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Kim Kardashian does it. So did Scarlett Johansson and Katy Perry.
And it turns out many whales also use “vocal fry,” the deep, raspy voice that these celebrities and a growing number of young American women have adopted.
With the exception of the group of animals that include sperm whales, orcas, dolphins and porpoises, all use “vocal fry” to find their prey, according to the paper released Thursday. The study in the journal Science found that, like humans, whales have at least three voice registers: a normal voice, a falsetto, and those creaky roasts.
“The similarities we’re finding are really striking,” said Coen Elemans, a vocal scientist at the University of Southern Denmark who co-authored the study. “This is the first evidence of widespread registry use in all animals except humans.”
Among Americans, voice brood can be divisive. Some find the deep, guttural voice grating. Others warn that the raspy tone makes potential employees less hirable. Radio stations get complaints about hosts who end their sentences with the raspy voice.
But the ranks of female singers are growing, especially among younger women. Many who speak with a creak view criticism of Vocal Fry as sexist social control of women’s voices. And according to Elemans, many celebrities today — including Kardashian, Johansson, and Perry — often speak in that somber register.
Among whales, the creaky voice is vital to the survival of the giant mammals.
How whales use their “voice”.
Elemans and his colleagues found that toothed whales use normal and falsetto registers to communicate with each other. You reserve the vocal fry register for navigation.
Loud water forces dolphins to “yell” at each other.
Many of these whales can dive more than a mile underwater and hunt in near total darkness. The animals use sounds to navigate underwater, emit powerful pulses, and listen to echoes to identify their meal.
According to the study, toothed whales rely on vocal brood to do their echolocation. Air is precious underwater – and whales have probably evolved to use the lower register for echolocation, as it uses air most efficiently.
According to Elemans, Vocal Fry “definitely took toothed whales a long way.”
that of his team A series of experiments showed that whales produce their wide sound repertoire with the same organ – the phonic lips in their nose, which vibrate much like a human larynx. To reach this conclusion, his team used a high-speed camera to film tissue movements on trained bottlenose dolphins and porpoises, and also taped small sound recording tags to wild whales.
These whales are on the brink. Now comes climate change – and wind power.
“They show to some extent that the physical mechanism is the same as the one we use,” said Andrea Ravignani, a comparative bioacoustician at Aarhus University in Denmark and at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. In the same issue of Science he wrote an opinion piece on whale vocalization.
He added, “The finding is quite unexpected and overwhelming.”