Hey, so I've not started HRT yet or any physical aspect of transition, however I have been working on my female voice for a few years. I majored in foreign languages in college, mainly focusing on German and English (i.e. double majoring those two), but also dabbling in Russian and Spanish. I took a lot of linguistics classes as well. I've found that my language and linguistics experience definitely helped me develop my voice. It also helps that I enjoy working with languages and speech in general.
Several aspects of linguistics were particularly useful in developing my female voice, like phonetics. If you know international phonetic alphabet well enough, you can pick apart the specific speech sounds that people are using - such as women who you want to sound like. Fun fact - opera singers use their own version of IPA to help them sing even in languages they do not know at all.
Learning more about phonetics also teaches you which parts of the mouth throat and nose are used to enunciate each sound - this helped me eliminate more resonance from my voice, because it helped me learn how to manipulate different parts of my vocal tract, and how to be better at doing it by teaching me how each part of your physiology changes the sound you make.
Have any of you had success bettering your voice by taking linguistics classes and such?
