This is the fifth post in a series inspired by Lake Bell’s audiobook chapter “Sexy Baby Voice.” In previous posts I’ve covered the three key features she uses to define this vocal style – bright resonance (which Bell refers to as “high pitch”), creaky voice (“vocal fry”) and legato articulation (“slurring”), and discussed the various ways that we can manipulate our vocal tracts to create or amplify bright or dark resonances. Now I want to talk about your voice.

Not your voice, but what people mean when they say “your voice.” A friend who’s a vocal coach and read my earlier posts sent me a not-very-funny opening scene from a sitcom called Loudermilk, where the title character (played by Ron Livingstone of Office Space) mocks and insults a young woman who takes his order at a coffee bar. The salesclerk is friendly, prompt and thorough; Loudermilk has no cause for complaint. His abuse is entirely based on his dislike for the sound of her voice.

Anyone who’s read this series or listened to the “Sexy Baby Voice” chapter will recognize three particular features of salesclerk’s voice: bright resonance, creaky voice, legato articulation. The Loudermilk scene could have been inspired by the scenes about “sexy baby voice” in Lake Bell’s 2013 film about the voice-over industry, In a World…

Loudermilk mocks the salesclerk’s creaky voice by using creaky voice in his own responses, and the salesclerk asks “why are you talking like that?” Loudermilk responds, “This is my voice,” and she says, “No, it’s not.” After mocking her voice more and ranting a bit, he says, “just stop doing that.” Her response mirrors the earlier exchange: “I can’t help it, this is my voice,” to which he responds, “No, it’s not.”

As Loudermilk receives his coffee and leaves, the salesclerk, infuriated by his abuse, shouts at his back, “You’re a total dick!” Surprise! She doesn’t use legato articulation or creaky voice – because it’s really fucking hard to shout with either of those features. He turns back and says, “There, there you go, you’re talking!” as though she’d proven his point.

Loudermilk’s insistence that the salesclerk’s use of creaky voice is not “your voice” echoes a deleted scene from In a World… that Lake Bell includes in the audiobook chapter. In the scene, Bell’s character conducts “a vocal experiment” on another character who habitually uses “sexy baby voice.” She asks the other character to count to ten, alternating “the lowest point in your register” (i.e. with dark resonance) on odd numbers with “the highest point in your register” (bright resonance) on even numbers, and then say “Here’s my voice.”

Of course, “Here’s my voice” is the eleventh utterance in the sequence. As an odd-numbered utterance, Bell’s character pronounces it with relatively dark resonance, and the other character follows suit. As with the Loudermilk scene, we’re meant to marvel at the transformation: this woman’s True Voice, stripped of all that sexy baby junk! The message of both scenes is the same: that “sexy baby voice” is fake and women only use it because they’re insecure, but maybe they can be tricked into experiencing the power of their True Voices.

I don’t know about you, but when I first heard the deleted scene with the “vocal experiment,” the first thing I thought of was Elizabeth Holmes, the business executive who is currently in prison for selling a fake technology to investors. In addition to amassing wealth and power through lies and hype, Holmes is famous for having an unusually low voice for a woman – not just dark resonances, but when she speaks publicly, her fundamental frequency is in the range more typically used by American men.

During the height of Holmes’s success, several people felt that her claims were too good to be true, and they suspected her voice of being fake too. When recordings surfaced of Holmes speaking in a more typical pitch range for an American woman, that was presented as casting doubt on her honesty in general. Is her voice as big a fraud as her company?

I’ll have more to say about the notion of “your voice” and what it means to accuse someone of habitually using a fake voice, but astute observers may note that this double bind – don’t talk too “high-pitched,” but don’t talk too low-pitched either! – is an echo to the double-binds put on women in all kinds of areas – be assertive but not bossy! be attractive but not slutty!

Recently I’ve written two posts about bright resonance in response to Lake Bell’s audiobook chapter, “Sexy Baby Voice.” Bell describes “sexy baby voice” as having three characteristic features: “high pitch”, “vocal fry” and “slurring.” My first post supported Byron Ahn’s analysis that found that Bell’s “sexy baby voice” samples didn’t have reliably higher pitch than the non-“sexy baby voice” samples, and suggested that she’s probably talking about bright resonance. My second post drew on phonetic and pedagogical research to confirm Bell’s claim that while resonance is constrained by the size and shape of our vocal tracts, it can be consciously controlled to a certain degree.

In this post I want to connect bright resonance (what Bell calls “high pitch”) with creaky voice (“vocal fry”). The original reason they’re used together is youth.

Bell’s argument is that “sexy baby voice” keeps women from being taken seriously, so let’s imagine a young woman who wants to be taken seriously when she talks. Let’s say it’s 1990, and this woman is named Heather, and she has important things to say, whether it’s in a speech or in conversation. And importantly for our purposes, Heather is trendy and feminine.

On some level Heather is aware that dark resonance adds gravitas to speech. But she’s young, she’s petite, she hasn’t given birth and she doesn’t smoke, so she has a relatively short vocal tract and thin vocal folds. This means that without using any of the vocal habits I described in my last post, Heather’s voice will sound girlish, and will risk being prejudged as immature and unserious.

Heather may try some of those habits and find them wanting. She’s already avoiding twang and nasal resonance, which would make her voice sound even brighter. She could try rounding and protruding her lips and using the furthest-back tongue articulations, the time-honored strategy of boys and tomboys. But here’s the thing: she doesn’t want to sound too masculine. She wants to be feminine, but taken seriously. And maybe even sexy.

Another strategy, lowering the larynx, also clashes with the style she wants. It sounds too formal, too grand dame, too fussy. Not at all trendy or stylish.

Let’s imagine that after trying all these strategies, Heather’s a little tired and resigned. She relaxes her voice and it drops into creak. And it doesn’t sound fussy or tomboyish, but it has dark resonance. Maybe it even sounds a bit fashionably blasé!

And from a completely personal view, I just want to say that I do find creaky voice adds a bit of gravitas, and it can be very sexy. When I hear a woman with creaky voice combined with bright overtones, I get an impression of smallness in bigness. I think of creaky voice as the oversize sweater, boyfriend shirt or even mom jeans of the voice.

So Heather starts using creak whenever she wants to be taken seriously. And because she’s trendy, other young women imitate her. Heather is Creaker Zero of late twentieth century “vocal fry.”

Is that the way it actually happened? I have no idea. But it’s a possible scenario. And the scorn that’s been heaped on “vocal fry” over the past thirty plus years has been a potent example of the double bind that women are placed in so many times. Not enough dark resonance? Girlish. Rounded lips? Transgressing gender. Lowered larynx? Fussy. Creaky voice? You’re destroying your voice!

A lot of the politics of women’s voices has been covered by linguists I respect and admire, so for most of this I’ll just refer you to the responses of Deborah Cameron, Penny Eckert and Lisa Davidson to the 2015 “vocal fry” panic, and radio producer Katie Mingle’s all-purpose response to criticism of women’s voices.

This is one area where Malcolm Gladwell failed in this chapter. Gladwell is the producer of Bell’s audiobook and a friend of Bell, and in the chapter she turns to him for feedback. His biggest strength is the ability to find experts and present their ideas in ways that engage a broader audience, but in this chapter he doesn’t talk to Cameron, Eckert, Davidson or even Mingle. He just sits there and gives his own opinions, even conflating “high pitch” with “uptalk.” In his defense, it is possible that he tried to refer Bell to experts, but we don’t hear about it.

A few days ago, Byron Ahn drew our attention to an excerpt from a new, six-hour audiobook, Inside Voice by Lake Bell, credited as an “actress/writer/director/producer.” Bell is a friend of author and podcaster Malcolm Gladwell, and Gladwell agreed to serve as a kind of sounding board for Bell’s ideas about something she calls “sexy baby voice,” pointing to the voices of Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian as paradigm examples of it. Gladwell, whose company is publishing Inside Voice, also published this excerpt as a free bonus episode of his podcast Revisionist History, which I listen to regularly, although I’m almost two years behind.

Bell argues for a few points: that what she calls “sexy baby voice” is a distinct speech style with specific audible features, that it is particularly inauthentic (she claims several times that it requires effort to speak that way, and describes a coaching technique for helping women to find their “true” voices) and that it makes them sound stupider than Bell knows them to be. She repeatedly assures us that she is not passing judgment, and then uses extremely judgmental language to describe “sexy baby voice,” which I interpret as an application of “love the sinner, hate the sin.”

Ahn posted a series of Twitter threads about the excerpt. He notes that it’s problematic for Bell to criticize women as a self-identified feminist, but he focuses on the terminology that she uses to describe the features of “sexy baby voice,” particularly the word “pitch.” He concludes, “we should encourage public figures talking about voices to consult linguists who have the training.”

I’ve got a lot of thoughts and feelings about this excerpt and Bell’s idea of “sexy baby voice.” I could probably write several blog posts on the practical, cultural and social angles to this. For this post I’m going to keep with Ahn’s focus on what “sexy baby voice” is, phonetically. I sketched some of this out on Ahn’s Twitter thread, and I’ll synthesize and expand that here.

Bell says that the primary feature that defines “sexy baby voice” is “pitch,” and as linguists, we’re trained to interpret “pitch” as the fundamental frequency of the voice – essentially, the lowest pitch produced by the voice at any given time. I’ve been taking singing lessons, and all the singers and singing teachers I’ve talked to use “pitch” in the same way.

Ahn introduces his discussion of the “sexy baby voice” excerpt with a graph of the fundamental frequency of a segment of the recording – throughout the excerpt, Bell uses her own voice to demonstrate the “sexy baby voice” style, even though she says she does not use it in everyday conversation. In the graph he posts, the floor and ceiling of Bell’s fundamental frequency range are not particularly higher when she is using “sexy baby voice” than at other times.

Bell mentions two other factors: “vocal fry” (the linguistic term is “creaky voice”) and “slurring” speech. Ahn speculates that she may be picking up on other factors as well, like “SoCal vowels” or laryngeal constriction. He also acknowledges that “pitch” may refer to other pitch-related features besides fundamental frequency range, such as “uptalk,” a pattern of rising in fundamental frequency at the ends of phrases. Gladwell uses the word “uptalk” when echoing Bell’s explanations, but it’s not clear that he’s referring to phrase-final pitch rise.

So here’s where I come in: my gender expression is fluid, so I’ve been studying differences in vocal quality. When I listen to the samples in the chapter of “sexy baby voice” and … not-sexy-baby-voice (that’s for another post!) given by Bell, both in recordings and her own mimicry, I hear some creaky voice (“vocal fry”), but the main difference I hear is resonance.

This section is going to be a bit of a departure from my normal linguistics blogging, because I have not studied any of the literature on this. My understanding of it comes from practical training, so I don’t know who to cite or credit for any of this besides my teachers, Kristy Bissell and Erin Carney.  Of course, any inaccuracies are most likely due to my misunderstanding of what they’ve tried to teach me!

Resonance is about the pitch of speech, but it’s not about the fundamental frequency. It’s about everything else: the harmonics that result from the way the tones from our vocal folds echo around our bodies and are filtered through different parts of our vocal tracts and nasal passages. Just as plucking a string on an acoustic guitar produces overtones from the guitar body, whenever we arrange our vocal folds to talk or sing we produce overtones: higher pitched frequencies that can harmonize or clash with the fundamental frequency.

There are a ton of things you can do with resonance and it can get really complicated, so let’s focus on the primary resonance difference I’m hearing between Lake Bell’s “sexy baby voice” and the other examples. To me, the “sexy baby voice” examples sound brighter.

Bright and dark are useful terms to evoke the quality of resonance while distinguishing it from fundamental frequency. Bright sounds are ones where we hear more of the higher-pitched harmonics, while in dark sounds the lower harmonics dominate.

As I’ve learned from my teachers, and as Bell demonstrates, there’s a lot we can do with our voices to shift the balance of harmonics towards light or dark, but a substantial part of resonance comes form the structure of our bones, cartilage, muscles and fat. Higher-pitched harmonics tend to come from shorter vocal tracts, smaller nasal cavities, and in general, from smaller bodies. As a result, the voices of smaller people tend to sound brighter.

Testosterone during the teenage years also changes the configuration of our vocal tracts: thickening the vocal folds, making the larynx larger and shifting it lower in the throat. This is why men’s and trans women’s voices tend to sound darker than those of women, girls and prepubescent boys, even when singing the same pitch.

Bodies that see an increase in testosterone after puberty do not get larger or lower larynxes, but do tend to develop thicker vocal folds. This is why many trans men’s voices change, but often sound different from typical men’s voices. It is also, as Bell mentions, why women’s voices often change when they give birth or go through menopause.

As you might have guessed, this is where the “baby” in “sexy baby voice” comes from. Children are smaller than adults and tend to have brighter resonances. It’s also why Bell sees “sexy baby voice” as an exaggerated expression of femininity: women tend to be smaller than men and therefore have brighter voices. Women who haven’t given birth or gone through menopause tend to have brighter voices. Bright resonance suggests youth, femininity and immaturity.

As I mentioned above, there are several things that people can do, consciously or unconsciously, to shift their resonances, and I want to talk about them. I would also love to get into a discussion of the sociopolitical issues that Bell identifies around “sexy baby voice” and women’s voices in general. But this is already pretty long for a blog post, so I’ll save those for another time.