hey you tagged that one post saying we could ask how yo trained your voice, so how did you?
This is going to be a surprisingly short post, I think!
To start with, this is what my voice sounds like these days. It’s from a few years ago but nothing has changed since except that I trod on my headset mic. I don’t have a before recording; my starting voice was a fairly bog-standard tenor.
I had speech therapy on the NHS, but aside from giving me access to some neat recording equipment and some excruciatingly embarrassing group therapy sessions there was nothing that couldn’t be replicated at home.
Key to all of this is that the difference between cisnormative male and female voices isn’t necessarily one of pitch but of timbre and resonance. So the goal of this method is to shift your timbre and resonance; the pitch will follow.
As far as I know most trans women who use this method end up with alto-ish voices like mine: at the lower end of the cisnormative female voice pitch range. If you want to have a higher-pitched voice, this probably isn’t for you.
The method my speech therapist taught me was very simple, really:
1) Without going into falsetto, identify a voice in which there is no chest resonance. (Your “head voice”.)
2) Talk, sing, and hum in this voice until the very narrow range you initially have access to expands.
3) Keep going until it is your only voice.
It starts out sounding shit but it gets better.
The way I found mine—and I had singing lessons as a child so I found this bit quite easy; I can’t speak to how difficult or frustrating it might be if you never had that kind of practice—is as follows:
1) Place a palm flat on your chest just below the clavicle.
2) Start singing out and, avoiding falsetto, find the pitch and mouth position that makes your chest under your hand vibrate the least—switching the vowel you are singing from aaaaaa to eeeee to iiiii to ooooo etc. Vary pitch and vowel until you can identify the combination with the least chest vibration. Once you find it, this is the point you want to jam both (metaphorical) hands into and expand to become your “whole” voice.
When you find it, record yourself so you know for the future what pitch and sound got you there.
3) Initial exercises are just to get comfortable making that sound. Spend a few sessions just getting to it and singing it if you can’t “get” it every time. Get used to how it feels in your mouth, in your nose and throat and chest.
4) When you are comfortable with singing that note, keep your hand on your chest, feeling for vibrations, and make the other vowel sounds. You can start out singing aaaaaa (or whichever vowel got you there) and slide into eeeeee and oooooo, making sure your chest vibrations don’t increase. If you’re anything like me, some vowel sounds you will have gotten used to making “in your chest” instead of “in your head” and these might be tricky to move.
5) Once you are comfortable singing that note with various different vowel sounds, move on to singing actual words and sentences—reading from books etc. You want to get to the point where you can sing any word in your head voice at that pitch without dipping into chest vibrations first. This bit is tricky.
5a) One thing that helps with that is to get used to humming in your head voice and pitch. Again, you can start out singing your aaaaa (or whatever) and then turn it into a hum and then back, and then reverse it: start with a hum, go to aaaa, and then back, or onwards into singing words and sentences.
6) Start moving up and down in pitch. Don’t go too far from where your voice is comfortable; repeat some of these exercises a few pitches up and a few pitches down from where you started, maintaining head voice. Again, you can start with your comfortable aaaaa and then slide down or up. Expanding your range this way may take time!
7) While you are doing this, try turning your original singing head voice into a speaking voice. You can start out with humming or singing and then turn it into talking at that pitch and in that part of your head/mouth.
Your eventual goal is to keep expanding the pitches available to your head voice, by singing and humming (or by talking if that is more comfortable for you). It will probably sound unnatural and silly to begin with, but the sound relaxes into a normal speaking voice the more you use it.
The less you use your chest voice the less you will have access to it. The more you talk and sing in your head voice the better your body will get at it, and the worse it will get at your chest voice.
When I trained my voice this way, my chest voice—my “male” voice—basically died off and became impossible for me to produce. Note that when this happened, my head voice—my “female” voice—was still quite low-pitched, much lower than in the sample I linked, but because of the shifted timbre and resonance, it passed. My voice pitch raised until it got to where it is now, which took maybe a year?
My voice these days is a lazy comfy sweater: there is no conscious effort involved. Coughing, shouting, etc. all happen in my “new” voice. I’ve also indulged in “bad” habits like speaking in vocal fry all the time. Given my mum’s and cousin’s voices I don’t have any reason to believe that a hypothetical cis girl me would sound much different.
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