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Have any of you ladies developed a feminine sounding voice and, if so, how did you do it? I would love to have a feminine voice but when I try it is just a goofy high pitched falsetto.
Kerri
Kerri Sweetness
The simple answer is not YET but it’s not as deep as it used to be! LOL!
Anna xxxHi Kerri, I went to a number of YouTube sites and listened to them, narrowed it down to this girl:
https://www.youtube.com/c/TransVoiceLessons
I did what she teaches and I now have what other people, including the women I work with, say is a natural, sweet voice. For me what really helped was being trained to sing in choirs. I was told that I was a natural countertenor, which is a very high voice for a male. It has a lot to do with being able to raise your larynx and keeping it there all the time.I hope you can learn a nice feminine voice, it does make a difference in how we are perceived.
Hugs,
Lauren M
You need to learn to mix your head and chest voices when you speak. It is a technique used by singers. It just takes time and practice. Having taken operatic voice lessons in High School turned out be a huge help. I just let my inner girl out and the voice kicks in. My problem now is every time I answer the phone people think they are talking to a woman.
I spent a lot of time working in live theater and radio. I learned to change the timber of my voice and modify my range. My CD friends say I am very good. Kind of like Cathleen Turner.
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.
I’ve been told many times that people thought I was a woman when they heard me speaking on the phone. I always thought I sounded like a man. Maybe that’s part of being intersex? I once learned that if you put your open hands in front of your ears but close to the skull,(like donkey ears) and then speak, you will hear what others hear as your true voice. I also do know that my larynx, trachea and epiglottis are all sort of misaligned and it’s easy for me to choke. When I have an operation, the anesthesiologists have difficulty putting the tube in. The people that I know that have mastered the feminine voice have told me that it’s like singing all the time. That seems similar to what others here have mentioned also.
Thanks Kerri for this good question and good luck. Marg
I’d say it is good enough. I have a video-clip with my voice from some 10 years ago (I have got better I hope!)
Gabriela
Thank you Samantha!
Yes, I have. Been going out for quite some time.
In reality, a femme voice is not the most important quality when aiming for acceptance. (Which is much better than “passing”, imho)
Sure, how you look, confidence, all important. But even more important… Shape/body proportions. Hips/waist/shoulders ratio. But I digress! Anyway, thanks!!
Hahaha! Thank you Carmen!! ♥️
I have a very feminine voice, if you count Lurch from the original Addams family as feminine sounding, lol!
I’ve developed a feminine voice. Though, I must admit, I haven’t had the opportunity to use it in quite a while. I’m not sure how good it would sound without some practice. I got a lot of help from watching YouTube videos on the subject. I found a channel called TransVoiceLessons to be very educational.
I’m not surprised, Amy.
Hi Kerri.
I do and it seems to work fairly well, although I do have to remember when I’m speaking to use it!
I did quite a lot of online research to learn how other trans women had developed their feminine voice without surgery. I found that women tend to use a softer volume when speaking than men do. That’s the first thing I had to learn and change. Women also vocalize from higher up. What I mean by that is that men speak from our chest (if you place your hand on your chest you can feel the reverbarations). Women talk from higher up in their throat. Women also use more of a flowing style of speech, as opposed to the often choppy style that men use.
I also realized that, just like men, women’s voices come in many different tones (think Lauren Bacall compared to Kristin Chenoweth), so I don’t have to use a high pitched voice, I can essentially modify my male voice to some degree and sound like a woman.
There’s a lot more to it than that, but for me, those were some of the most basic elements that I had to work on to create a feminine voice.
So those are some of the things I’ve learned that I want to share with everyone.
Hugs,
Holly
Another thing that has really helped me with a feminine voice has been the fact I have transitioned and now live fulltime as a woman. I wanted to learn feminine speech before I went fulltime as I work in a government building where I am the supervisor for security and spend most of my day talking with people.
When I listen to my voice recordings from 6 months ago and compare them to ones made this morning, there is no comparison, I sound much more feminine and I’m not missgendered on the phone anymore. I share this with you to point out that using and practicing speaking in a feminine voice is the only way you can really develop it.Hugs ladies,
Lauren M
Basically, I try to speak from the same place I sing.
I have been singing along with Madonna and Alanis Morissette for..like…EVER!
I practice by talking to my dog.
I try to imitate Marilyn Monroe.
As I start transitioning, one of the things I have learned, on the advice of others, was to just speak softly, a try not to raise my voice to what I think is feminine sounding. It never works, so now I just speak a little more softly and it comes out much nicer sounding. I have a sound/voice meter app on my phone I use to measure and now my wife and I speak in the same range for the most part. (laughter is another matter) I just keep practicing!
Kristen, I have followed, or I guess I should say “am following,” the same path. My natural voice is on the high side for a male anyway. It isn’t a lot of work for me to use a slightly higher pitch WITHOUT breaking into falsetto (although I can do a mean Mickey Mouse impersonation!) It comes out acceptably femme (now) and hopefully will get better over time. The trick is locking that register in as your “normal” voice – the voice you automatically default to when you open your pie-hole. It’s a species of “muscle memory” – you know, doing a motion or series of motions so often that you eventually find yourself doing those motions without actually having to think about it. That’s the practice, practice, practice part for me. P.S. I am also trying out femme voice training available at several places on the web. It’s possible I could end up with a better voice that way, but I have the comfort of starting with a halfway decent baseline femme voice.
I’ve found my Carmen voice by just speaking softer and staying away from my lower tones while being a little bit more breathy than my natural guy voice. I don’t go in to falsetto except for two occasions… when I laugh, or when I sneeze. People always comment how “cute” my voice is, or how “little” my voice is which adds to them telling me I’m adorable.
If someone can’t hear me and asks me to repeat something, I walk up closer and say it again, instead of risking talking louder, though I can maintain being en femme if I have to scream at somebody (which I learned a couple nights ago when I had to full-on throw down with a manly man construction type guy at a food truck event because he grabbed my ass as his way of being cute and flirty). He met concrete really quick at the hands of this petite little girl in 3.5″ heels.
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