Notes from a voice therapy appointment:
when people assess gender identity, 60% is
nonverbal communication
in stereotypical feminine conversation:
- more eye contact
- more smiling
- more body language
other "stereotypical" speech changes:
- speech is slower
- loudness is softer
- huskier
- choice of vocab
- pronunciation is very clear
things to try when practicing voice:
- record video to listen and watch?
- do roleplay sessions
- two columns while listening: what do i like, what do i want to change
- do voice exercises regularly
- guessing that 60-70% of those who want to change their voice don't have a model goal, but find satisfactory results, so it's fine to not have a model
- goals can also change
On pitch:
- pitch is one of the most impactful options
- breath support using abdominal muscles = long exhalation, and you can use the air for voicing. the air you exhale is the breath support and depends on how much you inhale. the ratio between inhalation to exhalation, if you breathe in for a second, you should be able to exhale for two seconds. about one word a second. We can speak without constant breath support but without air it sounds different
- thyroid cartilage, behind it is a pair of vocal folds
- larynx falls in throat
- these aspects change pitch
- where does pitch land now? Test it and compare to "typical" masculine and feminine to see how you'd like it to change.
- this is the most researched and has the most impact
On intonation:
- Also known as melody/cadence/inflection/prosody
- vocal fry is when you hear a gurgly sound at the low end
On resonance:
- resonance is complex to understand
- vocal folds make sound without personality
- vocal tract is between vocal folds and lips
- imagine a cave, which the audio can reflect in
Practice ideas:
- try counting or letters
- imagine words coming out of your lips, nose, between my eyebrows, or etc
- try to find other resonance strategies that work for me
- try using a lighter/brighter voice
- adding smiling changes the resonant frequencies in the mouth
- smaller mouth movements, but still clear with pronunciation.
- small/large dog panting changes because of space in chest
praat has spectrogram function that can be used to measure resonance form and frequency of f1 and f2, when resonance is higher this means f1 and f2 are increased.