New blog post! Tagging @linguistics and #linguistics this toot
@ahnaphor had a cool Twitter thread a week or so about the "sexy baby voice" described by Lake Bell. From the examples that Bell gives, it seems like the primary features of "sexy baby voice" are bright vocal resonance and creaky voice (aka vocal fry).
There's a lot more to say about this, but I wanted to get the basic #phonetics down!
https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2022/11/listen-to-the-voices-of-the-sexy-babies/
@linguistics Our vocal resonance is constrained by the size and shape of our vocal tract, but it's also under some degree of conscious control!
In this new #linguistics blog post I discuss techniques people use to add bright resonance to their voices, including breathy voice, pharyngeal constriction, nasal resonance, tongue placement, tongue shape and lip rounding.
These are fraught, socially and culturally - which will be in a future post!
@ahnaphor @alexlfrancis https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2022/12/controlling-the-brightness-of-the-voice/
@linguistics I've got some things to say about the sociopolitical issues that Lake Bell raises in her "Sexy Baby Voice" chapter, but the main points have all been covered by other linguists during previous panics over young women's voices. Here's a good one written by Deborah Cameron in response to the "vocal fry" panic of 2015:
https://debuk.wordpress.com/2015/07/26/a-response-to-naomi-wolf/
@linguistics Another great take from 2015 comes from @lisa_b_davidson and Penny Eckert!
Penny brought enough humility to the issue that she polled 500 people and found that respondents under 40 didn't hear creaky voice as any less credible.
https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2015/september/lisa-davidson-on-vocal-fry.html
@linguistics @lisa_b_davidson @ahnaphor Just discovered that @myl wrote about "sexy baby voice" in 2013 when Lake Bell's film In a World... came out!
@linguistics @lisa_b_davidson @ahnaphor @myl
Also, a model suggesting how aperiodicity (a feature of creaky voice) can induce a perception of lower pitch:
@grvsmth @linguistics @lisa_b_davidson @ahnaphor @myl I saw a poster at ARO some times ago where the authors showed that vocal fry is used roughly as much by male and female talkers, but less salient in male talkers because the perceptual difference with their "regular" pitch is smaller.
@leovarnet @myl @grvsmth @linguistics @ahnaphor I’d very interested in seeing what that poster was if you can remember because I found this opposite in this study. People could identify creaky utterances regardless of the speaker’s habitual F0 https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1159/000490948/html
@lisa_b_davidson @myl @grvsmth @linguistics @ahnaphor
Funny story, I searched in my old folders to find tracks of this poster, and it seems that it is... yours, at ASA 2017! Nice to meet you again!
@lisa_b_davidson
So looking at your poster abstract, the part that struck me at the time (so that still remember it 5 years later!) is the poorer accuracy in creaky voice identification in male vs. female speakers, and the possible interpretation in terms of low F0 as a cue to creaky voice. But of course these are only vague memories, I'm happy to know that this study has been published, I will read it with great interest!
@leovarnet I think you're remembering the hypothesis that motivated the study but not the finding (which was perhaps counterintuitive!)