Different Preferences Are Just Different Preferences

00:01 Hey, listen.

00:02 This is ridiculous.

00:04 More than once,

00:06 in the comments of a podcast I enjoy,

00:09 I've seen people call a guest's voice vocal fry

00:12 and say it sounds unpleasant.

00:14 And I wondered,

00:16 what exactly is vocal fry?

00:18 I'd consider myself

00:22 a longtime, die-hard lover of voices,

00:27 yet even I couldn't identify vocal fry.

00:31 So I searched Xiaohongshu

00:34 to find out what it sounded like.

00:38 I found that some

00:40 very affected people

00:42 imitating vocal fry

00:44 did sound awful.

00:46 But I don't think

00:47 that had anything to do with vocal fry.

00:50 Their imitation was simply too forced.

00:55 Then I found other examples

00:56 described as extreme vocal fry,

01:00 such as Cheng Yi,

01:03 Wang Yibo,

01:06 and Shan Yichun's voice

01:09 when she sings.

01:11 But to me,

01:12 those voices sound genuinely beautiful.

01:16 And there's Jackson Yee's voice too.

01:26 Even stranger, Taiwanese accents were

01:29 labeled this way.

01:33 Put that way,

01:36 perhaps vocal fry means

01:40 your voice sounds to others

01:45 as if many bubbles

01:48 are popping inside it?

01:52 But how to put it?

01:53 When I listened to that podcast,

01:56 I found that voice very comforting.

01:59 It was genuinely

02:01 exactly the kind of voice I love.

02:04 Why do people find vocal fry unpleasant?

02:09 I've also wondered

02:11 what kinds of people find certain voices

02:15 beautiful,

02:17 and what kinds of voices make—

02:19 no, wait—

02:20 what kinds of people find certain voices

02:23 unpleasant?

02:26 As for my own voice,

02:29 mm,

02:30 sometimes I think

02:33 it's all right.

02:34 But other times, I think,

02:36 my goodness,

02:37 how can it sound like that?

02:39 I come from an ethnic-minority region,

02:42 so my voice

02:44 carries some of my hometown accent.

02:48 Sometimes I deliberately

02:50 try to suppress that accent,

02:52 but people can still tell

02:55 roughly which region I'm from.

02:58 At those times, it feels rather intrusive.

03:02 I mean,

03:03 I was trying to shed my accent.

03:07 Because I genuinely feel that

03:10 the fact I have this accent

03:13 makes me feel

03:16 less confident.

03:19 Yet when I return to my hometown,

03:22 many people ask if I'm from elsewhere.

03:26 And my reply is that

03:27 I'm actually a local.

03:28 It's just that

03:29 when I was in school,

03:31 I spent a long time away.

03:34 Then, after graduating,

03:37 after graduation,

03:39 I did work back home for over two years,

03:42 but later I left again.

03:44 So compared with local people,

03:46 my accent may indeed

03:49 have faded a great deal.

03:54 But how should I put it?

03:57 An accent

04:00 has been with you since childhood,

04:05 almost like your genes.

04:06 You can't cast it aside.

04:10 So,

04:12 you can only learn to live in harmony with it.

04:15 But when it comes to vocal fry,

04:21 perhaps I really do like it.

04:24 I just can't understand

04:26 why people who hate it do so.

04:29 It's like how I used to wonder

04:35 why anyone would hate celery,

04:37 or why anyone would hate—what's it called?

04:42 Oh, cilantro.

04:44 As for me,

04:45 I can eat anything.

04:49 I love celery,

04:51 and I love cilantro too.

04:53 Some people even hate crown daisy,

04:57 but I think crown daisy is delicious.

05:02 Still, I do dislike some foods.

05:07 For example, I hate mutton's gamy smell.

05:10 When I eat lamb,

05:16 that flavor is truly unpleasant.

05:21 The only lamb dish I can eat

05:23 may be whole roasted lamb.

05:26 Perhaps because it gets charred,

05:29 it develops a charred, toasty aroma

05:31 that partly removes the gamy smell.

05:35 So

05:36 I can manage to eat it.

05:37 But something like lamb soup?

05:39 I really can't.

05:41 Even if I can't smell it,

05:42 once you swallow

05:45 that mouthful of soup,

05:47 the gamy flavor suddenly comes back up.

05:54 I find it absolutely nauseating.

05:58 So, returning to why people

06:00 hate vocal fry,

06:01 perhaps everyone has their own tastes.

06:05 Those preferences may have no obvious reason.

06:07 I hate it because I hate it.

06:09 I dislike it, full stop.

06:11 And I like it because I like it.

06:13 Dislike is simply dislike.

06:14 So,

06:17 these preferences aren't ranked.

06:22 There is no basis for comparison.

06:25 It's purely a matter of taste.

06:29 They carry no positive or negative judgment.

06:33 They're simply a neutral

06:35 expression of what we like

06:37 and what we don't.