Quote from: GeekGirl on March 13, 2017, 02:12:52 PM
I remember Dr. Haben told me the most important aspect of female voice is "prosody, prosody, prosody. I can give you pitch and you can develop resonance, but prosody is what will ultimately give you a successful result." (He probably told me this because he thought I had bad prosody.)

Sadly, my prosody goes out the window when I talk over the phone sometimes because I try to sound more authoritative over the phone. When I'm not calling to request or demand something, my voice is fine. I seem to be a lot more successful in person.

I work as a manager in a male dominated industry. That authoritative voice is my downfall! I recorded my self in some meetings at work and played the recordings for my voice therapist. She was very much aware of the problem, even had an official name for it. She gave me some exercises to work on. In just 2 weeks I've gotten amazingly better.
We have been working together for about 3 months and I can see now that I will have a passable voice without any surgery! I highly recommend working with a good voice therapist.

Quote from: ElizabethK on March 11, 2017, 10:19:53 PM
I recognise some of those words...I am sure a number of them were on her list of things to work on...she talked about a package of things. She is very much...no straining, ease into it kind of stuff...I feel even more positive to hear you talking the same stuff

Liz

This helps explain a lot of the feminine voice: http://www.nyspeechandvoicelab.net/transgender/voice-feminization/

Quote from: RandyL on March 13, 2017, 03:55:06 PM
For those like me without a clue:

Prosody:  the patterns of rhythm and sound used in poetry.

"the translator is not obliged to reproduce the prosody of the original"

the theory or study of prosody.
the patterns of stress and intonation in a language.

Hope this helps.
Randy

Sent from my SM-N910V using Tapatalk

Prosody is the sing-song in female speech patterns.  Women naturally have more "melodic intonation" to their voices. In other words, they are more animated when they speak.

I had my second speech therapy session today, via a video link.  I've been working on pitch for months on my own, NEVER speaking out of character (and obviously bugging my ex in those legal meetings) and am hitting my therapist's targets pretty easily.

I have some breathing exercises to improve my projection that i have been doing, and after a few days I can see the difference already.  I chaired a meeting tonight and it went very well.  I don't think I dipped into a male range at all, while before after 10 minutes or so my voice drifted downward significantly.

I've been working through a few simple sentences to develop more pitch variation and prosody in particular, and she was happily with the results.  She's having me move onto doing character dialogs now, where I am to try and act out the voice variations to support a narrative. This is getting pretty interesting.

It's definitely work, but also definitely fun, and I can tell my voice is improving.