Upper range - natural vs trained vs surgically changed?

[anjaq]

Hi.

I wonder how well you can go into the upper voice range and how it improved with voice training. And also how long it took until you regained it if you had voice surgery - if you regained all of it or if you lost a portion of it? Or even gained something at the top?

My voice rainge untrained was something like 100-500 with a very pronounced break at around 350 Hz.
With voice training, I liberated a lot of range and have a spectrum now of 80-940 Hz with a much less pronounced break that I can pass over without too much effort.

How did those ranges change with others, especially after a voice surgery?

I feel a bit that I am one of few to get into such an upper range, so I would like to hear if anyone else got there naturally and what a VFS does to that part?

Thanks

[kwala]

Hi.

I wonder how well you can go into the upper voice range and how it improved with voice training. And also how long it took until you regained it if you had voice surgery - if you regained all of it or if you lost a portion of it? Or even gained something at the top?

My voice rainge untrained was something like 100-500 with a very pronounced break at around 350 Hz.
With voice training, I liberated a lot of range and have a spectrum now of 80-940 Hz with a much less pronounced break that I can pass over without too much effort.

How did those ranges change with others, especially after a voice surgery?

I feel a bit that I am one of few to get into such an upper range, so I would like to hear if anyone else got there naturally and what a VFS does to that part?

Thanks

These are really good questions.  I can't comment on the after surgery part (because I haven't had it done!) but I can tell you a bit about my range from a trained vs. untrained standpoint in terms of singing and speaking.  I sang as a tenor many years ago and had a high chest voice that went up to about a Bb5 and could eek out a C5 when necessary, but my voice was loud and boomy.  I bottomed out around Ab2 but I hardly ever sang down there. I started speaking (self-taught) in a trained female voice and didn't want to give up singing so I decided I needed to sing in that voice too, and over time I was able to increase my range in that register.   Now, I sing from around middle C up to about A5 (880hz, enough to sing most female songs-- I can go higher but it's not pretty lol) and speak around D above middle C in a mixed voice that resonates primarily in my throat.   When singing, I use this mix and also pure head voice for the top notes.  On good days, speaking and singing like this is a piece of cake, but if it's super dry or I have a cold, or a long night of singing, talking it gets really croaky.  I'm hoping a glottoplasty will eliminate this because the voice will be more natural and not forced and squeezed so much.  Also, my trained voice still isn't perfect and has some "male-ness" and a "falsetto-y" sound in the upper parts that I've never been able to completely eliminate.

I still have a lot to figure out (time off of work, etc) before I commit but if I do go through with this, I would most definitely submit speaking and singing videos (before and after) since I know a lot of people have asked questions about it, especially the singing part.

[JLT1]

Hi.

I feel a bit that I am one of few to get into such an upper range, so I would like to hear if anyone else got there naturally and what a VFS does to that part?

Thanks

I went to a voice instructor who specializes in voice therapy.  She has been helping the transgender community for 20 some years.  She significantly increased my range without going into the head voice.  I can, and do sing soprano without falsetto.

It was a lot of work and it took a lot of time.  However, it was less expensive than surgery.

Jennifer   

[kwala]

I went to a voice instructor who specializes in voice therapy.  She has been helping the transgender community for 20 some years.  She significantly increased my range without going into the head voice.  I can, and do sing soprano without falsetto.

It was a lot of work and it took a lot of time.  However, it was less expensive than surgery.

Jennifer   

Even cis-women sopranos sing "soprano" in mostly head voice...The range that separates sopranos from mezzos and altos is around G5 to C6 and I have never heard anyone, even children, sing up there without the use of head register.  Any chance you could post a clip?

[ThePhoenix]

I have never trained my voice or anything like that.  But I did once have a person sit there in a trans* support group with a pitch meter and measure the fundamental pitch of my normal speaking voice.  The person came up to me after the meeting and informed me that I'm a B3.  B3 is 246.94 Hz. 

No idea what my range is at the high end or the low end, but I offer that data point for whatever value it may have.

[JLT1]

Even cis-women sopranos sing "soprano" in mostly head voice...The range that separates sopranos from mezzos and altos is around G5 to C6 and I have never heard anyone, even children, sing up there without the use of head register.  Any chance you could post a clip?

Hi,

"Darn-it Jim, I'm a chemist not a music instructor.." My understanding is that head voice and chest voice refer to the area of the body where one feels "buzzing" when one sings. There is also a range where one does not feel "buzzing" or feels very little buzzing called the "bridge" or the "mix" where the resonance is split so there is more than just head or chest.   I go into the higher end of alto or lower end of soprano with the mix. I do not feel the buzzing.  I can also sing that range in falsetto but it's a little airy.. The higher end of soprano is head voice.  I do believe we could be talking about semantics..or not. 

However, I don't know how to post a recording.  If you would be so kind as to inform me, I'll give it a go.

Jennifer

[anjaq]

You can post temporary recordings with vocaroo, they are deleted after a while though, or you can post on soundcloud.

Those descriptions of head voice or falsetto are all very mushy because different people, even voice trainers seem to understand different things when hearing these names. As I understand it there is a transition of registers happening always at a certain point - in female and male voices. It is above the normal speaking range but women tend to cross it sometimes when speaking and when singing in a higher range everyone has to cross it. Women seem to be able to cross it easier, while male voices tend to break in that area more. It seems to have to do with the strength and tension of the muscles involved. The way I understood it from what my voice therapist said, one muscle , the CT muscle, is mostly responsible for th elower part of the voice when it comes to pitch changes, the vocalis muscle is responsible for th eupper part and the area where one has to let go and the other has to take over is the "break". If the takeover is smooth, there is no break, but that takes effort in a masculinized voice. My theory is that this is in part because the CT muscle has to put up a lot of tension to get the pitch into the break area and has to let loose of all that tension gradually to give in to the vocalis muscle. That means a controlled relaxation of a tightly tensed muscle. In a female voice I believe the CT muscle does not have to tighten that much to get to that point, since the base pitch already is higher and closer to that universal and gender-independent breaking point, so less tension has to be given up and the transition is easier. Its just my theory

Anyways, thanks for the input already - I know I was fascinated to see how that break and the upper ranges to make sound in can change with therapy. I am not a singer, so all I do is sing "aaa" and "ooo" and such in thse ranges , but my voice therapist is kind of fascinated that I can do this and that it does not sound falsetto. In one assessment the woman analyzing my pitch range tried to sing before me and I was supposed to sing after. At some point in the upper range she (!) said she cannot go up any more, if I can do so, I should do so on my own. So I definitely have a good upper range and would like to know wht happens to it with surgery. The surgery is a great benefit at the lower part, which is where most of the daily action is happening, but I would be a bit sad if I had to give up that upper range as a price to pay for that. Thats why I am asking.

(Surgery is supposed to be just 10 days ahead, except I am not sure it will happen with my stupid bronchitis of the past days, so it may be I have to postpone it.)

[JLT1]

Anjaq,

You also posted on Jennygirl's Yeson thread which is good.  Have you thought about sending a PM to her?  She is a very nice person and has helped me on a few things..

Basically, they put a band around the vocal folds to shorten them.  I do not see why this would cause a problem.  However, my vocal instructor, worked at a hospital for her first 20 years after getting her PhD in voice was very adamant that I not get surgery.  Her reasoning was that the surgeon could damage the vocal folds during surgery and was not based on any change in range.   However, I did not ask her that question directly and we did not discuss Yeson's technique.  She did spend most of her career working with people who had throat work done by surgeons who were operating in the throat for other reasons so she may have had a bias.

Unrelated but possibly relevant is that she was adamant that I not have my Adam's apple shaved for the same reason.  I did anyway and she is not happy with me.  It's been 10 months and I'm just getting back what I had prior to surgery.  It's also still somewhat painful to sing in the upper range. 

I'll try posting some voice tones sometime this week...

Good luck and I hope you get well.

Hugs,

Jennifer

 

   

[anjaq]

Yes, I did inform myself a lot about the surgeries and Yeson. Some here say I must be the one who has the most information collected over the past 1.5 years - I know that some had an increase in the upper range, sone have not, but I am not sure how much of these changes were because of  or a lack of voice training before and after VFS. So I guess it will be my expoerience to make and share and see what I can say about it. I hope I will still be able to squeak and not loos that. It will be a surprise....

[kwala]

Hi,

"Darn-it Jim, I'm a chemist not a music instructor.." My understanding is that head voice and chest voice refer to the area of the body where one feels "buzzing" when one sings. There is also a range where one does not feel "buzzing" or feels very little buzzing called the "bridge" or the "mix" where the resonance is split so there is more than just head or chest.   I go into the higher end of alto or lower end of soprano with the mix. I do not feel the buzzing.  I can also sing that range in falsetto but it's a little airy.. The higher end of soprano is head voice.  I do believe we could be talking about semantics..or not. 

However, I don't know how to post a recording.  If you would be so kind as to inform me, I'll give it a go.

Jennifer

Thanks for replying!  This explanation makes a lot more sense to me.  The terminology can be very confusing and even vocal pedagogues seem to disagree when it comes to terms like falsetto, head voice, mixed voice, reinforced falsetto, etc.  My point was only that there is a limit to how high any voice can go regardless of age or gender and the upper half of the soprano range simply must include some form of head resonance.  Unfortunately, for most biologically male voice boxes, the tonal difference between head and chest register is very radical due to the thickness of the cords.  For this reason, it is often imperceptible when a trained soprano woman shifts between registers.

Rather than use so many terms, I like to simplify it and call everything up there "head voice" and then refer to placement (or the buzz you speak of) to account for the difference in volume and quality. 

I really want to have this surgery done, but I am still weary of losing my belted high register when singing.  My voice has come a long way in the last 2-3 years but I do feel like it has reached its limit and only surgery can take me to the next level.  I have a voice that mostly passes but it's never been second nature and requires a great deal of effort.  Undergoing the procedure could yield amazing results in the long run, but having to start over and learn to navigate a new instrument is somewhat scary!  I'm not a smoker and live on the east coast, so hopefully Dr. Haben is the right choice for me.

[Virginia]

Forty years of using my voice and suffering in silence, I had no idea how important it was for my alters to have voices of their own. My female alter started voice training 3 weeks after my breakdown when she became self aware in 2009; my child alter developing a bloodcurdling scream immediately after he became self aware 2 years later. My alters having a way to express themself was an important precursor to me beginning the process of recovering my memories of childhood trauma that began afterwards in flashback and nightmares.

I have never had any formal singing lessons, can't even read music. My speaking voice was 90-110 hz when my female began developing her voice; 200hz (G below middle C) was about as high as she could hit. She used the "Deep Stealth" voice training lesson manual available for free on the net, monitored her progress with Gram50 & Audacity. Later in her practice she switched to singing along with female and male vocalists in her range (Karen Carpenter, Carly Simon and Neil Young).

In less than a year, my female alter was recognized as a woman 100% of the time on the telephone by her voice alone with no mention of her name or any references to indicate she is a girl. (Quite handy pretending to be my Mom while I was closing/transferring her accounts when she was moving to the nursing home). These days her low is my hi. My female alter has a gravelly Sophia Bush/Demi Moore voice, doesn't bat an eye at leading Rosary at Church or joining in chants at yoga with her girlfriends. She is an alto like my Mother, can comfortably hit 500hz (C5), 750ish (G5) when she adds a soft breathy quality like many woman do to extend her range. My child alter's 1150hz scream is the same as my wife's.

The singing is nothing to brag about but you can get an idea of how far she came in a heartfelt voice-over duet I did with her after 2 1/2 years of practice:

[anjaq]

Thats a cool idea to do such a duet I wish I could sing, I would have recorded some song before the VFS. Ah well, now its too late for that