Women's Vocal Cord Damage from Speaking

Recently I listened to a radio discussion by two men and a woman on the subject of the state of education in America. As interested as I was in the subject, about one minute into the broadcast, I began to listen to an entirely different aspect of the interview: the pitch of the woman's speaking voice.

Her speaking style provided a clear example of a modern woman attempting to sound "like a man." She was speaking at what voice professionals call the "fry," the very lowest pitches capable of phonation by the vocal cords.

Since the 1970s, the speaking pitch of women's voices in the West has been dropping, in every field of employment — from communication and education to politics and business. In those years when women first entered the workforce in large numbers, experiments in business psychology discovered that women who lowered their overall vocal pitch moved ahead in their jobs, held others' attention longer, and got better performance from their subordinates than did women who spoke at high pitches. I think one study referred to it as "Big Dog Bark," or something like that. I even remember women being professionally coached to lower the pitches of their speaking voices.

This culture-wide lowering of female vocal speaking pitch mirrored a rising awareness by women of their age-old attempts to achieve the opposite effect, namely, of maintaining a youthful, even childlike timbre to the voice. Women suddenly became eager to throw off anything that made them appear weak, incapable, or dependent — including the sound of their voices. Though there were plenty of 20th-Century women who spoke with naturally low voices (strong actors like Barbara Stanwyck, Ingrid Bergman, Rosalind Russell, right up to Meryl Streep), women in the 1970s and 1980s, in an effort to be perceived as "strong," began to move toward ever-lowered vocal pitch — lower (I and many other voice professionals feel) than was needed to achieve the effect they sought.

But a relaxed, natural, even tone of voice (as opposed to an ultra-feminine, high-pitched voice) is not the same as a voice being lowered to its fundamental tone, or fry. Nowadays, almost all female news anchors, weathercasters, and entertainment hosts speak at the vocal fry, as do many women of power in business and politics.

Though occasionally a teenaged girl will begin study at my vocal studio with a high-pitched, "girl-like" speaking voice, many more young women arrive with unnaturally lowered voices, pitched at the vocal fry. These girls are often the leaders and high achievers of their schools. The subtext in their voices is: Please take me seriously! These voices are often already damaged from the acceptance of a new cultural "norm." This speech "affect" is unnecessarily harming the cords, actually creating an inability to sing, and prematurely aging the vocal cords from daily misuse.

This lowering of pitch has become so accepted by the culture at large that we no longer hear the vocal fry in women as aesthetically displeasing. Aside from being displeasing, this kind of speaking is extremely damaging to any vocal mechanism, male or female. When a person speaks at the fry, he or she is using pitches that cause the cords actually to "chafe" against each other — a phenomenon you can easily recognize in a speaker's low, gravelly tone, or in the raspy drop in pitch, especially at the ends of phrases and sentences. Compared to the voices of men — who have no reason to pitch their voices lower than their natural registers — women's voices may often be the lowest-pitched in any random group.

I would recommend to all women — but to young women especially — that each of you allow your voice to find it's natural speaking register, rather than attempting to force it to stay in a dark, low, rumbling area. With good diction, diaphragmatic support, and moderate tempo in your speech, you will find that your naturally-pitched voice can still be quite effective in communication, perhaps even more so, because listeners naturally trust a natural sounding voice in both women and men.