The Sounds of New York City, Circa 1920 (2013)

The fascinating thing is the same applied for female voices in the same era in the UK too. I had always thought it was some artefact of the awful posh received pronunciation everyone was expected to adopt going through school. If you listen to pre-war newsreels or movies you'll get the same shrill female tones.

Hearing Australian from then is similar, though sounds much like UK RP, with a more gentle hint of "Strine" than you'd expect today.

Yet anyone who's been around long enough will have probably dropped pitch over the years. Listen to any wartime or pre war famous women speaking and hear them twenty or thirty years later, e.g. the Queen, Vera Lynn, not only has the stuck up constricted accent gone, but the pitch has dropped markedly too.

It's interesting for me too. I wonder if vocal fry existed back then, or if that's something people will point out as a period thing 100 years from now.

That's very interesting indeed. Was it a kind of dialect that developed that way? I remember, first Bioshock game tried to capture such pronunciation.

I suspect more people back then were trained from a young age as singers (even if informally). That would reinforce habits of using various parts of their voice; a soprano voice does sound lovely when used for singing but can be a bit nasal when used for speaking. Likewise, a bass would have been trained to keep his voice within a certain range that keeps the resonance in his chest, which can lead to a "flat" sounding voice when used for speech.

The accents and vocal qualities didn't really start to homogenize across the country until the 1920s when radio became widely commercialized, and likely didn't become common until the kids from that generation were adults.

Chrome has a built in Flash player. You just have to enable flash for that site (click on the flash icon). It worked for me. FF however requires a separate download of the runtime.