Can you Sing after Voice Surgery ?

[KarmaGirl]

I was wondering if any of you that have had Voice Surgery with Yeson and/or Haben were able to sing well after all the healing has taken place?

I LOVE to sing, but I can't hit the Female notes past a certain point, EVEN with my Voice Training.  It makes me really sad, and I DO NOT want to sing in my male voice...after all I transitioned several years ago--There's NO going back.LOL

In a PERFECT world, I would be back with my old bandmates singing my way through life.   

Cheers!

[Dena]

If you follow the threads, voice surgery can go wrong. We had two examples of sining after surgery and the storage timed out on one but the link on the other one is still good.
https://www.susans.org/forums/index.php/topic,194899.0.html

[anjaq]

I know there are at least 2 professional singers and one professional musician who also sings who had voice surgery and are still singing. I know of one other singer who says she still can sing, but has some issues with some of the higher notes she could hit before and now are diplophonic - she did not have the time and dedication to find out more and how to resolve this though. I am sadly not a singer, but in speech therapy , I have no problems hitting notes from C3 up to about G5, although that upper part would really have to be trained to be useable and clean. I also hit a whistle register that is a bit above the high C. The only issues I have is at the passagio (about C4) and generally I am just not a good singer, cannot identify or hit notes well and so on.

[KarmaGirl]

I know there are at least 2 professional singers and one professional musician who also sings who had voice surgery and are still singing. I know of one other singer who says she still can sing, but has some issues with some of the higher notes she could hit before and now are diplophonic - she did not have the time and dedication to find out more and how to resolve this though. I am sadly not a singer, but in speech therapy , I have no problems hitting notes from C3 up to about G5, although that upper part would really have to be trained to be useable and clean. I also hit a whistle register that is a bit above the high C. The only issues I have is at the passagio (about C4) and generally I am just not a good singer, cannot identify or hit notes well and so on.

Ooh good to know! Where did they go to get their Fem voices? I'm curious. Yeson or Haben? Or?

I wondered because I can hit those "STING/Police" high notes, and I have a great falsetto, but it's not a true high note. 

I'm asking this because I am thinking of NOT getting my adam's apple reduced since you can't really see it on me. I'm getting a mid lift with my FFS and started to think about the idea possibly but then I was told you shouldn't get it done if you will be getting Voice Surgery. Am I right?

My speaking voice isn't bad at all.  But I do get lazy around my close friends, and then I sound like an older woman rather than someone my age.

I've also done VO work for video games (in my male persona) and I was hoping it would help me break into the female VO world.  Granted, I could probably market myself to use both voices, but then, I would be constantly reminded of my male form...something I am not comfortable with, since I have worked so hard to get to where I am passing 99.9 % of the time visually and vocally.

I took lessons from a speech therapist who is known in the Trans world out here for doing a great job, and I'm happy with the results, but as I said I DO miss singing so much.

Thanks for giving me some hope.

I'll probably PM you all for more info.

Cheers!

[cindianna_jones]

I have a close friend of thirty years who has decided to Fbomb it and solo with her natural and lower voice. She lives in Florida. She performs nearly every week. She has a great circle of friends and people who follow her. If you do have a good singing voice, you should consider surgery very carefully. You may lose your range.

[Dena]

If you depend on your voice for a living, you need to be very careful. Both doctors have had surgical issues with a voice didn't come out as hoped for or expected. My decision to have surgery was because my voice couldn't get above 190HZ which put it into the upper male range. Even after surgery, I need to use a trained voice or I am around 140HZ or mid male range.

The adams apple can be risky. If an unskilled surgeon take off to much, it will destroy your voice, Dr Haben can fix it but at the expense of having a sining voice. I had my adams apple shaved years ago and it didn't damage my voice. Dr Haben didn't have to correct for anything and I only required VFS.

Not knowing exactly what will be done in the FFS, I can't advice you about the risks that would affect voice surgery.

[anjaq]

Ooh good to know! Where did they go to get their Fem voices? I'm curious. Yeson or Haben?

All of the ones I know went to Dr Kim (Yeson).

One of them did a public Yeson Video: - she also does stuff with Video games and does music and vocals.

I also did not have an adams apple shave - not needed - not sure if the others did that or not. I believe they probably did not have it. My reason was that its not that visible and that a scar would be much more noticeable and lead to more questions...

If you do have a good singing voice, you should consider surgery very carefully. You may lose your range.

One has to be careful indeed. Personally, my vocal range was 3.5 octaves before the surgery and now it is 3 octaves, but that includes all those rather low volume low notes and the not really clean upper limit notes - But I am not a singer, so I do not know how well that range can be used. It seems that not much range is lost at least with the Yeson surgery, but it may be harder to control the voice, I seem to have more trouble keeping a note now and in high end notes I sometimes get diplophonia. I think the tuning of the vocal folds is more responsive now to muscle tension - less muscle effort does more of a pitch change, hence it takes more control to maintain a pitch to sing a note... but thats just my theory.

Definitely if you want to keep a singing voice, you should have glottoplasty only, not that CTA procedure on top of it.

[Dena]

Range improvement is relative. My original trained voice was really bad and ranged between 130 and 196 HZ. Post surgical, my trained voice runs between about 140 and 500 Hz with the sweet spot somewhere around 210 hz. Either surgeon could accomplish this if they both preformed the same tie on the voice.

I think the primary reason I saw so much improvement was because my original untrained voice was comfortable around 80 - 100 Hz. I suspect few males have voices that low so only a few people will see that type of improvement. I would have been happy with just moving into the feminine range but the additional range was an unexpected bonus. 

[anjaq]

Well - it always depends on what you consider your range. I was at a different doctor once and they measured range but measured much smaller range because they did not take into account the notes that I had to put effort into reaching them. My speaking range certainly was only 90-170 Hz pre OP, above that I had to strain to get to 240 Hz but it sounded fake and above that its head voice - which went up to over 900 Hz pre OP. Post OP the comfortable range is 160-220 Hz, I can still go down to almost 100 Hz if I want, and the 240 Hz still is the break point into head voice and above that I can reach about 800 Hz - on good days its a bit higher.

[GeekGirl]

I think the clip is really cool because it goes back and forth between the pre- and post-op voices. So I do sing a lot and I can't help but sing in a lower register since that's the voice I have right now. I have several professional recordings with me singing in them (I kind of sound like Bernard Sumner of New Order). Sadly, when I produced music for MTV, I didn't do much singing at all. Just vocal samples that I pitch-formanted up. While it would be nice to continue singing, for me, finally getting the proper pitch in my voice would really open up a lot of possibilities for me and it would finally give me peace of mind. So I'm willing to sacrifice some range for a better (let's say better rather than higher) pitch.

What is especially sad for me is when I'm on a call with a hospital and they have to bounce me between departments and one receptionist calls me ma'am and the second calls me sir only to have the third call me ma'am (and vice versa sometimes). I keep thinking to myself, "What do the people who called me sir think I am? A gay man? That would suck!" When people see me, there is never a problem, but when I talk over the phone, there's always a problem. It would be nice to experience less of the problem.

Just counting the days until July!

[anjaq]

What is especially sad for me is when I'm on a call with a hospital and they have to bounce me between departments and one receptionist calls me ma'am and the second calls me sir only to have the third call me ma'am (and vice versa sometimes).

Same here - when I talked to people in person they sometimes commented on my voice, but most of the time it was like "oh you should do radio because you have such a nice low pitch voice" or something like that, so people perceived it often as something positive, but of course some would say "why do you have a masculine voice" or a kid would ask" why do you talk like a man" - on the phone it was about 50:50. When I answered a phone and talked to someone and that someone would later call my work colleague , he would often tell her that he was talking to a Mr XXX before about this and that and she would be totally amazed at how this could be - how that guy could mistake me for a man... but thats just what happened on the phone.
No more, thanks to Dr Kim

[starlaunch15]

I definitely do not want to lose my singing voice, so I do not plan on having surgery.

Fortunately, my voice passes without surgery.

[Laura_Squirrel]

I definitely do not want to lose my singing voice, so I do not plan on having surgery.

Fortunately, my voice passes without surgery.

Well, I have no intention of having this surgery done. But, when you have any type of surgery done on your throat, it's going to affect it for a little while, at least. I remember when I had my tonsils taken out when I was around 33 and that pretty much ruined my singing voice for a while. But, to be fair, since my tonsils were severely infected, that was screwing up my singing voice too.

[anjaq]

Amy is a professional singer as well, she also does music teaching and performs on stage, she is living off her music and singing and she had surgery at Yeson. Her username here is AmyBerlin - I do not want to link to her public website, but I think she still may be reading the forums, possibly. She also is probably still in the Yeson Facobook group. She certainly can tell you how well singing works after surgery. IIRC, she said that it was hard for the first half year as she had to re-learn a lot, but eventually things worked out great.

[KarmaGirl]

Thanks to all of you that posted your thoughts. Again, I really get depressed thinking about how I cannot sing anymore.

I can certainly manipulate my voice well enough to pass without worry, BUT I hate it when I get lazy and it starts to go down.

I'm def going to chat with the folks at YESON.  Although, I'm not a fan of NORTH KOREA at the moment with all their scary nuclear thingies going on recently.

HUGS!

[anjaq]

Ah - North Korea is always a threat for decades - I would not worry too much about it - at least not more now than in the past. And seriously, if they would nuclearbomb Seoul, then we have WW3 and it would not be safer elsewhere anyways. But as I said, they live with that threat for decades, its ok to go there, I believe.

Regarding singing - its a risk. It seems that several voice surgery patients can sing after surgery, even professional, there is even a korean trans band whose lead singer had VFS with Dr Kim - but how well they do and if that would be enough for opera house singing or more suited for smaller events or electronically modified singing - I have no idea. I believe no music star who is iin the charts has done VFS yet - Amy is a singer in a band that makes CDs and they do events in clubs, Jamie does music for electronic rave music - I am not sure about the others... but I think those two qualify definitely as good professional singers and musicians.

What is your goal with singing? Is it more about singing as a hobby or singing as a profession?

[GeekGirl]

After reading all of these replies, here's what I think about the singing issue. I don't think a singer post-surgery will ever lose the ability to sing. It's just that the range may be more limited after surgery. However, I think this might be a temporary thing. I would hazard a guess that after surgery, a singer is going to sound really hoarse for a while and after everything is healed, the vocal chords will have to be trained again to be able to sing in the new slightly more limited range. I would also hazard a guess (one too many hazards, I know) that over time a more acceptable range will just happen with training, perhaps not to extent of the original range, but something that, in itself, would be fine for the purposes of singing the way we wish to be heard. If I had the option to remove the lowest four notes of my singing range, why not? I wouldn't want to sound like a woman who sounds like a man. I wouldn't miss those four notes. I would just find a subset of the new range I am comfortable singing in and use that from that point on.

The more complicated question is not "can you sing?" but "when will you be able to sing?" since that depends on your healing time and motivation to train your new voice. In the end, our sound is basically air passing through a pipe. We are just working with a slightly smaller pipe post-surgery. (An overly simplistic explanation, I know, and it doesn't account for vibrations, resonance, and other factors that alter our sound.)

[KarmaGirl]

What is your goal with singing? Is it more about singing as a hobby or singing as a profession?

I use to sing back up vocals for many bands from all over in my younger days.  And as my "guy" self I did many video game voices.  The money is great!  But, I want to be the ME that I am now and it's a struggle since I can't reach the high notes (within the girl range).  And it's also a struggle to do the female voices that demand the high ranges.

Luckily, I will be doing the female voices for a game that won't come out until 2 years from now    It takes that long to make a game...or longer.  So I have nothing to show for it until it's out.  I'm also looking for a new agency as well since my old one wasn't keen on my changes sadly.  Oh well.

My speaking voice isn't a problem. I pass all the time with it. It's just my range.

So yeah, It'd be nice to make the income I use to. 

I don't think I need my trachea shaved since it's not really noticeable. BUT  after my FFS with DiMaggio in May I guess I will see if the Lipo under my chin will reveal it or not. 

I was thinking if I DO the Voice surgery that it will be sometime next year around MAY.  That should give me time to figure things out and recoup from my costs.

[anjaq]

A trach shave can change your voice no matter if you do voice surgery afterwards or not - and Dr Kim does not like trach shaves...

Also i think the vocal range does not really expand with surgery. Not the overlal range. Maybe the higher notes are more easy in some cases... My vocal range pre op was 82-880 Hz, now it is 110-780 Hz, so I lost a bit, 3 ocateves instead of 3.5 I think, but I gained access to some funny screaming pitches at >1000 Hz - so thats a bonus.

You can make money by doing voices for video games? Is that hard to do? It sounds like fun and if it is paid well it sounds like a nice secondary job to do.

[KayXo]

A trach shave can change your voice no matter if you do voice surgery afterwards or not - and Dr Kim does not like trach shaves...

I had mine done by Dr. Brassard. He just shaved enough so voice wouldn't be compromised. I pass 100% of the time, including on the phone. Without this surgery, I would be "outed" as my Adam's apple was quite prominent. Very happy with results.