Hi, Dena
I somehow think you are posting your replies in several threads - maybe it would have made sense to do your own topic and post everything there
Anyways...
You can try different recordings - useful wouold probably be your everyday voice and a voice where you just totally relax and let go. You dont have to push it to sound male. Something that might me interesting though would be if you cound record a glissando while humming (humming and then go as low as you can and then as high as you can) to evaluate your vocal range. We can analyze this with PRAAT and tell you the notes, if you like
Quote from: Dena on May 26, 2015, 11:26:26 AM
This voice has to be an octave above the old voice but still about an octave below the female range. The point is when my voice broke, it broke bad and the only way I can reach the female range hurts.
This is not physically impossible, just very very unlikely - it would place your voice in or below the C2 range, which is about 65 Hz - Dr Kim mentioned that some patients had voices as low as 85 Hz, which poses a problem since you can usually only gain 75 Hz with the surgery, which still would put them only in the upper male or gender neutral range.
Here is a conversion table showing Hz and piano key names. Male voices are said to be 100-150 Hz, female 180-260 Hz.
If you are right and your voice is in the lowest possible range originally, it would probably be in that 80 Hz range - so to reach 140 Hz which is the point you can go to, IIRC, already is a pretty big shift and definitely it is not adviseable to go beyond that by voice training alone. If my assumptions so far are true, VFS will not be able to give you an effortless female voice but you would have to add some pitch increase by training on top of that. Usually what happens if someone has a trained , piptched, voice and then has VFS is, the new voice will be the same as the old, pitched voice, but the untrained voice is gone and the new voice is without effort but at the same pitch as the trained voice before VFS.
QuoteIn short, my old normal voice was somewhere in the mid 2 range. My physical size combine with a very large adams apple indicates I have a good sized vocal instrument which is not really what I want. I would settle for a much smaller model.
This would match my assumption of your old voice being in the 80 Hz range (E2) which really is low but it is only a bit over an octave below the female range (E3 is gender neutral, G3 is already female range)
Since your physical size is so large (how tall are you? more than 1m90? are you thin or more medium sized or big?), a voice that is below female average is expected by others anyways. Do you get misgendered a lot because of the tallness and the very large adams apple? After all its a pretty well known gender marker.... Or did you have it shaved?
Size of the adams apple seems not to have to do a whole lot with pitch though. I have basically no adams apple but my voice still was in the 110 Hz range and considered in the lower male range.
QuoteAs for projection, I don't need it all at once and am willing to wait out the healing period. Funny thing is a slow healing period will be an advantage for me. It will allow for the people who know me but don't know about me to see a gradual change in my voice instead of walking and suddenly going from a low voice to a high one.
Well - it is hard to predict. But one thing seems to be an issue - if you dont use your new pitch, you may not get used to it and then it may be harder to use it eventually. But since you said you are already using a voice that is almost an octave above your natural voice, the difference will not even be noticeable by others, it will just be easier for you and you will have the option to use higher pitches at will, so you could eventually increase pitch as you like.
During the first 8 weeks and some more, I was not audible in a car that had a loud engine or in a bar situation. I was at a party after the 8 week mark but was basically mute because I could not talk loud enough to communicate to others since too many people were talking plus music was playing. I think now after 3 months, I might stand a chance. What is your occupation? Do you have a very loud workplace?
