For short conversations, yes. Longer conversations would likely fall through. I learned a couple of these tricks from a voice coach who came to our support groups.
I take a three step approach. First I find the tone I normally speak at, and call it do. I then sing up do-re-mi-fa-sol and speak at that pitch. It’s not too high (I can still modulate my voice at that level). This won’t make me sound feminine, but helps with a slightly higher pitch and helps with step 2.
Step 2 is to open my throat when I speak. Sort of like when they tell you to sing from your chest and not from your throat. What this will do will be to get rid of that male buzz in your throat. Doing this you still will sound male.
Why? Because you have a big volume of space inside your head for the voice to echo around before coming out of your mouth. If you sing at the same pitch as a woman (not an octave difference, at the same pitch) you can still tell which is a male and which is a female voice because the female voice sounds smaller. So what can you do?
Some people talk in a whisper to make their voice smaller. The problem is that others can’t hear you, ask you to speak louder, and suddenly you sound like a male again. The technique is to use a smaller space, namely your nasal cavity. You want to push maybe half to 2/3 of the air into your nasal cavity when you talk. It sounds tricky at first but can be learned quickly enough.
If you push all the air up into the nose, you’re going to sound like Fran Dresher or Barbara Streisand. That’s not what you are going for. Pull back a little on what’s going through your nose. I heard it described as trying to talk through the bridge of the nose. You can experiment with how much air you push up until you find a level that’s comfortable and works.
This gives your voice a smaller space to vibrate in without reducing volume. You can still speak loudly without your voice falling back to a masculine sound.
There are so many other more subtle things to fully feminize your voice. Women tend to talk legato (their words flow together, more elongated vowels) while men talk staccato (sharp breaks between words). Women tend to talk with their hands more than men. Women tend to talk faster and use a lot more words. Women tend to modulate their voice with emotion to emphasize words and may raise their voice at the end of a sentence whereas men will talk more monotone and always drop their voice at the end of a sentence. Women tend to talk around a subject and may go off on tangents or parenthetical remarks before coming back to their main point while men tend to get straight to the point. And women tend to use different words from men. As an example, a man at a restaurant will usually say “I want …” whereas a woman is more likely to say “I’d like …” (more friendly, less aggressive).
I would say these are secondary things to work on after you can make your voice slightly higher and smaller. The initial three points will get you through “small talk” with someone. The remainder are more important for longer conversations and can be worked on after you have mastered the first few points.
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