I am just venting a bit.  I cannot get the voice.  My male voice (I never liked it) keeps comming though.  I have tried to understand pitch and resonance and other than taking my voice up all the way to "ridiculous" I don't understand how to change it.  I can talk softer, but I still sound like a guy.  Frustrated and ready to toss in the towel.  Don't recommend a v coach.  They are too costly.  Youtube clips haven't helped other than to hear that it takes long hard work to do it.  I don't get it. 

Frustrated with it all. 

I really do believe that the key to feminine voice is how you say words, rather than pitch.

I have to admit that the voice came easier to me than most... I've always done impersonations and character voices so crossing into female only took a few weeks to find and a few months of practice to perfect.  For what they're worth, here are a few things I figured out...

-- To find your voice you have to figure out where the voice comes from... It's an actual location... Your natural female voice is higher in your throat and farther forward than your male one.

-- Try to impersonate cartoon characters... I found that Spongebob and Bart Simpson originate from the same "place" as my voice now. Once you find them, it's easier to find the girl :-)

-- Men resonate from their chest, women resonate from their head.

-- There's a CD by Melanie Anne Philips that I found helpful, although not revolutionary.. it's about $10

-- Don't give up! It takes most Tgirls months of practice to get it.. I practiced every time I was in my car. I would pretend I was having a conversation, having to explain all I knew about Transsexuality to someone who knew nothing. ANY GENETIC MALE CAN DEVELOP A FEMALE VOICE but it's an unnatural thing to try and get your body to do it. It's hard but KNOW that there are thousands who've done it and you're no different.

-- Several weeks from now, you'll be practicing and then it will suddenly hit you that you found it! It's a magical moment... After that you can ditch "his" voice forever 

All I know is that now I pass over xbox live (a feat I thought impossible) but I still can't pass in person...I don't know what I did other than speaking an octave higher (I used to be a bass, now an alto), using a breathier quality for my voice, and speaking with a songlike tone (This was the easiest part because I used to sing in a choir regularly). Don't know why I pass over a microphone and not in real life though...

That whole isolating a piece of your voicebox can be a hard nut to crack.  At best I got an androgynous voice and left it at that. I still sound like myself, but I tweaked it enough that it passes muster - particularly when you look like the woman you are.

I never had a particularly manly voice though, it was always soft, but then I don't have a particularly fem voice now either. Shrug.

It is fricking frustrating. Such a difficult thing to master, yet even more frustrating is some people just seem to get it just like that. No fair!

Failing practise and patience you could investigate voice surgery...

Quote from: Dyan on August 01, 2010, 07:17:30 PM
            I am just venting a bit.  I cannot get the voice.  My male voice (I never liked it) keeps comming though.  I have tried to understand pitch and resonance and other than taking my voice up all the way to "ridiculous" I don't understand how to change it.  I can talk softer, but I still sound like a guy.  Frustrated and ready to toss in the towel.  Don't recommend a v coach.  They are too costly.  Youtube clips haven't helped other than to hear that it takes long hard work to do it.  I don't get it. 

Frustrated with it all.

I didn't understand how either until I played around with my voice for a few days.You should try retracting your Adams apple as much as you can and as someone in the voice section suggested you could try pressing your tongue as hard as you can against your upper two front teeth.

 I tried pressing my tongue against my upper teeth.  Sounded like a mentally handicap.  What do you mean retact the adams apple?  Frustration continues.

I worked it out with a combination of a questionably gotten Spectrogram program. and a simple excersize.

Put your middle finger at the bottom of your larynx put your index finger at the top of your larynx, now sing a note... in your male voice you will feel the vibrations through both fingers sing a higher note until you get to that falsetto range and you will notice that the top finger stops vibrating and you can only feel movement in the lower section of your voicebox.

in spectogram you will see this as a distinct change in the harmonics from 8+ peaks of noise to about 3-5peaks of noise Now begin to lower the pitch while trying to maintain that tension in your vocal cords and keep the vibration out of your upper voicebox, you should in time be able to speak at progressively lower pitches with training while holding the tension and thus only express the 3-5peaks of your voice. There's a specific pitch range you are trying to drop to and that will be only a tiny bit above your normal male speaking range. 180hz-230hz

Then it's just a subtle tweaking matter getting female enunciation, sorting out those odd noises that might give you away and increasing your endurance.