image: Brown played voice recordings for listeners and asked them to rate the perceived “creakiness” of the sound.
Credit: Jeanne Brown
PHILADELPHIA, May 14, 2026 — Valleyspeak, uptalk, vocal fry: These are all examples of speech patterns generally assigned to young women and often stereotyped to imply a lack of confidence or intelligence. At least one of these assumed patterns, however, is false.
Jeanne Brown, a researcher at McGill University, will present her work on rethinking vocal fry Thursday, May 14, at 10:40 a.m. ET as part of the 190th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, running May 11-15.
Using a combination of acoustic analyses and listener studies, Brown challenges the assumption that vocal fry is a hallmark of young women’s speech.
“The narrative took hold in the early 2010s, when a wave of mainstream media articles framed creaky voice — aka vocal fry — as a rising ‘affectation’ of young women,” she said.
By asking listeners to rate voices’ creakiness, Brown found that the primary marker for whether a voice sounded creaky was low pitch, not gender. In fact, both the listeners’ judgments and the acoustic analyses revealed that men and older speakers exhibit more creak than young women, a massive disconnect between evidence and popular belief.
“The conflict between that finding and everyday perception, where women are routinely flagged as creakier, suggests the bias is real but socially constructed, rather than grounded in how women actually sound,” Brown said.
Despite the evidence, it is unclear how these biases continue to spread, and it is hard to capture the full spectrum of listeners’ experiences when interpreting voices.
“Listeners may be responding to acoustic features like low pitch that covary with creak, to social expectations about who ‘should’ sound creaky, or some interaction between the two, and it’s not yet fully clear how each contributes,” Brown said.
Brown plans to continue studying social biases in vocal perceptions. She argues for a more nuanced, holistic approach to understanding speech patterns, combining studies of vocal production, acoustic mechanism, perception, and social parameters to help challenge the popular narrative and gender stereotypes about vocal creak.
“I hope it shifts the central question from ‘Why do young women creak so much?’ to ‘Why do we perceive and judge creak the way we do?’ I believe that’s where the real puzzle lies,” Brown said. “Advice telling women to avoid vocal fry to protect their careers [and] social perception puts the burden on speakers rather than challenging listeners’ biases, and that framing does real harm.”
###
Main Meeting Website: https://acousticalsociety.org/philadelphia/
Technical Program: https://eppro01.ativ.me/web/planner.php?id=ASASPRING2026
ASA PRESS ROOM
In the coming weeks, ASA’s Press Room will be updated with newsworthy stories and the press conference schedule at https://acoustics.org/asa-press-room/.
LAY LANGUAGE PAPERS
ASA will also share dozens of lay language papers about topics covered at the conference. Lay language papers are summaries (300-500 words) of presentations written by scientists for a general audience. They will be accompanied by photos, audio, and video. Learn more at https://acoustics.org/lay-language-papers/.
PRESS REGISTRATION
ASA will grant free registration to the in-person conference at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown for credentialed and professional freelance journalists. If you are a reporter and would like to attend the meeting and/or press conferences, contact AIP Media Services at media@aip.org. For urgent requests, AIP staff can also help with setting up interviews and obtaining images, sound clips, or background information.
ABOUT THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA
The Acoustical Society of America is the premier international scientific society in acoustics devoted to the science and technology of sound. Its 7,000 members worldwide represent a broad spectrum of the study of acoustics. ASA publications include The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (the world’s leading journal on acoustics), JASA Express Letters, Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, Acoustics Today magazine, books, and standards on acoustics. The society also holds two major scientific meetings each year. See https://acousticalsociety.org/.
###