Luckily, my voice hasnt been permanently damaged.  I have now regained a normal speech pattern. Pre vfs I had a voice was in the lower female rage.  My preop relaxed pitch was at 170 hz which was a big plus to start with.  However, as i got to learn since vfs,, resonance plays a bigger role in achieving a female voice than pitch itself( as long as your relaxed pitch is above 165 hz). Some post vfs girls came back on here with voice recordings averaging 250 hz but still sounded male as their resonance was not under control.

When you reach your 2 month mark postop, you'll need to start taking speech therapy sessions to adapt to using your newly created vocal cords and achieve that natural  feminine voice. In mythe experience, speech therapy is as important as the surgery itself.


Good luck with your recovery!
Hugs,

Wow, 170hz is really high for pre-op. But yea, it's absolutely true about resonance. Funny you should mention it, at a support group I attended someone was asking for tips on their voice, and I measured it in a pitch meter assuming it would hit 160hz max. As it turns out, it hit over 200hz, but because they didn't have good resonance, it still sounded more like a male/androgenous voice to me. But I didn't really have any tips for resonance since it's something that just kind of happened for me without me specifically working on it. I'm really starting to wonder what will be in store for me when I start using my new voice, and how my resonance will hold up. Should be very interesting...

In other news, I am now home safe and sound and completely exhausted after being up well over 24 hours.

First thing  to do when u start speaking is not to strain the way you used  to do preop. It just won't work post op, and will lead to your voice breaking, sending it back to your chest, giving u a male resonance. Resonance is basically using your head voice and speaking softly instead of using your chest voice. If you look at the sheet of exercisers given toto you by Yeson, you'll find a set related to resonance.

Okay, I think I understand. I'll just make sure to take it easy and not push things and hopefully I'll be able to feel out the right way to use my new voice without too much trouble. And yea, I will make sure to start doing the exercises as soon as I am able to. Thanks for the advice.

Hey everyone, just a quick little update. As of today, I have started talking again! So far, my voice seems to sound okay, though it is a bit hoarse. Even on day one my untrained voice is being read as feminine which is surely a good sign. Right now though, it is still a bit hoarse, and seems to strain easily, and my pitch range is pretty limited. My low range especially is just gone. Before, overuse of my trained voice had given me a pretty severe vocal tremor when I tried to go low, but now I don't have that range at all. The lowest I was able to hit on the pitch meter was about 130hz. Anyway, my speaking voice right now seems to be in the 160-180hz range, which is about where my trained voice was (maybe a little lower on a really good day), but still well below the 230hz Dr. Kim predicted I would have in a year after things have fully healed. Here is a quick recording so you can hear, that even on day one, I really don't sound too bad : https://clyp.it/fn554zax?token=6e19c03e5ac5cdec346fb29582e5078f

Sounding great already! I know there is improvement to come but with this as your starting point I know you're going to have such an amazing result.

For only a month after surgery it's early to judge but so far it's sounding good. It is feminine but because you are still dealing with swelling from the surgery I am not going to make suggestions until you have had more time to heal and I can hear a more finished voice. I suspect you could still pick up 20-30 HZ and more on the high end over the next few months.

There was a chart in the material from Yeson that showed the expected progression was something like male to gender neutral pitch transition between 2-3 months, then gender neutral to female between 3-4 months, and then final pitch after a year. I'm not sure how close that is to reality though, given my own results, and since I have seen videos of people earlier on in their healing whose voices were in the female range. Maybe it's more to keep people from freaking out if their voice heals slowly and they don't sound very good at first. Anyway, I'm not sure if I really want or need to go too much over the 200hz mark. I always said that the trained voice I had was fine, and that I didn't really need it to be higher per say. I just wanted it to be easier and more natural to use. I'm not even sure what 230hz would sound like, but I am worried it might be a bit high for me.

A pitch of 230 HZ isn't that high and it has the advantage that you don't have to strain at all when you speak. Even if you get a little sloppy with your voice, there is still sufficient range available that you aren't going to fall out of the feminine range.

As for healing, mine took about a year and there was a gradual increases in pitch so I suspect that the basic idea behind the Yeson chart is correct. Just how much improvement you could expect might vary. In my case, I had a bunch of swelling that took a long time to fade. If your swelling goes down faster, I think you would see  the improvement much sooner.

The graph of improvement didn't apply to me. In my case, pitch was higher after surgery then it started to fall gradually. after that. However, the biggest problem I encountered post-vfs was not pitch. It was resonance a few months later when botox started to.wear off (I had botox done). You stilll need a trained voice post vfs (in terms os resonance) to achieve that natural feminije voice. Vfs improves pitch only.

Hi Miyuki,

Thank you for share your experience here. As my pitch is very low, I am considering go voice surgery. But somebody said that the voice will come back to original voice after a period of time. I now hesitate should I go voice surgery and look for a voice trainer.

Quote from: naomi62343 on July 23, 2017, 10:02:54 AM
Hi Miyuki,

Thank you for share your experience here. As my pitch is very low, I am considering go voice surgery. But somebody said that the voice will come back to original voice after a period of time. I now hesitate should I go voice surgery and look for a voice trainer.

That isn't true with the current surgery. Older versions of the surgery didn't fuse the cords and only tied them. The tie could come undone causing the cords to return to their original length. I recommend that everybody see a speech therapist before considering surgery. The surgery carries risk of failure so if you can produce an acceptable voice without surgery, therapy is a better option. Even after you have surgery you will still require therapy  and much of what you would learn if you see a therapist before surgery still applies.

In my case, even with therapy, my voice was around 130-140 HZ. It couldn't be forced above around 180 Hz so if I was to reach the feminine range, surgery was my only option. As my voice sounded masculine, I had little to lose if the surgery failed.

With Yeson, an exceptionnal small number of girls have reported an insignificant pitch improvement; however, their voice didn't go back to what it was pre-vfs. In other words, you can only win!

Has it been another month already? How time flies... Well, I recorded another voice sample today, and I have to say, this is probably the best I have ever sounded in a recording, pre or post-op: https://clyp.it/uh3pphsy?token=065ae23d80731e565ff6edf50b3933b8 So yea, I am pretty happy with how things have been progressing, but I do have to say, the first month was rough. Like really, really rough. To start out with, it can be easy to get freaked out by how bad your voice is when you first start talking. It sounds bad, and it feels bad to talk. Your voice never does what you want it to, and if you try to push it it starts to hurt and then you have to just stop talking for a while to let it rest. My voice still is not what you'd call 100%, and there are times where I have more trouble controlling it then others, but it has improved massively from where it was when I first started talking. Hopefully by the end of the next month it will feel more or less normal. I just wanted to kind of stress this point a bit, because I haven't heard people talk as much about the first month of recovery from Yeson, but I for one can definitely confirm it sucks. Not as bad as not talking for a month, but still pretty bad. Anyway, that's more or less all I had to say. Unless anyone has questions, I'll be sure to post another update next month.

The voice is settling in nicely. It was just a tad bit lower than I expected but it sounds full, feminine, contains inflection and should pass the telephone test without any problems. At this point I don't see any issues that need to be addressed.

Yea, so on that point, I did put it through the pitch analyzer, and it seems that my overall pitch is still sitting mostly in the 160-200Hz range, but I did gain in inflections that go well over 200Hz. Also, even though the range is still similar to my trained voice, I am not reaching nearly as hard to speak in that range, so my speech patterns just sound a bit more natural and less forced. I pretty much said going in that I wanted my trained voice to be my speaking voice, and that I didn't really think I needed it to be higher, so I am completely happy with this result. If it does go up more as it heals that fine too, but I'm happy either way.

The voice will develop mor eand more over many months. Especially if you had anything like a
"vocal tremor" or strained voice before. I am still seeing change after over 2 years now.

However I wish the vocal tremor could be better adressed. I still have some of that - I think the proper diagnosis in my case at least may be a mild spasmodic dysphonia. It sometimes makes my voice weak or broken for a short while. Especially in the morning it can happen to me and I think i found a connection to anxiety issues - if I had a night with anxiety issues that keep me up for some hours , the voice spasms are much worse on the next day.

So being relaxed about the voice is quite an important part in it working at the desired pitch and clarity, really

Sounding fabulous, Miyuki! I'm so glad your surgery is turning out well.

You sound female to me.. youre probably in the lower female range but still female.

Hi everyone. So I am long overdue for an update. To make a long story short, for a while there my voice actually seemed to be getting deeper instead of higher, and I was having some serious concerns about it, but I didn't want to post here without really knowing what was going on and potentially creating fear, uncertainty, or doubt without cause. I did see a doctor and had my vocal chords examined, and it turns out everything basically looked okay. They were even impressed by the almost complete lack of scar tissue where my vocal chords were fused. They did however notice my vocal chords seemed very irritated, and though they weren't really able to explain why (other than possibly acid reflux which I'm pretty sure I don't have), but they thought it may just go away on it's own. And it does seem to have improved, although I'm still getting a lot of mucus buildup on my vocal chords which forces me to clear my throat a lot, which is definitely not helping the matter. In general, my voice has actually been sounding pretty good and feeling reasonably usable for the past few weeks, and it still seems to be getting better.

But (yes there always has to be a but with these type of things), in a way I am still finding myself a little disappointed with the results. The most obvious cause for disappointment is that my current base pitch seems to be settling at around 165-170Hz. My best estimate of my true completely untrained pitch (which was difficult for me to estimate since I went for so long using only my trained voice) is between 135-145Hz, meaning even in the best case, I gained about 35Hz. To put it in absolute terms, they said I could expect an approximately 70Hz increase, but I seem to have gotten about half that. Now I didn't need that much pitch, so my disappointment isn't nearly as great as it might have been if say I started with 100Hz as my base pitch. And I did say I would ultimately be happy if my previous trained voice became my speaking voice, which is essentially what I got. But even so, I guess on reflection, having saved up for nearly a year, put myself through the whole trip, and the recovery (not talking for a month was not fun), at a certain point you start to say to yourself, wow, this better be worth it.

Other than that my biggest complaint is just that the general feel of using my voice still feels "unnatural" at times. Its a bit harder to put my finger on this one, it's just that the feeling of using my voice in a way that it was not strictly speaking intended to be used is still not completely gone. I'm not really sure what I was expecting on this one... I guess it's just a matter of the fact that my natural pitch is just a bit lower than the way I like my voice to sound, so I still have to use kind of the same technique I did with a trained voice, just to a much lesser extent. If my pitch had gone over what my trained voice was, I could have just relaxed my voice and not cared, but I am very particular about the way my voice sounds, so yea...

Well, all that being said, how about some of the good points? For example, I can now laugh in a female pitch and have it sound right. Before this was just not possible, and I basically ended up having to mute my laughter to keep from sounding weird. Also, the horrible vocal tremor I developed seems to be gone, and regardless of the fact that the results from the surgery were not ideal, it is still way easier for me to talk now, and I don't ever feel like I strain my voice by just speaking normally. And finally of course, regardless of my personal reservations, everyone I talk to says my voice is sounding really great. So even with my personal concerns (and obviously there is still more time for some marginal improvement), I can't really complain too much, but I do feel like it's important to let people know that my procedure does appear to have under-delivered somewhat, because voice surgery is such a minefield and it's important people fully understand what the risks and potential outcomes are before getting themselves into it.