Hello little buns!
It is Stef, welcome back to my home!
I want to address one of the most common misconceptions and one of the most frequently asked questions
I get, today - how do trans women change their voice, and if I am a trans woman, that's you!
How do I change my voice?
The misconception here is that hormones replacement therapy is going to change your voice.
For transgender men, that is the case.
Testosterone thickens your vocal chords, but for trans women, it's not.
Hormone replacement therapy will not do very much to your voice at all.
If you want to see my video explaining Hormone Replacement Therapy, just click on the link
up here, or there will be a link in the description box.
When people undergo testosterone-based puberty, their vocal chords thicken.
This means that no matter what gender you are, if there is a lot of testosterone in
your body, your voice is going to deepen.
Estrogen, however, does not affect the vocal chords in any way.
After the testosterone has affected your vocal chords, the physical changes are permanent
and no amount of hormone therapy can reverse it.
At 5 months on estrogen, all of my voice changes have been through VOICE TRAINING, and sometimes
(infrequently, but sometimes) computer editing.
I want to make it very clear that by not all trans people have to train their voice - only
do it if it is something that YOU want for yourself, to lessen your dysphoria or for
any other reason.
Just make sure you're doing it for you, and not for the approval of others, otherwise
it's going to be a source of negativity and frustration in your life.
I promise you, I promise!
Voice training is a difficult thing to grasp and to practice.
I find myself slipping out of consistensy all the time - that is probably the most difficult
aspect of it, is training your voice to be consistent.
Because some days you might have a fantastic voice and you'll be like, "damn I can do all
of thise!" and other days you might feel like, why can't I get there?
What is stopping me?
The hardest part is definitely being consistent.
What I and many other trans women endeavour to do with voice training is to train my voice
into a naturally softer tone and higher pitch.
Everybody has a different goal with voice training but that generally across the board,
in regards to trans women, is usually what it's about.
Usually.
Another big misconception about voice training is that it is only pitch that needs to be
trained.
In fact, the pitch of your voice is the least important aspect of vocal feminization.
The most important thing in vocal feminization is the tone and the speech patterns.
While I know that your genitalia defines what your voice will be like, I know that we live
in a world where boys and girls are raised to behave differently.
This means, as you grow up as a girl or as a boy, you are going to subconciously take
on the vocal characteristics of that gender purely from subconcious learning as you observe
the people you are told to aspire to be like.
While that is the very reason many trans people want to train their voice, it is also something
you can use to help you.
Before you even start training your voice, listen to people who have voices you like
- listen to them speak, poetry, sing, whatever.
Try to notice aspects about their voice that you admire.
This is important.
Think of somebody like that, keep them in mind - we're going to call them your vocal
goals, okay?
It can be something unattainable!
It doesn't have to be something that is considered achieveable.
Just think of the voice and think of what it's like, and you're on the right page.
The bottom line is, learning any skill requires observation of the skill itself.
Before I get into the techniques I'm using to train my voice, I want to do a vocal comparison.
I am going to speak a line from one of my very first videos, from long before I started
transitioning.
Here we go: "I really just wanted to make this video because,
I really just wanted to make this video because, I felt like, you know, when I was eleven and
twelve and thirteen, I felt like, you know, when I was eleven and twelve and thirteen,
and when I was really struggling with my confidence, with my appearance, and when I was really
struggling with my confidence, with my appearance, there was nobody that I could find anywhere
online, in the media, anywhere, that had a face like mine.
there was nobody that I could find anywhere online, in the media, anywhere, that had a
face like mine."
There are three things you should have noticed from that comparison: first, pitch.
Second, tone.
Third, flow.
Pitch, tone, and flow are the three things that I train my voice to noticeevery time
I speak to keep myself moving forward with the vocal training.
I'm going to go over what I do for reach of these things in order.
Keep in mind I have been training my voice for nearly a year now!
Things will happen slowly - do not feel bad if you can't stretch or manipulate your voice
right away.
I also learned from some voice teachers back in high school for other reasons, so the knowledge
I gained from that overlapped a bit with this, so I had a bit of a head start.
Just don't feel like this is going to be an instant thing, it's not realistic.
I promise you, this will take some time.
Eventually, these techniques will be so natural to you that it will be effortless to train
every day, just like any other skill.
It will just take time.
So, for the first vocal aspect, pitch: This one is tricky, because it is the easiest one
to make sound strange...
"STRANGE".
If you focus only on pitch and not on tone and flow, it might sort of sound out of place.
Regardless, it is still important to know how to manipulate the pitch of your voice,
so the easiest way, and the easiest method for extending your range of pitch, and eventually
permanently lifting it higher, is to move where your voice resonates from.
Before I started training, my voice resonated from my chest.
This is very common for testosterone-heavy voices, I have no idea why, but that's what
gives voices their bass and boom, and their deep like, you know.
The chest resonation.
Okay?
It's the vibrations through your body.
It can be tricky to go back into it, but I want to show you another comparison.
(clears throat) So we're gonna go down.
(clears throat) We're gonna go back down, (sighs).
To my chest.
She needs some milk...
Okay, this... this is the closest thing I can get to my chest voice.
I don't even know if this is what I used to talk like all the time.
It feels really weird being down here.
If I place my hand on my chest when I'm speaking like this, I can feel the vibrations, it's
like very... obvious.
It's a very obvious feeling.
It goes right to the skin and you can feel it in all of your limbs, it's the weirdest
thing.
I don't know, if you're not used to speaking in a chest voice, then it's gonna be a weird
feeling for you, I guess, but try to get here, even if this is not your regular voice, and
if this is your regular voice, you're good!
What you want to do, is you want to visualize your voice as energy or as anything, you just
wanna try to visualize your voice inside of your ribcage, okay?
And just imagine it lifting into your head, until you reach your head voice, which is
here, okay?
You should not feel the vibrations in your chest when you're in your head voice, especially
down here - it should feel like it's resonating from somewhere between your collarbones and
your nose.
So, for me, it really resonates right here, right, whereas before it was down here.
It's a very clear difference in where you can feel the vibrations, so that's a very
obvious physical cue to help you understand where this voice should be placed.
For some people, moving into head voice can create a nasally sound.
That's not a bad thing, just observe the changes as you move your voice around, and just make
mental notes of what you're noticing while you manipulate it.
Try going back and forth between the chest and head voice for a few minutes so you can
get a grasp on how to move from head to from chest, I can't even speak, oh my god!
It's so weird.
It's such a weird thing to do anymore.
For the first month of training your voice, you may want to go through this excercise
every day just so you can remind yourself how to move your voice from chest to head,
and also to help permanently be able to visualize that change.
The next vocal aspects actually go together pretty well, so those are tone and flow.
Tone is the softness or hardness that your voice has.
You can have a very harsh or hard tone, or a very soft and delicate tone.
Hard tone is not to be confused with raspiness - this is not voice texture, so much as the
roundess or edge of the words and pronunciations.
I know this can be a hard thing to understand, but bare with me, I will show you the differences
in a second.
Flow is the way the words flow out of your chords, or the way you form and join words
and sentences together.
You can also refer to these as speech patterns if you want, but I just think flow has a nice
FLOW To it, alright?
These are much easier to manipulate and train than pitch, and also more important, so if
you were trying to raise into your head voice and you were worried because it sounds kind
of "strange", don't worry, it's all good, everything's gonna be okay, I promise.
This is the easy part, and it will make way more of a difference.
I am going to demonstrate a hard tone and flow right now, like...
I don't wanna say that because it sounds like I'm gonna be rapping, and I'm not...
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog - why?
I don't know why - you tell me why!
Okay?
So harsh tone, and harsh flow... and here is a soft tone and flow:
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog - why?
I don't know why - you tell me why!
With a hard tone and flow, words come out like jagged rocks, like a mountain range in
the horizon, like, it's an up and down kind of thing.
The sounds climb up and down and fall again, and it's kind of unpredictable.
Picture the lines on those monitors in the hospital when they're watching your heartbeat
- if a harsh tone and flow is those regularly, try to bring those lines smaller.
So instead of the lines going up and down like this, try to visualize it more...
smaller.
Okay?
Bring those lines in.
And of course, yes, like, in real life that does mean your heartbeat is slowing down,
but in real life...
I mean...
In the context of voice training, it's not what's gonna happen, your heartbeat is gonna
be fine.
For softening the toneof your voice, what you want to do is move your voice from the
back of your throat to the front of your throat.
When you speak with a hard tone, the sounds bounce off of the back of your throat and
they push out, they jump out your mouth, for lack of a better word.
When you bring the voice to the front of your throat, the words climb out gently and carress
your face as they leave your body.
You can hear the difference, I hope!
Hard tone, soft tone, (clears throat) hard tone, soft tone, (clears throat)...
That's hard to switch between.
Hard tone, soft tone.
I don't know, I just sound like... it's fine!
You get the point, right?
Flow requires more time to change and is something I definitely put most of my focus on now.
If you remember back to the beginning of the video where I told you to think of a person
whose speech you like, it's about observing this person's speech patterns - the dogs won't
stop barking!
Can you guys hear the dogs?
I promise you they're not my dogs, I don't have any secret dogs- what the f..?
So, this is about observing the way these vocal goals of yours speak and trying to learn
and integrate their speech patterns into your own speaking.
Some women, cis and trans, do have a hard tone or a hard flow and that is okay!
Not everyone's voice has to be the same, change what you want to change about your voice.
Don't try to just fit into some cookie cutter thing because it's what everybody else wants
from you, okay?
Do whatever you want with your voice, train your voice to be harder if you want!
Do whatever you wanna do!
Okay?
You can train your voice however you want, don't have to do it the way I'm doing it.
That's important.
You do not have to train your voice the way I'm doing it, it can be any way.
You are absolutely allowed to be happy with yourself.
I promise.
If training your voice will make you happier with yourself, then you should do it, that's
when you should do it.
Anyways, observe the people whose voices you admire, and and try to imitate their speech
patterns.
Integrate a thing or two here and there - for a little while, I wanted to speak like 2009
Lady Gaga - soft, delicate, quiet, a little bit raspy.
But now I want to speak like 2016 Lady Gaga - energy, action, and assertion, vivid imagery,
and expression!
Your tastes may change as you change as a person, and that's okay!
Cisgender people also undergo a lot of voice changes in their lifetime, and speech pattern
development, and everything!
Like, even Lady Gaga's change from 2009 to 2016, that's a very clear difference, so don't
feel like you have to find a voice and stick with it your whole life, okay?
You can train your voice for your whole life.
You can change your voice every day!
Do whatever you want - do like, that "Batman Chooses A Voice" thing from whatever, College
Humor?
That was, ugh, I love that video, I'm sorry.
We're just shrinking all of those changes down into a few years so that we can feel
more comfortable.
But don't feel like you have to stop or settle for a voice, okay, you can change your voice
whenever you want!
I think it's also worth mentioning, because I'm definitely gonna get questions about this,
yes, you can train your voice if you're cisgender, that is totally fine.
It's a skill like any other skill, anybody can learn it.
I am just sharing these techniques in thecontext of transgender people, because it is quite
literally life and death and happiness versus death for a lot of us to train our voices
- that is why this is highlighted in a trans context, but you can train your voice.
Anybody!
Anybody can!
Specifically, this is a trans context, just making that clear!
I really hope this has been helpful for you - (Boston accent) FOR YOU!
For you, for you, for you, and all of you!
For all of you!
HARD TONE.
feel free to share this with your friends so that they can learn about voice training,
too!
Especially if you know trans people that want to train their voice to be different, send
this to them!
Maybe they can learn something and they can start their journey off on the right foot.
But don't go sending this to trans people that you don't know if they want to train
their voice, 'cause that's just rude as hell, okay?
I will see you again very, very soon.
Until next time, be cool, it's alright, everything is gonna be fine, we're all gonna be okay,
and I love you so much BYE!