Hi.
We have discussed a lot on practical advice how to make a voice that is perceived as male in females with transsexuality more female/feminine. The main changes involve resonance, pitch and prosody (intonation, melody). A lot of emphasis is put by voice trainers on prosody, some on resonance and littel to pitch. Voice surgeries adress mostly pitch and in a indirect way the other parameters as one does not have to watch ppitch anymore.
What I am interested now is how these differences come to be. Clearly pitch is a product of body changes by testosterone/DHT - the vocal chords get longer and thicker. Resonance seems to be at least to a part physiologcal because the larynx is enlarged and positioned differently. But resonance to a degree and prosody almost exclusively differ due to reasons i am not sure about.
A common tips for example is to bring the voice "to the front" "into the mouth", use a head resonance and not a chest resonance, use more melody when speaking and other things similar to that. So how does this difference come by? Do women generally use their voice in a different way, so would any woman be able to to a male and female resonance, prosody etc but choose for some reason at some age to use their voice in a certain way and not the other? Or is it somehow founded in physiology - does the different larynx or vocal fold length influence these parameters as well - something we have to work against constantly?
I wonder about this because there are so many things people here seem to have to learn about how to use their voices and change it, push it, use it differently, that I wonder, if this is because we have to work with a different body or if a lot of it is basically mainly psychological/socially trained because we grew up having to pretend to be someone we are not. I can to a degree recall that I was using my voice in a way that made it sound more male, but not to the degre that I feel I had to and have to unlearn it.
