Recommendations for vocal exercises?

[Bacon]

Hey again, guys. So I'm almost 1 year on T and my voice still hasn't dropped very much. In fact, I find that--if I'm feeling anxious or for some reason "defaulting" to being feminine because of my prior socialization--my voice, at least to me, sounds pretty much exactly the same as pre-T.

Other people have noted how deep my voice has apparently gotten, but I still don't usually hear it. I mean, when I listen to previous recordings of my voice compared to now, there is a difference, but it still sounds in the female range, imo.

HOWEVER, I have always been a talented voice actor. When I want to, I can easily, easily make my voice sound extremely deep and posh, which is what I would love for my voice naturally to sound like. However, this does require a consciousness on my part and is not automatic at all, and I fear that if I were to start talking this way all of a sudden, it would seem rather strange and like I am affecting an accent.

Any recommendations for vocal exercises to deepen my voice naturally and get the voice I want? I have seen TONS of different vocal exercises for such a thing online, but before I pick any one routine to practice daily, I wanted to ask you guys if you had any first-hand recs that helped you.

[Dena]

Not exactly who you expected to respond but when you talk, try relaxing the muscles between your larynx and your jaw. This is how men normally speak and it causes them to use the chest voice. It can drop your voice over half an octave and when combined with a less expressive speech pattern, should help you sound more masculine. You might go over to our section and learn about PRAAT which will give you hard numbers that can be compared against this chart

[Kylo]

Just practice speaking in the deepest chest-voice you can. It might also be that it just sounds weird to you and is actually coming along just fine. If you really want to gauge, record the voice every couple of weeks to compare.

My voice sounds deeper to me that it does to others. At 8 months though, it now gets gendered male by anyone who hears it, so it's clearly getting somewhere. I practice pretty much every other day, but I don't think that makes a huge difference - there was a point at which it passed a threshold between male-female and that was likely just the T, not my learning anything new about talking.

[Ryuichi13]

I found an app in the Play store called Voice Pitch Analyser.  Its simple to use and helped me determine that my voice was indeed in the male range, even when I was unsure. 

It's not as indept as PRAAT, but once I found out I was in the male range, I was no longer dysphoric about my voice.

Ryuichi

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[Bacon]

Thanks, guys! I'll try those analyzers and see what's up, as well as continuing to do vocal exercises.

I don't call enough strangers to know if I'd get maam'ed or sir'ed on the phone, but I think probably the former, unless I was putting some effort into deepening my voice.

But interestingly (and somewhat comfortingly) is that pretty much 100% of the time now when people SEE me first, and then start talking to me, I could be talking in what I consider to be my most annoying, feminine, high-pitched tone of voice, but they'll continue to call me "bro"/"dude"/"man"/"sir", so I guess my voice--even at its most fem--must not be THAT bad.