Quote from: Sierra Belle on September 20, 2013, 11:04:30 PM
You should probably be familiar with which surgery she ACTUALLY got. [....]it seems to be by far the very LEAST invasive vocal operation I have come across and it's success rate is reaaally high. Every example I have heard has sounded very natural. I think your fear, as well as your support group's fear is of the OTHER vocal operations
Oh I did not want to say that this is not the case - and from what I got from a friend of mine who met her lately the voice is good and I dont think there have been complaints. I didnt see her in a long time as after 2002, we all more or less disappeared from each other and the TG stuff - many moved away. Anyways I dont know as of now her surgeon or EXACTLY what was done except that IIRC she got a procedure that was rather new at that time and that involved taking the vocal cords and basically "sewing them together" to make the opening for the air smaller and the active part of the vocal cords shorter. This sounds to me like what Yeson is doing, so either it is just close to that or some other surgeons performed this as early as 2002 or she actually was one of the very early patients of Yeson (which would also mean that very likely the procedure was further developed since then). I think I even remember that she did a short presentation at the support group about this - with the ususal sceptic reactions (that group was sceptic to everything which sounded like an easier way - laser hair removal, RLT without skirts, early HRT, FFS, ...). So what I remember from back then was that the voice was very squeaky at first - really high pitched and she did not control resonance well so it sounded not really great (I cannot be said enough that #1 priority is to get resonance trained). I found the pitch to be too high for a woman of her stature - rather tall and as many TS people not overly femme in face and body, so I think I perceived that a bit as a mismatch - that pitch would have me expect a smaller, tinyer, more feminine woman. And from what I gathered the pitch is still really high now after 10 years (so on the upside this is a good hint that the effects of the surgery are long lasting). I have to meet her again to see how things are and ask her some things about it if I really should consider this, which I am absolutely not sure but rather scared about. Oh and that scare - it is only to a minor degree a scare about maybe lack of success in the result - from what I hear here, the results seem to be awesome. Its also that I just generally am scared of surgery (the last one I had was SRS and that did not go that well) and I am scared of doing such a step now - being 13 years post op and all that - how would I explain to anyone what I did without coming out again. So thats mostly about me. My fear of surgery comes in part of me often getting nerve problems - does this surgery potenitally injure any nerves? I hear somethign about the tongue being numb? I tend to be among the fraction of a percent in such cases in which nerves do not regenerate well. Once I pinched a finger too hard and it took over 2 months to regain sensitivity
![Sad :(](https://www.susans.org/Smileys/susans/sad.gif)
.
Regarding the surgery resulsts - from how I understand it, it basically reduces your vocal pitch range, restricts it to the upper half. I guess that is all right as who wants to use the lower half anyways except if one is a singer or actor. But did I get that right?
Oh and one more - Do they have at least a guess as to what happens long term? I mean like 20 or 40 years out? they cannot know anything about more than 10 years of course because there was no such surgery before but do they have a guess? Will pitch stay, come down a bit, could the modifications cause some other problems in old age with breathing or therelike?
Quote from: Jennygirl on September 21, 2013, 02:40:37 AM
I suppose there is a chance she had it done at Yeson. From what I understand, 2002 or shortly thereafter was around the time that Dr. Kim initially began performing VFS.. It wasn't until 2007 that he presented it, though.
I dont know where she went or how she got the information. I would have to meet her again and ask. It was outside the country though for sure.
Again - what I heard was the initial result more or less some weeks after surgery, so that was not well trained. What I noticed was that I thought the pitch would be too high - well in a female range of course but IMO unusual for a woman like her in this country. By the way I tend to think, I would be interested if someone has info on that, that women in different countries use different pitch. In Germany a lot more women seem to use a lower pitch than in the US and rarely I hear some of the very high pitched voices here in Germany that are at least common in the US media. Maybe that is also why I thought the pitch was too high because of the context - maybe it was more like a US woman than a German woman.
(EDIT: Found a study on that: www.qmu.ac.uk/casl/PitchRange/Mennen_et_al_ICPHS07_final.pdf - it says that there is an average 5 Hz difference plus a difference in the pitch range used... )
QuoteGoing into it I knew I would still have a lot of learning to do with the new pitch. Heck, I am still learning
It's a very rewarding experience.
That sounds cool. I can imagine that it is much more fun to learn with a voice that is in the right range than to try and learn the same thing with a voice that "breaks off" to the low range. I really was so put back in the one face to face voice lesson I had with a trainer because she wanted me to go into my deeper voice to feel the resonance - by that time I really did not want to hear that sound coming out from me....
EDIT: Jenny, you mentioned that you wrote something about how to use the praat software for voice training, can you give the link? I just tried and its quite complicated program. If I get this right, my pitch range seems to be 90-420, original voice is at 110-120, regular voice now (the way I am using it without having to think too much about it) is between 125 and 160, if I make some effort it seems to go in the range of 200-210 (though to me this is already the point I scare away of using it outside training). But I'd like to know more on the program as I am not sure I am using it right. I am recording and looking at the blue numbers at the bottom in the voice pattern image after zooming in to 10 seconds.