Was just wondering what aspects of your voice you’re currently working on?
My issue is mostly that I drop my pitch a bit too low, which invites a heavier weight and sounds too masculine to my ears.
How about you?
Keeping my vocal wave dynamic and bouncy whilst also remaining mostly above my anchor pitch. I find that I’ll often bottom out at my anchor pitch too early in a sentence but it doesn’t feel like a natural path of my vocal wave to spring back up again. Its the woooorst. I end up sounding quite monotone and unnatural at the ends of sentences as a result sometimes
I find it can be helpful to try to think of it more like acting - sometimes I produce a more fem voice when I am mocking a woman with a hyper-fem girly voice - and whoa, what do you know, I can maintain a high voice with a feminine cadence and end all my sentences on an up-pitch, etc.
It’s really about how I am thinking or projecting myself - and it’s so dysphoric to realize the problem is that I’m not naturally feminine … though it’s probably more accurate to say, I have to re-program the way I speak, and that’s a painful process like any other part of transition.
Mmhm, I get that too. For me, my natural/muscle memory vocal wave is very typically feminine in shape, its just at a masc pitch. I need to effectively just transpose that bad boy up and I’d be golden, but maintaining the same vocal wave at a higher pitch just slowly wiggles its way down over a while
yeah, I just need to practice, really - the same way I changed other parts of my voice. For whatever reason I’m just struggling with pitch. I think part of it is that my ear is not trained well enough - my ability to “hear” when my pitch is in the right place vs the wrong place is really weak, and so I overcompensate and shoot too high (because I can’t hear when it’s at the right pitch), and also sometimes when it’s too low it can sound higher to me on the inside … so, some of this is really about ear-training, as well.
And yes, it’s pretty typical for anyone’s speech to get lower and more monotone - esp. when listing things or at the end of sentences. So it’s just a skill to listen for that and prevent it from going too low. I worked on that with a speech language pathologist - she would have me list things and work on noticing the pitch going down and bringing it back up, and establishing a better baseline.
Re: ear training, it might be worth trying to get your hands on some aural training books intended for musicians - I’d say my ear for pitch is very heavily improved by having done that sort of stuff
Yeah my voice therapist was very good in this vein as well. All that’s left for me is practice
My comfortable pitch range is very narrow, so I have a hard time sounding super enthusiastic. Not sure if training like a singer would to boost their range is what I need, but that’s my idea.
my understanding is that you can indeed train higher pitches … where I struggle is with actually using and producing those higher pitches in a natural way - they require more abdominal engagement, I’m more likely to falter or my voice to crack, and in general I struggle to sound as normal or natural - but it’s still a good idea to do pitch slides and sustains to help you produce those high pitches anyway
I’m working on trying to get insurance to pay for Wendler glottoplasty surgery. I strain my voice a lot trying to get even high “male associated” pitches much less feminine ones. Sinus and nasal passage issues make things even worse because I have to use the muscles for things other than just adjusting pitch, do they are always strained.
I have been working with a vocal therapist on softening my way of speaking, like adding some breathiness, etc., and some resonance adjustments in the mean time.
pitch is no obstacle for me, i can do ~200hz without trouble! my main concern is, when i begin to speak louder, i don’t keep my tongue forward enough to keep a feminine (in my view) second formant frequency, and thus my voice can sound kinda weird when doing that.
i think in normal people terms this is my vocal quality being a little darker than i’d like? personally i find it easier to just visualize how the resonance works throughout the vocal tract instead of trying to abstract it, but maybe thats just the engineer in me.
uh in short i need to speak with my tongue closer to the front of my mouth
yes, making my vowels more forward by speaking with my tongue more forward in my mouth was what actually led to me having a passing voice! It was the one thing that just finally “clicked” and worked for me, and suddenly I realized I actually knew how to mimic or create that voice all along - it just was so hard for me to stumble upon it and realize that’s the right voice.
It might help to use a vowel chart and practice a word with more forward and more back vowels.
Even just playing around with “umm” (which was something I had habituated as such a back vowel and would cause me to slide back frequently when I was trying to habituate more forward vowels), play around with the vowels between “umm” and something more like “erm” - the “e”-ifying of the “um” moves the vowel more forward and gives you a better perceptual sense of what’s going on that isn’t just about coordinating anatomy (ideally you don’t really think much about your tongue, and you certainly don’t want to be trying to manually control the tongue - that should all be unconscious coordination, and on your perceptual level it’s best to notice when the vowel feels or sounds too back or when it’s more forward - and then regularly habituating more forward vowels).
my approach initially was to treat it like pronouncing words in a foreign language/putting on an accent. the neat trick about this is that i’ve already done that, so all of a sudden it became a lot easier. even if one has never learned a second language, the mindset may make concepts involved with voice training seem a little more manageable.
i love the idea of using a vowel chart though! i’ve had a fair amount of experience with phonology, and i’ve noticed so much material i read on transgender voice training assumes the reader has an intuition for vowel formation—the most prominent example i see of this is stuff saying “mask the sound with /i/” (what you said with "‘e’-ifying). such a chart would absolutely be helpful in demonstrating how this actually works, and more importantly that the idea refers to tongue position, and not /i/ (e as in eel) just being “higher pitch”. one can of course say “just move your tongue forward”, but thats a hard instruction to follow without gobs of context and explanation, and is near useless for truly understanding how it feminizes the voice.
if it sounds like i’m making an education curriculum, i pretty much have been! while my first approach was learning it like a foreign language, my approach now is to study and write about it as though i’m going to teach about it. i personally find that the best way for me to learn, but of course people differ :)
yes, I think the framing of treating it like an accent is much easier to learn and integrate - I think the vowel chart and anatomy discussion mostly misleads students, it’s just not how we know how to alter and make sounds. Instead, mostly we are good at mimicry, and treating vocal feminization like voice acting or like learning an accent or a foreign language is much more appropriate. Still, it is really hard to teach someone an accent over text, which is why I think so much vocal feminization resources and lessons are overly focused on explaining anatomy, vowel formants, etc. rather than demonstrating through sound and videos.
This is why I think voice training is mostly an in-person exercise, I think it was important for me to have someone to visually watch and mimic, and also for them to be able to watch me and correct when I was making a major beginner mistake (like root tongue tension, or tightening neck muscles and my vocal folds too much, etc.). It was also helpful for getting immediate feedback on when I was mimicking or demonstrating something correctly vs not.
I’ve been doing my fem voice for over a year at this point and for me, while I don’t have to train anything technical, I do still struggle at times.
The biggest issue is that talking is a good bit more straining than before and I so always think about it a little when talking, especially when i’m in a meeting or something. It’s always just a thing I look out for and I wanna train myself to stop looking out for it. And when I wanna stop thinking about it and do my old masc voice, I notice that it’s even more straining and basically not possible anymore.
I guess i’m just training consistency at my point. Never had that feeling of it just feeling like it’s my regular voice tbh…
Struggling to find the motivation, and/or discipline to continue with the work. I have made progress, but when I hear myself it sounds wrong, and I neither understand why, or what can do about it, and that’s been demotivating, so I stopped.
Need to get back into regular practice.
that’s when I lower the bar, and then make it less structured
if you want to practice, do it for 5 minutes - set a timer, and don’t spend too long
or even better, just do it in the cracks - experiment in the shower or while commuting in the car, don’t worry about a timer or how long you practice at all.
treat it more like play - seeing what you can do, what you notice. Listen critically to others voices during the day, that is practice too. Listen more than you produce sound, learning to hear is more important for a beginner than any other skill.
Pick apart voices, try to replicate voices, mimic and be a mockingbird.
Do what is easy and enjoyable to you and let that breathe life into your practice.
I spent a long time just trying to perfectly mimic the line “You look like the 4th of July!” for no reason other than it was fun to do.
Find a distinctive female voice that you would enjoy mimicking and just keep trying. Record yourself and listen carefully, and make adjustments and notice how they change how you sound.
I tend to forget about brightness quite a lot and wonder why I sound weird (although not to the point of breaking stealth, apparently). And I’d like to be a bit more melodic because I tend to end up in a monotone. Oh, and my telephone voice needs work.
But really I feel I should spend more effort on social skills. It might just be AuDHD, but I’m terrified of monopolizing the conversation (or worse, mansplaining), particularly when it’s around my interests. And I’m terrible at
fakingshowing interest by asking questions.
