#classical voice

[image id: a screenshot of the 2008 radical musicology study titled “The Changing Female-to-Male (FTM) Voice” by Alexandros Constansis. text is as follows: “As soon as an FTM person starts receiving testosterone 13 treatment, he is always warned about the dramatic effects that it will have on his voice. However, when I began my own experimental work in 2002-2003, I had not encountered any transman who had also been given some means to properly deal with his changing vocal instrument. The general consensus even relatively recently has been, as Shelagh Davies and Joshua Mira Goldberg characteristically state, that 'FTMs don't need speech services because testosterone will cause pitch to drop'.[18] This, apart from being unfair to transmen, is also overtly simplistic as the writers admit very soon that 'testosterone doesn't always drop pitch low enough for FTMs to be perceived as male'. [19] This had already been noted by Van Borsel et al in 2000 who reported that 'results from a sample survey involving 16 F-T-M individuals and longitudinal data from two clients suggest that the voice change [i.e. speaking] is not always totally unproblematic. A voice assessment and some counselling before the hormone therapy are recommended."[20] Even so, the general consensus remains unchanged due to lack of understanding of all the parameters influencing male transvocality. There was no research on singing FTM voices during my pre-transition days, and I had to look for material that described the closest equivalent: the changing voice of an adolescent biological male. I then augmented this with my own experimentation with medication and on devising the best method from vocal techniques that I was already familiar with.” end image id.]