This book explores what pulse phonation is, what it can do, and how it develops into a cultural practice. It is a multidisciplinary inquiry that merges theoretical frameworks with embodied practice to discuss the processes of producing and perceiving pulse phonation, its use and significance in contemporary discourse, its functions in the animal world, and its place in a broader reflection on voice and sound production. It presents a thorough investigation of pulse phonation to jointly take into consideration its sociocultural, bioacoustic, and creative dimensions. In the book, leading scholars and practitioners such as Nassima Abdelli-Beruh, Diana Sidtis, Katherine Meizel, and John Nix present a wide array of approaches, from sociolinguistics and voice anatomy to acoustic ecology and performance studies. These approaches include case studies of creaky voices across cultures and media; physiology and acoustics of the pulse register; creak singing including possibilities, perspectives, pedagogies; pulse phonation, embodiment, and gender; the “phenomenon of extreme vocal fry”; vocology, somatics, and the disease condition; the use of pulse phonation from live arts to film studies; composition, improvisation, and creation with creak; and the pulse register in animal vocalization. This groundbreaking publication concludes with a multifaceted series of testimonies from users and listeners of creaky voices.

Table of Contents:

Foreword: My days and nights with creaky voice PART I: Frames Introduction: What is the matter with pulse phonation? 1. From deviance to the birth of a register 2. Vocal fry, creaky voice, and singing voice pedagogy: Singing teacher attitudes and usage 3. Voice creakiness in singing 4. Acoustic, physiological, and paralinguistic analyses of creaky voice in spontaneous dialogue speech 5. Generation, acoustic properties, and behavioral relevance of pulse tone vocalizations in bird vocal repertoires PART II: Narratives 6. A case study of "vocal fry" in Suffolk: Intersections and contradictions in the sociolinguistic salience and dialectological prevalence of pulse phonation 7. Creak and embodying gender: A case study of media interviews with an actor before and after coming out as transgender 8. "It’s chiefly your eyes I think, and that throb you get in your voice": The place of creaky voice in the soundscape of attractive female voices in twentieth and twenty-first century American cinematography 9. The role of creaky voice in gender perception in Scottish English 10. Gilmore Girls, cowboys, bon viveurs and lacanian psychoanalysis: Vocal fry's significance as symptom of object a (capitalist semioblitz, masculine menace, and ineradicable excess) PART III: Experiences 11. Doing things with creak 12. From extreme to everyday: Vocal fry in contemporary theory and practice of music 13. Transmasculine creaks and cracks 14. Mothers and creak 15. A case study in creak and creaky voice: The pedagogical impediments and uses 16. Dreamvoice: Composing from creaks breaking through the unconscious 17. What can the pulse register do? 18. The other side of the human voice