The fluttery voice persisted, creeping effortfully into the quiet room, determined and intimate.

Mrs. Seelen is a former dancer who speaks in a fluttery voice and always seems to be encouraging people onward, including the staff, most of whom are struggling actors, directors or filmmakers.

It starts out as a piano-driven slow jam; then the chorus is interrupted by a dramatic chord progression, and soon Ms. Carey's precise, fluttery voice is turning a power ballad into something more delicate.

I pay to keep this place off-limits for cops," he said in a fluttery voice.

Accompanied on piano by Shelly Markham, Ms. Marcovicci delivers many of Lawrence's signature songs in her fluttery voice, which makes everything she sings at once personal and idiosyncratic.

If her fluttery voice is musically unreliable, she has turned that liability into a liberating dramatic strength.

A fluttery male voice responded immediately.

"Oh, captain, I am so overcome with emotion," she said in a high, fluttery voice entirely unlike her own.

The woman spoke in the tinny, fluttery voice one associates with dumb blondes in American comedy; the man in an earnest, rumbling baritone.

The women sang traditionalist responses, but in "Dambalou," a song praising the bravery of ancient Manding warriors, their fluttery voices could sound like the B-52's.