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9 steps for a more typically female voice (MtF notes)

Hum to find resonance and note the position of your larynx. I try to make my upper teeth vibrate.

Lift the back of your tongue to make your mouth smaller. You want to be talking largely with the front of your mouth.

Tighten your throat/airway. Relax into position, so you don't strain or sound especially pinched.

Add some airiness to your voice to compensate for the tight throat. Bring your pitch up and stay out of falsetto.

Pull back your lips and smile slightly. This slightly shortens your airway and has a minor but noticable effect on the quality of your voice.

Emphasize with pitch instead of volume. It helps to pretend you're kind of excited, sometimes. Enunciate.

ntr4ctr voice training

First, you're going to want to put your hand on your throat, and feel your larynx. Then, you're going to swallow. You should be able to feel your larynx move up and back. This is happening because of the tensing of a series of muscles that automatically happens when you swallow, but that you probably aren't used to using consciously. Repeat this until you get a feel for the muscles that you're using.

Next, you're going to put your hand on your throat and swallow again, but this time, instead of releasing those muscles, you're going to want to keep them tightened even after your swallow.

What's you're going to do next, now that you've got a feel for those muscles, is to try to consciously tighten them to pull your larynx up and back, but without swallowing.

Then, you're going to try talking like that. Your voice should come out with a higher pitch than normal.

That's all there is to the technique, but there are some other important things you need to know if you want to get good results from voice training.

Voice training is like learning to ride a bike. When you first start, you'll be able to go about 10 feet before you lose your balance, and you won't be able to steer because you need all your mental energy to just keep from falling over. Your voice will sound terrible, unnatural, and monotone because you need to devote all your focus to just raising the pitch so you won't have the natural flow of normal speech, and you'll only be able to do it for like 5 seconds at a time. The idea of speaking like this normally and for hours at a time will be unthinkable, and you'll wonder why your voice sounds nothing like passing trans people's. But this is normal. As you practice, you'll be able to do it for longer and longer, and it'll become more automatic that you don't even have to think about while you're doing it. As it becomes less conscious, it'll start to sound more natural, and lose the stunted, deliberate quality that it has at first. You'll also be able to more finely control it, and think about other things while you do it as it fades into the background. Like riding a bike.

All you need to solve these problems is practice. Which brings me to the biggest obstacle of voice training. Voice training practice isn't difficult or anything, it's just talking. But what it is is slow. I've been voice training for two years now. It takes months before you start seeing any meaningful results, and even longer before it starts being passable. If you're listening to your own voice and judging yourself, or if you need to see significant improvement after just a few weeks to not get discouraged, then voice training will feel like an arduous, painful task, and even if you're able to force yourself to stick with it for a week or two, you won't be able to endure it for a whole year and hundreds of hours without burning out. The necessary first step to voice training is learning to see your shitty voice as the normal first stage, accept that it doesn't make you "masculine" or anything because that's how every MtF's voice starts out, and that it's going to stay that way for months and months and maybe even a year, and that's okay, because you will get better eventually. If you're constantly monitoring and evaluating yourself and your progress and thinking about how far you have left to go, the hundreds of hours of practice it takes to pass will feel like hell. But if you don't worry about where you are or how long it will take, then those hundreds of hours will fly by like nothing and one day you'll just have a better voice. I never noticed my voice improving, there wasn't any one point or even any short period where it suddenly got better, I just remember that it used to be terrible and know that right now it sounds pretty good. All you have to do is turn your brain off, and accept that you'll get there when you get there, instead of watching your progress like it's the microwave timer on a frozen burrito.

So, now that we've gotten that out of the way, what's a good way to voice train? I'd advise using a voice chat program like discord. This is a good idea because you have to talk to someone, talking to yourself for 500 hours would be way too boring, and you'd probably feel self-conscious talking to people irl when your voice doesn't pass. Plus, the people you talk to online can be other trans people, so that you don't have to worry about being judged. Talk about tranny stuff, talk about politics, talk about video games, talk about what you had for lunch, it doesn't matter, just keep talking. Don't worry too much about listening to clips of your own voice of deliberately improving at specific things. You can do some of that stuff too but what's most important is to just dump raw hours into using your voice with an elevated pitch until you can do it for as long as you want without getting tired and you don't have to devote your whole brain to it. Once you've gotten to the point where you can do that on autopilot and you can direct your focus to monitoring and tweaking specific things instead of just keeping your voice in the proper pitch range, THEN you can start making finer adjustments. There's no point in studying how to do a wheelie when you're still learning to pedal.

badambulist