It's crazy to me just how different voices and the accent were back then.
So many women had this very high-pitched and constricted, and almost childlike "shrill" voice.
While men had vowels that were so wide-open laterally, but lacking in upper overtones (the opposite of nasality).
And I don't think you can ascribe any of it to the recording technology -- even if you record someone today and cut off higher/lower frequencies, they don't sound anything like that.
The fascinating thing is the same applied for female voices in the same era in the UK too. I had always thought it was some artefact of the awful posh received pronunciation everyone was expected to adopt going through school. If you listen to pre-war newsreels or movies you'll get the same shrill female tones.
Hearing Australian from then is similar, though sounds much like UK RP, with a more gentle hint of "Strine" than you'd expect today.
Yet anyone who's been around long enough will have probably dropped pitch over the years. Listen to any wartime or pre war famous women speaking and hear them twenty or thirty years later, e.g. the Queen, Vera Lynn, not only has the stuck up constricted accent gone, but the pitch has dropped markedly too.
It's interesting for me too. I wonder if vocal fry existed back then, or if that's something people will point out as a period thing 100 years from now.
Annoying as it may be, it doesn't have to be pleasant to or even popular with broader society in order to be something iconic to our era. I can't speak to whether that's the case, though.
I suspect more people back then were trained from a young age as singers (even if informally). That would reinforce habits of using various parts of their voice; a soprano voice does sound lovely when used for singing but can be a bit nasal when used for speaking. Likewise, a bass would have been trained to keep his voice within a certain range that keeps the resonance in his chest, which can lead to a "flat" sounding voice when used for speech.
The accents and vocal qualities didn't really start to homogenize across the country until the 1920s when radio became widely commercialized, and likely didn't become common until the kids from that generation were adults.
I think the homogenization came with interstates, jets, and the quicker movement of people around the country. Your accent tends to come from the peers you were exposed to as a child and teenager and is nearly fixed by the time you're an adult. I have noticed a generational decline in southern accents in my own family. But my grandfather was born well after the radio became widespread.
Anyone who has done field recording knows that even with the best directional microphone in a zeppelin, you get an amazing amount of unwanted/unexpected noise. This is why people record 'wild' track in the field, so when they do studio over-dub they can include the right kind of background noise, to make the overdub sound right.
Those wild tracks in the city scape would be fascinating.
Chrome has a built in Flash player. You just have to enable flash for that site (click on the flash icon). It worked for me. FF however requires a separate download of the runtime.
I'm using Firefox and rather not touch Flash to begin with. Besides, all browsers are going to ditch it for good soon, due to Adobe declaring its EOL this year¹. So all such sites should really do something about it.
So many women had this very high-pitched and constricted, and almost childlike "shrill" voice.
While men had vowels that were so wide-open laterally, but lacking in upper overtones (the opposite of nasality).
And I don't think you can ascribe any of it to the recording technology -- even if you record someone today and cut off higher/lower frequencies, they don't sound anything like that.