Quote from: DawnOday on August 06, 2018, 05:09:51 PM
Qu812 I have to disagree that pitch is not important. Of course forward resonance and breathing are all intertwined.
Let me put it this way:
If you were to look at all of the vocal variables on their own,
Pitch is the one that would be least likely to get you clocked out of all of them.
Particularly in the classic "telephone test"
Quote from: DawnOday on August 06, 2018, 05:09:51 PMYou don't have to be dead on, a variance of one or two notes is expected...
The videos I linked above prove that you can be off from the "female range" by much, much more than "a variance of one or two notes." The lady in the news stays almost entirely in a range of <100-200Hz. Janeway ends many of her phrases about that low as well, often speaks comfortably around 130-170, and reserves 220+ for elevated speaking or the peaks of her phrases.
I also made the point that pitch, out of all vocal variables, is the least improvable. Everyone's voice is different, but your range is what it is. I say this as someone who spent years passing in broadcasting, using a very narrow upper portion of my range to do so. (I was strongly aware of what sounded passable and what did not.)
The fact is, maintaining such vigilance is incredibly bad for the key problem of gender dysphoria.
If you're constantly aware of what you're doing with your voice, judging your performance moment to moment, worried about the next phrase you're going to say, worried about errant sounds, afraid that coughing fit you just had at work didn't sound womanly at all... etc etc... that is actually really, really unhealthy for you psychologically in the long-term.
The whole point of transition is to liberate yourself from the experience of feeling like an impostor in your own skin, to keep the voice from being a prison. There's obviously value in moderate training that gets the voice "out of the basement" so to say, but trying to only operate the voice at only its highest, most feminine-sounding frequencies takes great effort and will burn it out rather quickly...
...and that's on a good day. What about days when you have a cold, or talked a lot the day before, and everything sounds terrible? I had a "Ukrainian accent" I would slip into to cover myself in these cases, but that's really putting up a serious facade, and the kind of acting that makes one's insufficiency glaringly obvious.
This is why I'm such an advocate for voice feminization glottoplasty. As I said, peoples' conception that this surgery helps you by pushing you to higher pitches is only half true - it does that, but that's not what makes you sound more female in-and-of-itself. The surgery makes all of the pitches in your range that you already had access to sound more feminine on their own, independently of what part of your range you're using.
There are great options available in South Korea, North America, and Europe just within the last 5-10 years. I'm sure more will pop up soon. It's also a relief that it's generally only half the price or less of GRS bottom-surgery. When I transitioned over a decade ago, this kind of glottoplasty was not available or widely known, and voice surgery was generally "for the desperate." But if I were in the same position now as then, I would definitely make feminization glottoplasty my top surgical priority. Not that my GRS itself wasn't a Blessing from the Divine, but the improvement in my quality of life since having voice since surgery is beyond measure!
