Professor Tom McEnaney, who teaches a class called “Sounding American,” says the U.S. has a long history of men criticizing the way women speak. Sound technologies, starting with the gramophone and phonograph, he says, were developed for men’s voices — and distort women’s.
Following is a written version of the podcast episode:
You might recognize the voice of Kim Kardashian.
What makes the reality TV star's voice so distinctive is what linguists call “vocal fry” — a kind of gravely low voice that you can also hear in other celebrities like Zooey Deschanel, Katy Perry and Britney Spears.
Critics have said this relatively new way of talking doesn’t sound professional and doesn’t command authority. But others say that language is always changing, and that this criticism is part of a long history of insulting how women speak.
“It was part of a history of men in particular, especially men of a certain generation, talking down to women of the younger generation, about the way that they spoke,” says Tom McEnaney.
Credit: UC Berkeley
McEnaney is a UC Berkeley professor who teaches a class called “Sounding American.” This is the first of two episodes where we’ll look at ideas explored in his class, from how the history of sound in the U.S. shapes contemporary popular culture to what it means to sound American and how it relates to U.S. identity.
In his class, he brings up what defenders of vocal fry have said:
“There was this response to say what you hear as annoying, what you hear as immature, what you hear is non-professional, is actually a new way of speaking that carries a lot of prestige for women of a certain generation and among a cohort in that generation,” he says. “And so this is actually a powerful way of speaking.”
Credit: Barbara Kinney for Hillary for America via Flickr
“We have to decide whether we will all work together so we can all rise together.”
— Hillary Clinton in 2016
During the 2016 presidential campaign, a video ran in The Atlantic called “The Science Behind Hating Hillary’s Voice”:
“People sometimes say that they would like Hillary Clinton more if her voice was a little bit less annoying. Why does she sound so irritating to some people? Amee Shah, who researches hearing and perception at Cleveland State University, ran an analysis of Hillary’s voice for us. According to Shaw, Hillary’s voice is actually average in pitch and loudness for her age and gender. But Shah did find that some people might perceive Hillary’s voice as louder because of the mic effect. Hillary tends to use too much force when she talks into a microphone during big speeches.”
McEnaney says the kind of prejudice against Hillary Clinton’s voice is defined against a certain standard and norm that developed along with media technologies — starting with the gramophone and phonograph — that were made with a standardized male physiology in mind.
Credit: Taras Kalapun via Flickr
“And so women’s voices, normative women’s voices, were harder to pick up on those instruments,” he says. “This was true for microphones as well. And so oftentimes in the early history of media when women spoke over the radio, there would be distortion and noise because the technology was not developed for the range of their voices.”
He says presidential oratory in the U.S. has a certain standard sound, and engineers are responsible for producing that sound.
“Good evening my fellow Americans. We now stand 10 years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations.”
—President Eisenhower in 1961
And in doing that, they make a set of assumptions of what they need to do to make a voice audible. These decisions become the norm of what a voice should sound like.
“So this bias, which is built into the media system,” says McEnaney, “carries all the way up to the present, and these accusations of Hillary Clinton as speaking with the voice that’s shrill instead of the stentorian male voice of a whole tradition of broadcast male broadcast voices is shown to have political consequences in political debates today.”
But now, he says, we find ourselves in an even more disturbing situation in which our president doesn’t want to sound like he has an Ivy League education and instead speaks — and tweets — in fits and starts.
“That there would be such a value placed on the lack of education for people who are making massively important decisions,” he says, “doesn’t seem like just the democratic tradition, but really something that is against the access to public education, against the access to education for all people, so that all people wouldn’t have to desire that kind of tweeted speech, but could have a diversity of ways of speaking in different social situations.”
In our next podcast episode, McEnaney will discuss the concept of “white voice” and how difference defines the American sound.
“The United States is, of course, a polyglot country and it’s made up of all of these different languages and speech forms and that to say that there is an American sound is to suppress 80, 90 percent of the way that most of us speak.”
