Vocal Breakdown: Why Florence Pugh’s Low Voice Sounds So Feminine

Hello, how are you? I'm Olivia and I'm a gender affirming voice teacher. And today we're going to do another vocal breakdown. And in this video, we are going to look at Florence Pugh, who is a lovely British actress, and I have never seen her acting in anything. Apparently she was in Dune part two. I saw part one. Didn't see that one. She was in Little Women, read that book. Oppenheimer didn't see that. I saw Barbie when it came out, but I didn't do the Oppenheimer or what a Barbenheimer. I can't remember what people were saying. She was also in that Don't Worry Darling movie that had like it was like a big controversy with Olivia Wilde directing it. She's been in a lot of stuff. I just have unfortunately not seen any of it, but she's got a very interesting voice. So we are going to take a listen and break down all the different elements of her voice, her tone quality, her pitch, her resonance, her articulation and her vocal weight. So let's check it out. I was excited to play a modern day woman that had dreams and aspirations and drive and juggling whether she should be a mom, if she had time to be a mom, how she should be a mom. It just truly was like. And obviously it goes without saying that the the the amount of work that we had to do in the place that we had to go to were obviously hard. But I think I was just only thrilled and excited to get to work on it. Also, on every single movie that you do, you learn so much about yourself. And I I think the reason why I am drawn to being intimidated by roles is because I want to see if I can do it. And usually the thing that I'm intimidated by is because I haven't done it before and I don't know if I can do it. So it's very risky game, really exposing myself in that way. But yeah, I was definitely I was I was I was thrilled to know that this opportunity was there. And if I was brave enough to go there with someone, hopefully I'd get the results that I that I wanted. And I was just so grateful to everything that Andrew created with me. Florence, love it. OK, cool. My impression of Florence's voice is that it is lower in pitch, that it is a rather grounded voice. It doesn't sound floaty or kind of like, oh, like moving a lot in pitch or kind of heady in resonance. I would say that it's really grounded. It feels like it's in the back of her throat a little bit. And I can hear some of her onsets are a little bit harder, her attacks. And I think that that could be partly her accent, too. Overall, I think her tone quality is a little bit almost like a nasal on the edge of a nasal tone quality when I'm first listening to it, but definitely a sort of grounded feeling voice. So let's first take a look at her pitch. The amount of work that we had to do in the place that we had to go to were obviously hard. But I think I was just only thrilled and excited to get to work on it. Also, on every single movie that you do, you learn so much about yourself. We take a look here. Let's just highlight this much. We'll go take a look at the average pitch. Average pitch about a 139, about a 140 if we round up. So that is definitely on the lower end of feminine perceived voices. Generally, I suggest people kind of shoot for around like a hundred and sixty five hertz average. And she's well below that. One hundred and forty hertz. So let's take another little chunk here and see if we get a similar average. Take a look at this. Let's take a look here. Yeah, about a 142, 143. So she really stays in that low range. So if we look at kind of like the peaks of her voice here, we see it go up to like a two. What did it say here? Like a 220 in hertz. So a lot of times people will be going up to 220 like that A3 area, and that's their average pitch goal in many cases. But you see that that is just the peak. That's the very tip top of her intonation. So we've got a little bit of movement. Let's see here. That low pitch here, she's going down to like a hundred hertz and then going up to about maybe here like a hundred forty. So then, yeah, she's popping up here. So maybe about like from what are we saying here? Here we go. Like 116 to like whatever that 220. So one hundred one ten to about 220. So that's probably the lowest voice that we've looked at here I have looked at in these vocal breakdowns. So she's really consistently low. And I would say, you know, if you take a look at this, it's not moving a whole heck of a lot like there is movement and there's a little bit of a spike here, but we're not seeing a huge movement in terms of intonation. So that's that's really interesting. So definitely a low voice, grounded voice for sure. So in combination with the pitch being low, we get a heavier vocal weight, which makes sense, right? We kind of think about lower pitches generally are going to lead to a heavier vocal weight if you're not sort of trying to be aware of that and changing that. So we've got the heavier vocal weight in terms of resonance. I would say that she's relatively bright. She's not dark back here. You can hear me do my horrific British accent. Amazing. So she's definitely brighter in resonance, but she's not overly bright. But she's just kind of middle ground bright, I'd say. The one thing I do think sticks out is her articulation. And that oftentimes I mean, that might be come with some British accents, too. But I think that she's got pretty clear articulation and it could just be like how she's mic'd up and stuff. But she has a lot of these how she should be a mom, how she should be a mom. Like those S-H's are really like popping out. And then when she says things like it just truly was, that's that glottal onset or that heart attack. Instead of going, it just truly was, she's going, it just truly was. So she's got this heart attack, but these clear articulations. I would also say that generally, like she's very connected. The amount of work that we had to do in the places that we had to go. So it's very connected, even though she's got those hard onsets for a lot of those vowel starting words. And then she goes down, dips down into the vocal fry a little bit. Obviously hard. Yeah, I think there's just like a really relaxed quality about the way that she's speaking. And it's just kind of casual and in the back of the throat, but still clear. So I think that Florence has a beautiful voice. It's definitely a feminine voice. We can definitely hear that, right? But this is not a traditionally what we think of as feminine voice. Her pitch is way lower than we expect feminine voices to be. Her vocal weight is definitely heavier than we expect vocal feminine voices to be. I think her resonance is definitely bright. The smoothness through the phrases is definitely maybe what we think of as as feminine. But yeah, I mean, I think that this is a fantastic example of a feminine voice that is defying what our sort of expectations of feminine voices should be. So I think that Florence is like a great, you know, voice to to look at and analyze. Have you seen her movies? How's she as an actress? I'm sure she's great. Anyway, I hope that this was helpful. Let me know if you like Florence's voice or if there's any other voices that you'd like me to analyze. Thank you so much for watching. And I will look forward to seeing you in the next video.