differences might originate in anatomical changes in the vocal tract, or in the neurological wiring that controls articulation, brought about by the biological predispositions that produce same-sex attraction. But no anatomical differences exist in gay men (or lesbians), and no differences in their brain wiring have been found. Today, most experts agree that the voice we label as gay (or lesbian) is a learned behavior that might begin in infancy, when language is being acquired. The theory is that toddlers who are biologically predisposed to a same-sex orientation identify more closely with opposite-sex parents and caregivers, and wire in the circuits for speech patterns that conform to those speakers. Thus, a gay three-year-old boy will attend to, associate with, and eventually mimic the greater articulatory clarity and elastic prosody in his mother’s voice than the more monotone, less crisply articulated, speech of his father; while a lesbian toddler associates with the father’s deeper voice and thus exaggerates the lower back vowels to deepen overall voice pitch.54 People adopt these speaking patterns unconsciously and may manifest them very early in life (some report realizing that they spoke differently than their peers in elementary school), others not until adolescence.55