Creak

Creaky voice can be produced in a number of ways. It involves closure along the vocal folds leaving an opening at the front end; the folds are loosely pressed together and are thicker than in other settings. The subglottal pressure is often low. Creak often leads to a more irregular pattern of vibration, and always to a slower one than is normal for the speaker. This means that the f0 of creaky voice is low, and in fact it is sometimes possible to hear individual pulses as the folds open. When speakers reach the low part of a falling f0 contour, they may switch into creaky voice: there is a close relationship between low f0 and creak. The symbol for transcribing creak is the diacritic , which sits under another symbol. A creaky production of the word ‘yeah’ could be transcribed.

Figure 4.5 shows a spectrogram of a stretch of speech where creak is used. The speaker is describing a fizzy drink as ‘disgusting yeuagh’ (a ‘nonce’ word, invented for the occasion), . The latter part of this is produced with very marked creaky voice, which can be seen in the way that vertical striations change from being rather regularly spaced to being irregularly spaced, and further apart from one another.