Was just wondering what aspects of your voice you’re currently working on?

My issue is mostly that I drop my pitch a bit too low, which invites a heavier weight and sounds too masculine to my ears.

How about you?

  • apotheotic (she/her)@beehaw.orgEnglish
    8·
    3 months ago

    Keeping my vocal wave dynamic and bouncy whilst also remaining mostly above my anchor pitch. I find that I’ll often bottom out at my anchor pitch too early in a sentence but it doesn’t feel like a natural path of my vocal wave to spring back up again. Its the woooorst. I end up sounding quite monotone and unnatural at the ends of sentences as a result sometimes

    • dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
      4·
      3 months ago

      I find it can be helpful to try to think of it more like acting - sometimes I produce a more fem voice when I am mocking a woman with a hyper-fem girly voice - and whoa, what do you know, I can maintain a high voice with a feminine cadence and end all my sentences on an up-pitch, etc.

      It’s really about how I am thinking or projecting myself - and it’s so dysphoric to realize the problem is that I’m not naturally feminine … though it’s probably more accurate to say, I have to re-program the way I speak, and that’s a painful process like any other part of transition.

      • apotheotic (she/her)@beehaw.orgEnglish
        5·
        3 months ago

        Mmhm, I get that too. For me, my natural/muscle memory vocal wave is very typically feminine in shape, its just at a masc pitch. I need to effectively just transpose that bad boy up and I’d be golden, but maintaining the same vocal wave at a higher pitch just slowly wiggles its way down over a while

        • dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
          3·
          3 months ago

          yeah, I just need to practice, really - the same way I changed other parts of my voice. For whatever reason I’m just struggling with pitch. I think part of it is that my ear is not trained well enough - my ability to “hear” when my pitch is in the right place vs the wrong place is really weak, and so I overcompensate and shoot too high (because I can’t hear when it’s at the right pitch), and also sometimes when it’s too low it can sound higher to me on the inside … so, some of this is really about ear-training, as well.

          And yes, it’s pretty typical for anyone’s speech to get lower and more monotone - esp. when listing things or at the end of sentences. So it’s just a skill to listen for that and prevent it from going too low. I worked on that with a speech language pathologist - she would have me list things and work on noticing the pitch going down and bringing it back up, and establishing a better baseline.

          • apotheotic (she/her)@beehaw.orgEnglish
            4·
            3 months ago

            Re: ear training, it might be worth trying to get your hands on some aural training books intended for musicians - I’d say my ear for pitch is very heavily improved by having done that sort of stuff