The Voice Pro's Guide to Vocal Fry

What It Is, How To Do It, How To Use It

Vocal fry often gets a bad rap.

Vocal fry has a lot of names: creaky voice, glottal fry, glottal scrape, popcorning, and more. It refers to the lowest register of the voice, and is used in both speech and singing.

Not long ago, vocal fry in speech was all up in the media, and in a pretty misogynistic way. Young women were targeted in for using vocal fry in their speech. The reports would claim that using vocal fry was bad for your voice, and an indication of lack: lack of confidence, lack of strength of ideas, lack of physical energy. Luckily, some female broadcast journalists began to successfully point out that their male colleagues were using vocal fry quite liberally as well, so it (apparently) became less interesting at that point.

These days, vocal fry in speech has been observed to be related more to age and culture than gender, and vocal fry in singing is generally related to the genre in which one is singing.

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It’s been shown that use of vocal fry does not damage the vocal folds. To produce vocal fry, the vocal folds are short and loose, and the air pressure beneath them is less than when you phonate in other registers. Only slightly greater than whe