A new clip of Ariana Grande speaking in her “regular” voice has confused fans.
The singer, who is gearing up for the release of Wicked, recently joined Gossip Girl’s Penn Badgley on an episode of Podcrushed, where she spoke about her music influences, songwriting process and acting career.
But it was a brief clip of the Victorious star naturally slipping into her deeper register while chatting that grabbed fans’ attention and quickly went viral online.
As the footage circulated on social media, Ariana herself chimed in with an explanation, writing under one viral TikTok of the clip that it is a “habit” and that she changes her vocal placement “often depending on how much singing I’m doing.”
“habit (speaking like this for two years) and also vocal health,” she wrote. “I intentionally change my vocal placement (high/low) often depending on how much singing I’m doing.”
“I’ve always done this BYE.”
It’s not the first time Ariana has addressed her voice. “I’m speaking in a slightly higher placement than I usually speak in, because I’ve been doing a lot of interviews all day and I’m trying to keep my voice healthy,” she said in a video she made almost ten years ago.
Fans were also quick to suggest her high voice could be part of her preparation to play Glinda in Wicked.
In an interview with Zach Sang, she spoke candidly about how she prepared for the role, telling him; “I tried to use that to take lessons every single day while I was doing The Voice and get ready for these auditions.”
“I trained every day with Nancy [Banks] and with Eric [Vetro] to transform my voice, even — like, my singing voice — everything about me, I had to deconstruct to prove to them I could handle taking on this other person.”
Fans were also quick to draw comparisons to other celebrities like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, both of whom famously have much lower natural voices than they use publicly.
In her 2020 documentary, This Is Paris, Paris Hilton entered a recording booth to show how she could easily transition between her different “voices.”
“I feel like the whole world thinks they know me because I’ve been playing this character for so long,” she said in the documentary. “That’s not me.”
“This is my real voice, that was a character,” Paris told ITV’s The Morning Program after the hosts pointed out her different tone. “For a long time, people have misunderstood and underestimated me, but I can understand…playing that character. Of course, they were going to assume otherwise.”
“After the Simple Life, I got stuck [as that character] and everyone assumed that’s who I really was in real life and I’m a naturally shy person, so it was also kind of a mask for me.”
