hey ladies,

Just wanting a little advise as I've been reading through your topics and would like to confirm a few things.... Firstly,  I sent my voice file through to dr Kim and was told I'd be a good candidate.

now I'm wondering,  should I be getting voice therapy before the surgery? I'm trying to put my savings strictly towards surgery with yesson. But I've begun to understand that it is vital to have voice training also.. is this the case? Should I just wait until after the surgery? Or should I start therapy sessions beforehand?


Thanks for any advice

Chloe

From what I gather, you would need to unlearn some stuff so it's probably better to just go in with your natural voice and train it after you've recovered (2 months). I am going in a few weeks and this is my plan.

All Dr Kim does is raise the pitch and the rest of stuff like resonance and prosody is up to you and needs training.

Thanks heaps Katie.  I was kinda planning the same thing from what I read on his email.  But got a bit worried when I read some of these threads. I definitely don't have alot of money to spare, so to be able to do it afterwards would be perfect.

Chloe xoxo

It's probably better if you don't try to train pitched voice now... but you can and should work on trying to get the right resonance, learning to speak without typically male undertones, experimenting how to change/modify color of your voice, etc... getting some of the things correctly now, means you will have an easier situation post-op, and it will be easier to start working with your voice. You don't neccessarily need to spend a lot of money for therapy now.. but you probably can afford a few hours with experienced classical singing teacher.. They know more than enough about voice to give you some directions, few corrections, and thats enough for you to train a little in the time leading to your VFS.

I think if you can do some voice training about prosody and resonance, but not training any pitch changes, it would improve your post OP experience. If you go in untrained, you may otherwise be disappointed by the surgery because your voice will essentially sound very similar post-OP, just with a bit higher pitch - to fully use the pitch gain you actually need to use the proper resonance, so I think it helps to have an idea about voice, resonance, voice modification and all of that. I think it helps if you know how to play around with your voice, go up and down in pitch, use different resonances and just be more comfortable experimenting with the voice - this helps during the post op phase when you basically have to experiment with your voice to find out how it works now...

Short answer: YES

There is one reason why I got up to speed so fast after Yeson.. It was because I spent 5 months seriously training my voice (pre-op). I didn't take any formal voice lessons, just followed coursework I found online.

I had already "found" my voice pre-surgery, pitch and everything. My problem was being able to use it in public, my brain would automatically sink back down in pitch which ruined everything about my female voice when I tried to use it in front of other people.

If you go to Yeson with no voice training, you will have to do double duty post-op. You will both have to recover from the surgery AND train your voice to sound female.

I cannot stress it enough, do not expect Yeson to magically give you a female sounding voice. More reports come in every week about people who go there expecting just that and come back extremely disappointed. Training is ESSENTIAL. Best to do it beforehand so you have a headstart in recovery to know what you are already capable of.

Everyone is capable of finding their female voice, surgery or not. Yeson VFS can be considered an "aid" but not the whole shebang. I would say pitch is only 20% of the pie. The rest is training!

Quote from: Jennygirl on May 31, 2015, 03:19:54 PM

Everyone is capable of finding their female voice, surgery or not. Yeson VFS can be considered an "aid" but not the whole shebang. I would say pitch is only 20% of the pie. The rest is training!

Yes... often its only a few minutes in the beginning... don't overstrain the voice. So its not really much every day... but imo it should be done consistently every day.

hugs

I went to see Christella Antoni on Saturday to get her advice and assessment of my voice prior to going to Yeson in July. As a result of what we discussed, I'm seeing her for three regular appointments before I go. It isn't that my voice sounds male (it doesn't), but  that I have some chord problems due to insufficient closure and also that she thinks one of my chords is thinner than the other. She says she can probably fix the closure problem before I go, and then I'll be certain that any changes afterwards won't be confused with a pre-existing problem.

My normal talking voice is 177Hz modal pitch, 163 Hz mean with  a high of 202 Hz and a low of 61 (though she says that's probably due to the escaping air (more of a wheeze type sound). The irregularity is 15.74%.
With the Rainbow Passage my modal frequency is 229Hz with a high of 287Hz and an irregularity of 18.02 %.

I've no real idea of how to interpret these. Can anyone help?

Sarah.