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Comment by screye | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how similar this is to (sexy baby) valley girl upspeak & vocal fry.

Many young women picked this up from the Kardashians/Paris Hilton and now cannot "turn it off". We know this is not their 'natural' voice because if you ask them to make weird sounds and then a normal voice, then their normal voice sounds completely different than the sexy baby voice.

The weird thing is that the women themselves are surprised by this sound they're hearing and cannot easily reproduce it because the sexy baby voice is so deeply internalized.

Sounds rather similar to these involutory ticks.

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Probably also, gay voice. I'm pretty sure a lot of young (not yet gay) men don't have that voice until later in life.

I was friends with a nurse who told a story about a gay man who went into surgery. He had a heavy, stereotypical gay accent. But when he initially woke up after the surgery it was gone, and as the anesthesia faded, the accent slowly came back.

I'm sure it varies for each individual, but for at least some gay men, some portion of their accent might be an affectation (even if it's largely subconscious).

While a "gay accent" is subjective, let's stay on topic.

I don't know if I believe this story in full. An awake person is likely to showcase more linguistic characteristics vs a sedated person which would in turn sound less affectatious. It's hard to say, "Yes, Turntina slay!" when your groggier than a koala bear.

We don't know to what degree their voice "changed" but I find it more likely the story was slightly exaggerated to make the story appear more interesting.

I remember knowing a few people who had the stereotypical gay voice in high school or college, but did not talk about their sexuality, then lived as openly gay later on. So I don't think it always starts later in life, seems like it can even precede being out.

A college girlfriend even chewed me out for assuming one of those guys was gay based on the voice, and insisted he was straight. I think he is out now.

It would be interesting to see a linguistic or otherwise academic study on those vocal features. I'm sure people have looked at it. Here's a Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_male_speech

Where I live it gets confusing as a lot of people put off those signals but are in instead just extra friendly straight people.

I thought a coworker was giving me signals previously and asked them if they use Grindr, and they said "I'm not gay", and I had to save face by saying "Oh sorry I meant Tinder, I said that because I'm gay haha, because I'm used to talking about the app I use haha, definitely not implying haha".

As a not so fem gay man myself I don't really hear this in my own voice.

I have heard it from some in the gay community and not from others. And in fact I have heard it in straight men, too - gaydar is a big mishmash of various observations - speaking in that voice can lead you to think someone might be gay but upon further examination, types of eye contact etc can show that they're not.

I think stereotyping everyone that speaks in a "gay" manner is a hurtful mistake.

You're right. It's not accurate all the time, it's a stereotype, it's misused to judge people, embracing it too much means losing sight of everyone's individuality.

Yet it has some cultural place and correlation. I think it's worthy of study by linguists or social scientists and so on.

I was finding it hard to talk about this without sounding offensive. As a straight guy I don't know how it reads to others.

Actually the "gay voice" is subconcious feminisation, imo. Of which there are plenty of gay men who consciously or subconsciously style themselves with feminine traits.

But there are plenty of gay men such as myself who embrace more masculine traits; it's just that a long history of a homophobic society suppressed exposure of the public to "normal" gay dudes.

It doesn't help either that straight script writers wrote stereotype fem gay characters for laffs. But then in modern times a large portion gay men working in the industry are the fem type and therefore those are the characters they write or play.

That's just like a southern california accent at this point, even men talk like that somewhat over there [1]

[1] https://www.spreaker.com/user/7768747/california-accent-voca...

My sister is like this.

I was in California for business a few years back, and she was visiting her best friend from high school in SFO.

So we all met up. My sister was all of a sudden talking in a sort-of valley girl accent. She said she just talked that way in California and had no idea why. At that time she was 34, but was visiting CA once or twice a year for the prior 10 years or so.

Just bizarre.

Curious: What is the sexy baby voice? And where can I see this weird sounds and then normal voice experiment?

This is a good place to start - https://omny.fm/shows/revisionist-history/from-inside-voice-...

Lake Bell asks the person to speak in their highest note and then their lowest note and then yodel for a couple of times. Then to asks her to just speak, and the voice that comes out much closer to what we associate with a 'normal' woman's voice.

I guess having to manually change tone to such extremes resets the body's ability to recover this incredibly specific learnt behavior, and the person momentarily reverts to a clean sample of their own voice.

> resets the body's ability to recover this incredibly specific learnt behavior, and the person momentarily reverts to a clean sample of their own voice.

What is one's "own voice?"

Nearly all speech patterns, dialects, accents, patterns and phrasing is learned from one's social circle. Speech itself is "learnt behavior." It makes sense that those engaged in a subculture or online community may take up the way people talk in that sphere of social influence. Before hand, speech patterns evolved apart from one another due to geographic distance. In the modern era, it doesn't seem unreasonable that one would have greater influence from an online community than a local one.

I don't see any reason to privilege a specific, arbitrary way of speaking to be "normal" and one's "own voice" and others to be learnt behavior one "recovers" from.

Perhaps that is a difference of definition.

Your 'own voice' refers to the unaugmented tone from your vocal cords. It is distinct to you because that is your physiology.

To find the tone you can take a deep breath and sigh. You can hear your tone. You have to sigh like you mean it though and relax, let it out.

Uuuuuuuuhhhhh

Other than the resonance of you oronasal cavity, all other aspects are some type of learned behaviors/impediments

Well... In my country there is a well known sociolect among well educated females. It also involves speaking in a low register. Doctors have found that this causes vocal chord scarring for some people. Not all learned behavior is favoured by the body, shall we say.

The "normal" voice would probably be associated with clear diction, produced with the least physical effort based on the speakers physiology.

Think sighing loudly but neutrally, producing white noise. Then sigh loudly again, tightening the vocal cords just enough to add sound, with the least effort. Try talking like that or near that where it feels comfortable.

Wasted physical effort (in the sense of not adding clarity) in speaking is almost certainly culturally learned or due to the aesthetic/self-image of how one wants to hear oneself, attract and maintain listeners attention, differentiate oneself, etc.

30 Rock had a good example of the whole act https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm-ZF9AfN40

Off topic, but Hannibal rules

Yeah, that was a bonus to the clip that I'm quite aware of lol. He was a writer on that show and occasionally cameoed as the homeless guy.

Think Marilyn Monroe/Betty Boop.

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