This book explores what pulse phonation is, what it can do, and how it develops into a cultural practice. It presents a thorough investigation of pulse phonation to jointly take into consideration its sociocultural, bioacoustic, and creative dimensions.

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