Everyone's voice changes over the course of a day, depending on how you are feeling and what message you are trying to convey. If you are happy, you may have a cheerful upbeat bounce to your voice. If you are angry, you may almost growl. If you get emotional, you may get all choked up, your voice catching as you try to speak. That voice catching (breaking, cracking) is called 'vocal fry.'
Professional singers and actors train very hard to master vocal fry. If a singer is singing an emotional ballad, they want to convey that emotion, so they may devote considerable effort to learning how to add a raspy husky sound to their voice.
Your voice comes from your vocal cords. If you vibrate your vocal cords smoothly, you get a nice clear sound coming out. If you almost close your vocal cords, and breathe out just a little bit, the cords may vibrate, and you get this creaky sound coming out, vocal fry. If you lower the the pitch of your voice at the end of a sentence, your voice might accidentally catch without your even intending it.
Here is Sean Connery playing James Bond in the movie Dr. No. Notice how his voice catches as he introduces himself "Bond, James Bond":
https://youtu.be/b15-P12gIf0?t=75
There has been some debate about whether vocal fry indicates wealth or a rural country accent. In Canada, comedian Steve Smith used a gravelly voice to create the down home character Red Green:
By contrast, the character Loudermilk claims that fry indicates wealth:
Once you become aware of vocal fry, you start hearing it everywhere. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton has a bit of fry in his voice at times, and countless singers use fry in their songs: Willie Nelson, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, Rihanna, etc. Some people probably have naturally raspy voices.
There are actually many different ways to create this raspy effect. Danish voice researcher Cathrine Sadolin has written books and websites on how singers can create different 'rough' vocal effects. In her framework, vocal fry is called creaking.
https://cvtresearch.com/description-and-sound-of-creak-creaking/
Brendan Houdek of New York Voice Coaching explains how to use fry and other effects to recreate the voices of famous characters from movies and tv:
No comments:
Post a Comment