What did you do about your voice

[Tina2]

Aloha everyone, I just wanted to know what you did to help your voice to sound more female, was it voice training and if so how long did you train your voice before you saw good results.
Or did you have voice surgery and if so did you have good results.  Thanks for your input or I guess I should say Mahalo nui loa and aloha.

Tina

[Hazumu]

First I bought the Andrea James video.  It was good, but was just a start.

Then I bought the Melanie Phillips video.  It seemed promising, but didn't quite do the trick.

I tried the Exceptional Voice CDs.  They seemed more grounded in practice and technique.  But I still wasn't making the needed leap.

So I purchased 6 one-on-one phone sessions from Kathe Perez of Exceptional Voice.  We could (at her direction) try a bunch of stuff -- different techniques and resonance placements, exercises that illuminated resonances and tonalities my vocal apparatus was capable of  -- and then start focusing on what actually works.

I'll say that the technique we found to use I'd previously tried and rejected as sounding to me to be too phony.  It took a trained ear listening to me to say that in fact it actually had the desired effect on listeners.

Your mileage may vary.  Some need nothing, some can 'get it' from friends, or from a video or two, some need in-person vocal counseling, some will ultimately need some form of surgery (and the surgery is risky and comes with no guarantees.)

Karen

[Kate]

What "works" REALLY varies from person to person. Some have always sounded female, some pick it up naturally, some say their voice changed from HRT, some have professonal voice training, some practice by listening to female announcers, some use video tape lessons, some buy sound measuring equipment to monitor their voice, etc.

I struggled with it a lot in the beginning, and at this point just figure It Is What It Is. It may not be very female, but it's not really male either... and in any case, it's Just Me now. Maybe I'm just being lazy, but at least for me, there's only so much I can do with it within the physical limitations of what I have to work with. So I've stopped obsessing on it, and just try to relax and be me... without "trying" to "do" anything... which ironically is when I sound the most female, lol...

~Kate~

[Lisbeth]

I have not done anything with my voice.  But then I also noticed several years ago that I tended to raise the pitch of my voice without trying when I was out with other trans people.  Generally my voice does not out me except on the phone.

[offthesidewalk]

I have not done anything with my voice. ... ... Generally my voice does not out me except on the phone.

i haven't done much to change my voice either- although i tend to do excellent on phone conversations, but not so much face to face. I always seem to dislike my voice, no matter how feminine it sounds, and i always would like to do better, but i lack the time and aid. *sigh* oh well... maybe singing in the shower does help more than i let on. Lol.

[Moira Midnigh]

I'm still trying to figure out how to do it, but!

I've noticed, long ago, that my voice takes a rather severe change in pitch when speaking in English. And the intonation is very different as well. I'm a crazy, I talk to myself a lot, really, so I guess that's part of the reason. I don't have to pretend. So.

I'm trying to get that to Danish, but it really changes my accent when I do it. The higher the pitch, the more eastern my accent (within the boundaries of the Danish country, of course, and not quite swedish-sounding either ^.^)

And it does sound weird and phony to me when I try it in Danish.

But English, even when I don't pitch too high, I sound much more female. Because of the way I pronouce words, the bits I emphasize, the...the everything. I might sound like a woman with a cold that's been smoking since birth (the cold, actually. Imagine that, a cold with a smoker voice!) but I woman I do sound like!


~Moi

[Kate]

Generally my voice does not out me except on the phone.

I've noticed that people will cut us a LOT of slack with the voice in person if we look reasonably female. They'll make the voice "fit" as long as the other cues match up. It still surprises me, but no one ever seems to notice a thing when I chat with them.

The trouble on the phone is there are so few initial cues to go by. So what I tried to do was start any phone conversation with, "Hi, this is Kate, may I help you?" to set up that expectation, just in case. I don't really make a point to do it these days, as it feels sorta forced and artificial to do at this point, but it helped in the beginning.

I've also noticed my voice sounds the "best" when I don't notice, lol. When I DON'T sit there and try to get the pitch just right, the tone just right, the resonance gone... but just relax and enjoy being ME. I do have a natural "Kate" voice now, which isn't something I "do" so much as FEEL. And while it may not be female, it IS just me... and I actually ENJOY talking to people now. My whole being anymore, from the way I look, sound and move just feels like a celebration, an enjoyment of being I never knew was possible. Again, not that I'm pretty or graceful or sound female, but just... I dunno, congruent? In synch finally?

~Kate~

[Suzy]

The phone is an excellent place to practice.   I love to talk to telemarketers for a while, give them a hard time, and then hang up.  I know I have succeeded if they call me by my wife's name.  Another excellent place to practice is drive-in windows.  If you can order food and get called ma'am, chances are you are doing well.  My own personal experience is that I do best if I remember how I talk to my pets.  It's a very feminine voice....strange, but this works for me.  I also did a program called "Finding Your Female Voice"   See a sample here:


Kristi

[funnygrl]

That's a great one Kristi, and I like this grrl as well:

[cindybc]

Hi Kate I agree with you hon

I had a fairly high pitched voice to start with and didn't realy have any reason to rush as it was I had a  passable voice and just recently begun adjusting it to a more feminine level. I love that girl in you tube, she has a realy good method to practice the voice.

Cindy

[Tina2]

Aloha everyone, thanks for all the great thought and insight on this matter, I guess like most of us, it is a concern, but I think with practice I will succeed, I am still wondering how I am going to pass, and I have not even started HRT or even found a therapist or a Dr. yet.  I do know I want to line up certain things before I do transition so this will give me the time to do all of this and other thinks like electrolasis and maybe some hair transplant (not much but a little).

Maikai ka wahi o Kukana (Susans place is the best)
Aloh nui loa.

Tina

[LynnER]

I'm Purely self taught....

I have been passing this IM around the forums for a while... It gets posted here and there but here it is again.

kk, this is what works... Ive helped many others do the same thing I did... there is a such thing as a perfect voice and it just takes time... hell, if I wasnt sick so often I can sing like Agent-M From Tsunami bomb now LoL

1: Forget about pitch as a goal...
2: speak in your normal voice... feel the top of the voice box, you should feel a vibration, then feel the bottom of your voice box and you should feel a roughly equal vibration....
3: speak in the highest falseto as you can... try to totaly kill all vibration at the top and bottom of the voice box...
4: This is the hard part... learn to speak with the vibration only at the bottom of the voice box and reduce the vibration at the top of your voice box as much as possable...  It uses muscles I didnt know I had till I figured it out... and seriously, it helps in passing physicaly too cuz it helps hide the addams apple if its nott too large by literaly forceing it in and up at the same time.... Literaly you can describe it as "shifting gears" in your voice... after a while it becomes your primary nature to have it shifted all the time and dont even have to think about it.
5: once you have mastered <or atleast gotten> #4 now you add some breathyness to your voice... let out just alittle more air while speaking with out adding any volume... this gives the "marilyn monroe" effect and will make your voice awsome...


Hope this helps.
PS: here is an example of
Before
http://home.earthlink.net/~hellpasopunk/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/barryloRez.mp3
After
http://home.earthlink.net/~hellpasopunk/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/LynnvoiceLoRez.mp3

And a link to a host of examples from other current and former visitors here at susans
https://www.susans.org/forums/index.php/topic,9544.0.html

[tinkerbell]

Well, it took speech therapy for me (I still go to my sessions).  My voice is NOT where I want it to be just yet, but it has improved significantly.  At least I am not called "sir" on the phone anymore!  That's a big plus in my case! 

tink

[Ms Bev]

That makes me wonder if there is an easy way of getting telemarketers to call you in the first place?

Why not get a job as a telemarketer, then you can practice as much as you like?

The telephone is a demonic device!  It took me six months of voice training to get consistently recognized as female, sight unseen.

Bev

[Janet_Girl]

I got the ' Finding your female voice'" from Deep Stealth, but I found that the Spectrogram that you can download and my Sound Recorder on my computer works best.  I can use the Spectrogram to stay within the suggested settings and then record my voice.  I play it back and make changes.  You will read things about feeling the vibration in your voice box.  This is true, but I find that in my case, the vibration is in the lower part of my box.  I get a smoky, kind-of sexy voice like Cher, even tho I did not personally like her, but that is a different story.

I love answering the phone in my new voice, because there is that pause when the caller isn't sure if they reached 'him' or not.  It is really fun when they ask for 'him'  and I answer 'Thats me'.  They sounded dumbfounded.  I am going to start saying 'just a minute' and then come backing my male voice.  I love the confusion. >

,
Janet

[TreeFlower]

I do what LynnER does but learned it in a completely different way.  I exercised those muscles by harmonizing with Shania Twain.  Not because I like her music but because she worked well with my voice.  I pass very well now on the phone.  It takes a lot of practice at first but it comes natural now.  You also need to build up those muscles around your voice box.

[karmatic1110]

I love CandiFLA    She is a good fried of mine and a total sweetie with a great voice.

I am self taught as well.  I just kept recording myself and just saving the best so that I never backtracked.  My voice is all over my Vlog in my signature.

[Virginia87106]

I spend alot of time on the phone and the first interaction is the most important.  It isn't so much the pitch, altho' it needs to be higher than normally male, but it needs to be breathy and melodic.  Think singing, but talking.  And the words used are also important... not simply "thank you", but "thank you so much" with emphasis on the "so".  Also men talk choppy (yes, I am speaking to MtFs) but women draw out words.  Like "hi" is choppy but "Hiiiiiiiiiiiii" is more femme.
Also, when you meet people without talking, men nod their heads, and women smile at each other.  tHIS is a very important cue.
Also men talk very fast, while women talk slower, and say alot of what men would call unneccesary words, like " Yes, I know you are busy, I had such a busy day yesterday, I..........."  You get the idea.

[MaggieB]

The voice is the hardest part of the transition for me. I found a female voice that is easy and I am able to speak loudly with it but my problem is that I don't like the sound of it. It is high and somewhat whiny. Not quite like Micky Mouse but too close for me. Still, I find that sometimes in conversations, I flip over into that voice. When I am laughing, it is my natural sound. I used it to talk to my SO and she asked me if I was sick.... Not what I hoped to hear. She also doesn't like it.
What I do is to try to raise my pitch just a little and also to use a voice that I use to talk to my cat. Is it female sounding? Sorta. I also have a personal voice recorder that I use on car trips and errands to practice and hear what I sound like. CandiFLA on YouTube has some good points as does Andrea James. I suppose I try to do some of all of them. I have the spectrogram too and wow only my highest voice will stop those lower male tones. A work in progress.

Maggie

[LynnER]

Learn to control your resonant harmonics and you will sound female, regardless of what pitch your voice hits....

I'm serious... the largest part of the female voice is <Next to inflection and rythem of speech> is the harmonic resonance...

Think the difference between a piano and guitar. Or when listening to duets where both male and female hit the same note and yet you can still hear the difference.