So, I thought I will start a little thread now to ask questions and describe what I am doing to get my voice into shape.
As a background, I transitioned at age 23 that was 15 years ago. I did the Melanie Anne Phillips sort of voice training back then and managed to get my voice from the old male voice to a more feminine range that passed rather ok for a while. With aging I lost some of that good voice until recently I keep getting asked about the voice and people even misgendering me, so I know I have to do something. Also I have a sore throat and a bit of pain most of the time now for many months to almost 2 years. My fear is that I damaged my voice with doing a too high pitched voice for so long.
My original speaking frequency was at 100 Hz and I tried to record that now but it took me forever to get back down there and it hurt - so I definitely did some permanent change to my voice with voice training alone. Just it is not enough, I got up to 140-160 Hz speaking range, which still is in the male range, maybe androgynous. I am not sure about resonance, I think I am also sort of halfway there in that aspect.
The 160 Hz is comfortable for me now, but not good. going higher makes me loose voice control (pitch variations, loudness,...).

So I decided on some steps to do:
Next week I will be at a voice clinic to check my voice box, vocal cords, and speaking generally, also probably frequency range (i will see if I can and have to use the old oice as well). So I will know my base parameters then, learn about flaws in my speaking and if my voice was damaged.

In the same week I will start voice training to get rid of the flaws and maybe also start to correct any damage that may be there.

Then in like half a year or so I will have a decision point - whether voice therapy rally helped me enough or did not get the results I need. At that point I will decide if I can avoid getting voice surgery or not - or if I want it anyways. I am already saving up money just in case I need it for that.
In case I want or need voice surgery (very likely!!) the next point is where I will have a question that maybe someone can answer.

I hear all the great experiences from Yeson but wonder if it would work on me as I obviously am starting very low originally though higher in the now permanently changed voice. To get from 100 Hz up to 200 Hz i need a lot of work done there. And the resonances will not change so there may be a mismatch then with pitch and resonance that I may not be able to control if it affects resonances that I need to use to speak loud.
The other option is Dr Thomas but his method is so vastly invasive and leaves a scar on the neck that I am worried about going there. It also is more expensive and the website has warnings on it saying that there is a substantial risk of loosing voice quality, loudness and more. On the other hand I heard a good example of it and a friend of mine phoned with two of his patients and they have great voices - he does correct resonance as well as I understand it and thus no mismatch can occur. I guess his method would not care if I start that low as it is a complete reconstruction of the voice box anyways. Pkus no resonance control is needed afterwards.

What do you think - is Yeson or Thomas the better choice for a 100 Hz starting voice? I would prefer Yeson, but if he has to do a 50% suture and I still have issues with resonance I would have to think. Thomas seems more risky in general though and more invasive but maybe thats needed for such a low starting voice?

Anyways. I will keep you updated if you are interested and if someone has good tipps, please chip in

As someone with one paralyzed vocal cord that only functions because of an implant (and is therefore not capable of being retrained - training implies neuro-muscular response), I've been looking at voice surgery for some time.

My original inclination was to go with Dr. Thomas in Portland, despite the invasiveness of the procedure and the less than perfect success rate. Even with all that, he seems to have a higher than typical success rate for voice surgery so he seemed to be the "best" of a bad set of choices.

Then I began to learn about Yeson, right here at Susans. After listening to numerous women's before and after voices, I am extremely encouraged.

One thing I've been able to do fairly successfully is remove most of the male resonance from my voice. This alone raised pitch a small amount and that pitch increase, plus my age, has let me pass in many situations so far using my voice as-is.

But it's clearly not an ideal voice. I've already written to Yeson and they indicated that yes, they can work with my medical situation. Now I am not yet prepared to go to Korea for this surgery as I have a couple additional milestones before going full time next year, and then the first thing I'll do after full time is go for voice surgery.

So my question to you would be, have you practiced just removing male resonance from the voice, ignoring pitch entirely for now? Because, and this is just a guess, even with a 100 Hz starting voice, working to remove male resonance may get you to 110-120 Hz, and then Yeson, with an average 75Hz increase would put you squarely in the lower female range at 185-195.

Note: For some beautiful lower female voices, listen to Diana Krall or Jane Monheit. You can find their videos on YouTube. Both are modern jazz singers.

My own voice, with male resonance suppressed, is 145-160 Hz. Yeson said because of the implant, and assuming they can perform the surgery even after the exam, that I ought to expect about 50Hz increase. That would be more than enough for me.

My final thought to you is that I understand the Yeson procedure is not just non-invasive but also reversible. So in the worst case, you could still go to Dr. Thomas. But personally, I doubt you're going to need it if you go to Yeson.

LizMarie, I'm not sure Yeson's procedure is reversible. They permanently remove a mucus membrane and some vocal fold tissue before suturing them together. It's not as if they just suture them up in their original state and could just remove the suture to reverse it. I may be mistaken, but I've heard this rumor a couple of times now and it needs to be verified before spreading too much. I can ask Dr. Kim during my follow-up consultation on Tuesday.

anjaq, when Dr. Kim was explaining the procedure and results to me he went over the fact that the results are limited to what he has to work with in the beginning. Someone who starts at 70Hz could only expect to get up to 155Hz for example. However, starting at 100Hz means you'd be at 175Hz, which is definitely above the male range and close enough to the female low range that I wouldn't expect there to be a problem really. Even so, you could even use a tiny bit of effort to just raise it a little higher, which would be a lot easier starting from 175Hz and trying to go to 200Hz then going from 100Hz and trying to go to 200Hz.

Basically, to me the surgery makes sense no matter where your starting frequency is since in the end you'll still potentially have to work on raising the pitch if you start with a lower frequency, but after the surgery it takes less work to get up to the higher frequencies. Also, resonance is something you have to work on with or without surgery (if going with Yeson) so that cancels out in either case too, although from the sound of it it falls into place easier after the surgery.

Obviously for me I would recommend Yeson due to the minimally-invasive nature of the procedure and the consistently good results I've heard (and hope to be a part of in a couple weeks!).

Thank you for that clarification, Sarah!

Even if it is not reversible, Yeson still seems like the far better option, at least to me with my condition.

I know of one person who has done a Y suture and it was for undisclosed reasons not successful (not with Yeson AFAIK). This was done after a VFS involving tensioning of the vocal cords, also not successful. She then went to Dr Thomas to do the invasive method and got decent results, so that option is possible, but she might have gotten better results if she had no previous VFS.

I have done some voice training off Melanie Anne Philips voice training tapes back in 1998 and had rather ok success removing a lot of the male resonance. It did in fact increase, as you said, Liz, my pitch by about 30-40 Hz at the low end and actually about 50 Hz on average with some increased pitch control. So if I speak at my regular voice now, I cannot go down to 100 Hz but only to about 130 Hz due to these changes. Sadly my resonance control is not perfect. It is a huge difference from the pre-everything voice.
Now I will do the striptease as this is of course the topic of this thread and give you audio.
Compare these two and you will see what I am saying up there.

This is my best approximation of my old voice. It took me like 10 minutes to actually get there. I had to drop resonance control and pitch and this was a huge psychological barrier for me plus it is actuall ypainful to speak that way. When I did this recordeing, afterwards I could not talk for a day because I had throat pain, that was probably because of an infection though. http://vocaroo.com/i/s09LNxeumIQA

And this is my rather relaxed regular speaking voice now. It is averaging actually about 160 Hz in this recording but the range is between 140 Hz in some passages to 180 Hz in others which is because I do actually use more of the pitch range now than I would have done in the old days 15 years ago. This voice by the way usually passes rather ok if given visual clues, so I get sirred on the phone, I get kids saying "but you speak like a boy" or "you are a boy!"-"Why do you think that?"-"Because you sound like a boy!"  but most people just assume I do have some voice issue maybe and dont ask too much, except if they miss visual clues again in bad light for example or if I am tired and the range then drops from 140-180 to 130-160 or even gets more monotonous at 130-140. http://vocaroo.com/i/s13PtrJOLUp8

I guess what I would like is to get up to like 190 or 200 Hz with as much effort as i am doing now to control resonance anyways - which is why I somehow hope that a VFS could bring the 100 Hz that I am already adding 30-50 with resonance control to 175 base frequency to which I would then hope to add again 30-50 Hz with resonance control and be at 200. I dont know if that makes sense though or if that increase by resonance control would go away or how that works anyways.

Next week I have my consultation to check out if maybe some of the resonance issues I still have are from damage at the vocal cords and I will also have my first voice training session hopefully (or rather the intro session) and check if I can get resonance doen better and improve my speaking to make it less straineous, which sadly it is now. Also it is rather limited in volume now and has been in the past years, so I guess I have the same issue already that others do have post VFS and that only can be corrected with training , I guess.

Alot of improvment anjaq....I think you sound good! I was tempted to make recording so I did lol can I have an honest opinion

http://vocaroo.com/i/s0k0hhUvzPCu

Yes, when I listen to these own recordings of mine I am always startled at how different it sounds. Havent heard that old voice in such a long time. I think the present voice is not really bad but it gets me in situations at times and I am a bit afraid that doing what I do may cause some damage. Also I somehow feel an internal mismatch - if I look into the mirror and speak, I think the voice and the image just dont match in my mind. Plus as I said in bad situations (actually not bad in terms of living but bad in terms of voice passing - like being actually really relaxed or having fun drinking with friends or doing sports) the F0 drops to 130 Hz for some passages which is quite exotic, gets noticed, people start to look for other clues and pick up some like my broad shoulders or some clues in my face. Then they ask odd questions. And if they dont have good visual clues to go by (only campfire or candles as a light source) I am actually sirred in person (not on the phone) though this is really really rare.
Now I guess I have two worries about the surgery (given that there are no complications and such). Either it does not change anything as I already am not using the 100-140 Hz range regularly and often not even the 140-150 Hz range. Or - and this may sound strange - that I get too high up in pitch and end up with something like 240 Hz (e.g. 100 Hz base + 80 Hz from Yeson + 60 Hz from my own resonance control). This would be a mismatch to my body as well, as I am not petite but rather big in stature (not tall), 100 kg and aged nearing 40 - and I am German .

Delani - the audio quality of the recording is really awful , sadly. I think it sounds all right and female though. I think I heard occasionally a bit of a drop in pitch and resonance but that is still fine I believe. How hard are you trying for it? I was expecting a different voice now given your description of your condition of a paralyzed vocal cord - apparently it does not affect your voice all that much? Edit: Sorry! - 3am tiredness made me confuse Liz and Delani. My apologies 

Quote from: anjaq on November 15, 2013, 08:01:22 PM
Yes, when I listen to these own recordings of mine I am always startled at how different it sounds. Havent heard that old voice in such a long time. I think the present voice is not really bad but it gets me in situations at times and I am a bit afraid that doing what I do may cause some damage. Also I somehow feel an internal mismatch - if I look into the mirror and speak, I think the voice and the image just dont match in my mind. Plus as I said in bad situations (actually not bad in terms of living but bad in terms of voice passing - like being actually really relaxed or having fun drinking with friends or doing sports) the F0 drops to 130 Hz for some passages which is quite exotic, gets noticed, people start to look for other clues and pick up some like my broad shoulders or some clues in my face. Then they ask odd questions. And if they dont have good visual clues to go by (only campfire or candles as a light source) I am actually sirred in person (not on the phone) though this is really really rare.
Now I guess I have two worries about the surgery (given that there are no complications and such). Either it does not change anything as I already am not using the 100-140 Hz range regularly and often not even the 140-150 Hz range. Or - and this may sound strange - that I get too high up in pitch and end up with something like 240 Hz (e.g. 100 Hz base + 80 Hz from Yeson + 60 Hz from my own resonance control). This would be a mismatch to my body as well, as I am not petite but rather big in stature (not tall), 100 kg and aged nearing 40 - and I am German .

Delani - the audio quality of the recording is really awful , sadly. I think it sounds all right and female though. I think I heard occasionally a bit of a drop in pitch and resonance but that is still fine I believe. How hard are you trying for it? I was expecting a different voice now given your description of your condition of a paralyzed vocal cord - apparently it does not affect your voice all that much?

I don't have paralyzed vocal cord  And Im not trying too hard but I just can't stay in that range for too long lol

Oh I am sorry - I am tired. It is 3 am here now. I was thinking that was a reply from Liz. I am so sorry!. Please ignore this, if you want delete your reply, I corrected my post above already. I need to sleep!

Quote from: anjaq on November 15, 2013, 08:07:18 PM
Oh I am sorry - I am tired. It is 3 am here now. I was thinking that was a reply from Liz. I am so sorry!. Please ignore this, if you want delete your reply, I corrected my post above already. I need to sleep!

lol it's ok no harm done

@anjaq That's definitely a big difference between the voices. Your female voice is good, but I do sense that resonance can still be improved a tad. Frequency sounds fine and with a little more resonance control I think it would sound great.

@delani As anjaq says the quality makes it hard to fully critique, but even with that I think it sounds really good. Resonance sounds good. The frequency is a tad low, but not enough for me to gender the voice as male. If you could get a better recording we'd be able to give a better critique.

Quote from: SarahR on November 15, 2013, 08:47:04 PM
@anjaq That's definitely a big difference between the voices. Your female voice is good, but I do sense that resonance can still be improved a tad. Frequency sounds fine and with a little more resonance control I think it would sound great.

@delani As anjaq says the quality makes it hard to fully critique, but even with that I think it sounds really good. Resonance sounds good. The frequency is a tad low, but not enough for me to gender the voice as male. If you could get a better recording we'd be able to give a better critique.

http://vocaroo.com/i/s0amUIffTOts

here's another i hope the quality is better its sounds ok on my end im not quite sure, but i hope it's good

That's a little better. I stick to my initial assessment that it sounds female to me already. I'm sure there would be some things you could improve like maybe a slightly higher frequency with voice therapy, but if it's not hard to do that voice, you can use it in public, and doesn't cause you any dysphoria then I would say you're good to go without VFS.

For me it was all about consistency and usability. I can have a passable voice, I just can't use it in public. I would always go back down to a lower frequency or fluctuate all over the place. Plus, I can't relate to my "feminine" voice. It doesn't sound like me, naturally, eapecially since I know that I'm forcing it like that. Those are the reasons I did VFS. If these issues don't happen for you then your set with a solid passable voice in my opinion.

Ok, I mentioned that if I am not fully aware of my voice like if I am relaxed or drunk or sleepy it drops. So I decided to make a short clip more or less shortly after waking up and brushing my teeth, not really fully in daytime mode. The F0 is at 130 Hz and the resonance is worse than in the daytime recording. http://vocaroo.com/i/s0OuifonFrii

I mentioned that I will get voice training soon, next week I have an appointment and We will discuss some stuff. I think to get resonance down too much is also not good as it sounds too breathy or overly soft in the opinion of my friends (she said that when I control resonance really a lot more, I am doing something that she knows from women who are flirting or trying to calm someone - doing a very soft voice for that occasion). But we will see what voice training will give me and how that goes. I will wait and see how things sound like with a good resonance control that is also possible to do without hurting my throat, which is another issue I have now - if I talk a lot in the daytime voice in the last post, I need to drink a lot, use these candys against coughing and still get a bit of a sore throat at the end of the day. So I am doing something wrong. This gets worse if I try on a day to push the F0 to >170.
The reasoning is that I need good resonance control anyways and that cannot be improved by surgery so I better get that down first. I think I do a lot (compared to the old voice) already but may be improved further. If doing that part which is in any case needed and the pitch increases together with that to a level that it sounds female already, then there is no real need for surgery as I would not have to watch the F0 while speaking but rather the resonance which I would have to do in any case. This is actually what a lot of people tell me - if you get resonance under control, the voice will be female no matter what you do with pitch. I am not sure this applies to something like these early morning 130 Hz issues or the passages in my daytime voice that go to 140 Hz. This is pretty far out for women and while some may find it fascinating and even erotic, others will ask questions or use it as a hint to look for clues. Pitch is secondary to resonance, I am told (though that study I linked in the subforum actually says otherwise!) but it is not without importance.

So Sarah, you think the daytime voice I do above would with a bit more resonance control actually work? I dont really think so, its very deep and unusual for a womans voice. How did that play out for you - you used resonance control really well before you had VFS, was that not enough? Did you need the pitch control? Did your pitch actually change if you applied resonance control? I know your F0 before VFS was in the range (150 Hz) that I am using nor regularly - was that with resonance control and did it drop if you have not used resonance control? I am still trying to find out what changing resonance would do to a post op voice. I think the difference between me using resonance control and not using it is unusually high in terms of F0...

Quote from: SarahR on November 15, 2013, 09:24:17 PM
For me it was all about consistency and usability. I can have a passable voice, I just can't use it in public. I would always go back down to a lower frequency or fluctuate all over the place. Plus, I can't relate to my "feminine" voice. It doesn't sound like me, naturally, eapecially since I know that I'm forcing it like that.

Well for me, the daytime voice above takes only a little bit of "forcing", more like being aware of it a bit all the time, which again is what is still needed after a VFS anyways to control resonance, right? But I get this with the fluctuations - As you hear I can go to 130 Hz in some situations, 140 Hz for a half sentence even in daytime voice and I notice that sometimes single words or the beginnings of sentences can be really low for some reason (pitch variation is usually a good and "feminine" thing but not if this goes down to 130 Hz syllabils ).

I also get that "this voice does not sound like me" part. It basically is my own thinking that my voice sounds too deep (what I said about the mirror there). Its kind of a reminder of a body that I mostly changed to the better and this is a topic that is hard to get across with people who dont have the focus on body dysphoria (of brain sex / body dis crepancy as I read recently elsewhere). They would say "it passes, you can live and be accepted as a woman in society, so leave it at that" - it is complicated but just as I could not have skipped HRT or SRS even if I did not pass, I also need to fix my voice by some method or another or it may be that I feel not fully at home in my body. Its not as bad as the other issues of course though

I agree with Sarah on the assessment of your voice delani - as far as one can judge from the recording with probably a crappy laptop mic - it sounds fine to me with maybe some small improvements to be made by voice therapy. If this is easy for you and you can use it consistently, I think you may be fine.

Quote from: anjaq on November 16, 2013, 04:00:40 AM
I agree with Sarah on the assessment of your voice delani - as far as one can judge from the recording with probably a crappy laptop mic - it sounds fine to me with maybe some small improvements to be made by voice therapy. If this is easy for you and you can use it consistently, I think you may be fine.

Ok thanks I'll just go to speech pathologists in my area and have session with her to she how it goes she deals with tg voice so I hope I can achieve what I want

Ok, I got the results from my voice examination today.
Funny starting episode to that - she asked me for the origin of my voice problems, I explained that I got the wrong hormones in puberty but now get better ones. She then asked me if I was transgender at which point I corrected her that I am a transsexual, which confused her as she was told by others coming to her that you cannot say transsexual anymore because it contains "sex". Sigh. She then asked me "which direction". LOOOL - I told her that this topic is 15 years behind me, so she was relieved that her view of me as a woman was correct . She then poked me an endoscopic camera in the throat and let me make sounds, showed me the video and then sent me to voice assessment. Before that we talked a short moment about my voice issues in respect to TS and she told me that my voice while being low pitched is a nice voice and that if I should consider voice surgery, I should be careful as it would be a pity if I get hoarse afterwards. She knew about two techniques - the chord stretching and the Y-suture (glottoplasty). She told me that she thinks the second one is producing voices that are hoarse and she indicated that she has met patients of Dr Gross in Berlin who had that issue. I told her that I actually do consider the Y-suture but not with Dr Gross as I do not find any good information on him at all or on voice surgery in Germany in general. She then told me that Dr Gross is rather good and that he has had the most patients. So i told her that if I want to do that I would probably go to Seoul for this. She pulled up an eyebrow in a bit of suspicion. I told her that I heard mayn recordings and obviously meeting someone in person or on Skype would be better, but in Germany I got nothing so far. She asked how many surgeries he did and I told her that it was well over 200, more like 250 probably by now. She fell silent and just said "Oh! - THAT many!". This indicates to me that Dr Gross is not even close to that number, so he is most likely out of my considerations now. She still suggested I should do voice training for 3 or better 6 months before planning a trip to Korea and maybe at that point I would do that trip only to do sightseeing.

Now to the results:

The good thing is I do no thave any nodules on the vocal cords that she told me of. The bad thing is that I have 2 other issues with it:
* On one hand it seems that the two chords are sometimes out of sync - maybe one side is more tense or loose or just not keeping the same tension?
* The other is a bigger one and I try to illustrate how it looked like on the video of my voicebox. The blue triangle is the vocal chords, the white room between them is the open area, left is without making a sound, right is while making a sound (the chords of course vibrate then):



As you can see, my vocal chords are not coming together over the full length, so I use only a part of them to make a sound. I loose breath that just rushes through these gaps and overall this contributes largely to my voice getting tired rather fast and probably all the subsequent problems. She said the upper, triangle shaped gap is rather common and should not pose a problem, but the lower oval shaped one in the tip of the triangle is causing the issues.
Funnily my mind immediately saw the images of the Y-suture and how it exactly closes this gap - remember, it does bring together the cords in that third of the length. Thats pretty interesting - it means that if the problem persists after voice training and I should go to Yeson, he would fix two problems at once

Another thing is that I seem only to use part of my vocal cord already - her argument against a Y-suture was that part of the cords are not participating in the voice formation afterwards which causes hoarseness.... obviously already not all of the cords are participating in it right now, so duh...

Now the second result was vocal range and loudness and here is the chart:



Seems I go from 85 Hz to 750 Hz when doing low loudness sound (blue) and from 110 to 370 Hz when I am doing a loud sound (black) (it was all "O"-sounds). I dont know what the red "Formants" dots mean. The two green crosses are my speaking voice average and me making a relaxed short sound. The speaking voice while reading a passage is 140 Hz, which was a bit on the low side, I know that usually that is 150 or 160 Hz, but after going down to 85 Hz with considerable effort, I was kind of feeling odd and spoke lower pitched.
So the good thing is I can actually go up to almost a g" (WOW!) if I really want and dont have to be loud. The bad thing is that if I am trying to use volume, I loose vocal range massively (probably in part due to that gap mentioned before). Loudness is 80-90 dB in the normal speaking range, shouting gives up to 100 Hz. She also asked me to make a sound that I like and feel comfortable with just saying "Aaaa". It came out to 200 Hz. I was supposed to sustain a "s" sound for as long as possible, I came out at 56 seconds, then a vocal sound ("a" or "o") and I came out to just 9 seconds after which my voice gave out! I think thats really low.

So this is my assessment - some more tests were done in respect to speaking, word starting, hoarseness, softness, intonation, mimics, breathing - but it seems all was ok, she did not mention any flaws in them. I got an indication for "functional dysphonia" which means I can get insurance cover for 10 + 10 voice training sessions which will start tomorrow. Lets see what comes out of it, next checkup at the clinic is in February.

What do you think of this - anyone had similar issues as a result of speaking in a non-relaxed voice (which according to her was the cause of the "gap") for many years or even before that? Any thoughts on the asynchronicity of the cords vibrations? Anything on the pitch/loudness diagram?

Thank you and Greetings.

I know that there were diagrams that outlined different vocal fold issues, one of them being what you have where they don't come together fully. I didn't have that issue so I can't say for certain, but I think that's something that Dr. Kim would fix with the surgery. You'll want to send him that info and confirm that though.

It looks like you have a pretty large range yourself, which is good. It sounds like it's worthwhile to go through the voice therapy, especially since insurance covers it, and see where you are after that. If you're not where you want to be or you cannot easily sustain it then you have some of information to decide whether Yeson is right for you.

That's interesting that she hadn't heard of Dr. Kim yet had heard of the one in Berlin. Keep us updated on your results as you go through the process.

Quote from: SarahR on November 20, 2013, 03:13:44 PM
It looks like you have a pretty large range yourself, which is good. It sounds like it's worthwhile to go through the voice therapy, especially since insurance covers it, and see where you are after that. If you're not where you want to be or you cannot easily sustain it then you have some of information to decide whether Yeson is right for you.

That's interesting that she hadn't heard of Dr. Kim yet had heard of the one in Berlin.

Well, this is Germany. Only rich people go outside the country for surgeries that can be done within the country on insurance cost (they dont cover going abroad). Or people that know that something is done better elsewhere and save up the money.
So it makes sense that she knows German surgeons but no one elsewhere. People also still go for the PI style SRS surgeons here and not to Thailand, even though that is really horrible as this is so outdated that it makes me cry.

Anyways she was not totally against me considering this, which is good.
Yes I was a bit surprised at my range as I tried it in praat and never got up that high, so that was interesting. Maybe it is because she said to deliberately make that tone in a very low volume, which I guess helped this a lot. At a higher volume, the range is a lot less... But she said its a good starting point, I need to expand volume on the higher pitches, probably do some resonance work as well. i found it interesteing that my "favourite tone" was at 200 Hz - i wonder how my voice would be if that became my centerpoint for speaking frequency - But thats impossible presently, I cannot do it.

A short update after the first session at the voice trainer - she analyzed the information and said that I have a great vocal range but she has not really encountered many people (or maybe none) with that sort of vocal chord abnormality. She said that usually people will try to tighten the vocal chords to make them thinner and thus sound softer and higher pitched. My vocal chords seem to rather reduce  the mass that makes the sound by reducing the active length considerably, essentially inactivating parts of the vocal chords at the expense of loudness and efficiency to hold a sound due to the bypass. I told her I am considering voice surgery via the Y-suture and was prepared for a backlash. She said two things - I would appreciate comments from Yeson visitors:
* there may be a persistent feeling of something present in the throat - not big but noticeable especially when talking very loud or when breathing or yawning as the vocal chords cannot open to the full length in that situations
* there may be some issues with heavy breathing as the opening to let air through is restricted
But then she also said that essentially what my vocal chords are doing is what this surgery would do - inactivate parts of the vocal chords. So she actually said that in my special case she could imagine that this type of surgery could actually be a good option if training will not be able to close these gaps. That surprised me.

However what I think might actually happen in case I do a glottoplasty is that my voice might not change that much. If I already did inactivate parts of my vocal chords, I am already only using like 2/3 of them and the voice still is rather low. But maybe its a difference if the inactivated parts are closed or open? Maybe this is what happens to those who do the Y suture and complain later that they have not noticed any change, especially if they are speaking differently for a longer time already - the suture closes the gap, but the active length of the vocal chords stays the same, the main effect being that one can relax more and looses less air and maybe then do the other strategy of stretching the chords again to get higher up, which was impossible with the gap still in place.
Geez, I am totally getting a voice nerd here