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Introduction to Transmasculine Voice

This is not necessarily a full guide. Rather, it is more so aimed at being an introduction to transmasculine voice for both those who are on testosterone and those who are not. I plan to make more material in the future, but I hope that this guide can work as a starting off point for those who have just begun working on their voice. For those that have been working on their voice for longer, this can definitely serve as a refresher of fundamental concepts and as a redirection from ineffective practices. I am still working on my longer, more complete guide, which will cover both transmasculine and transfeminine voice, as they really are just two sides of the same coin.

Unfortunately, the current state of trans voice leaves little room for transmasculine people, with many people thinking testosterone will completely change the voice and no more work will be needed, or even that it’s impossible to get a passing voice without T. While T may do “all the work” for some, for others, that isn’t necessarily the case. You can also still get a passing voice without T.

  1. T might not do all the work for you. When going on testosterone, the vocal folds will get longer, which lowers your pitch and adds a "buzzy" quality, but oftentimes the larynx might not descend as much as it might need to for a passable voice. This is how you get the stereotypical "trans guy voice", where someone has a mostly masculine sounding voice, but something sounds "off" about it. That's usually larynx height, which, if raised, will make the voice sound brighter, and if lowered will make the voice sound darker.

  2. There's no such thing as "talking from your chest" or "talking from your throat". These are ultimately abstractions that don't actually mean much as far as what is going on with your voice on a physiological level.

  3. There's no such thing as "increasing head resonance" or "increasing chest resonance", either. When someone says this, they are usually referring to the sympathetic vibrations that you sometimes feel when placing your hand on your chest or your head while speaking or singing. These differ greatly from person to person and are not indicative of if you are doing something right or not.

  4. Pitch isn’t everything. You can still sound masculine at a higher pitch, and you can still sound feminine at a lower pitch.

Awesome, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s get started!

Perceived vocal gender in this model can (mostly) be divided into 3 parts:

  1. Timbre. For the sake of this guide, we are measuring timbre on the axis of brightness and darkness. This is controlled by a lot of things, but I’m going to simplify and reduce it to three things: Larynx height, embouchure, and vowels.

  2. Texture. This can actually accompany a lot of different qualities, but for this guide when I refer to texture, I'm only talking about a buzzy quality and a soft quality. That is our texture scale as far as vocal gender is concerned. This is controlled by how high your closed quotient is, which is a measure of how frequently your vocal folds are in a "closed" position during phonation. You might also hear of a similar concept being thrown around, called vocal fold thinness and thickness. This is referring to applied vocal fold mass. Essentially, using more or less of your vocal folds during speech. From a purely pedagogical perspective, these might as well be the same as they strongly correlate to each other and are achieved the same way. If someone is talking about vocal fold thickness, just know that on an acoustic level they are referring to how buzzy something sounds.

  3. Pitch. This is the least important of all of these, but it is undeniable that it does have some effect on the perception of vocal gender. Pitch is mainly determined by the frequency at which your vocal folds are vibrating. The faster they vibrate, the higher your pitch. The slower they vibrate, the lower your pitch.

Cool, now we know what makes a voice sound masculine and feminine. Let’s move on to how we can actually do that.

Larynx Height Exercises

I recommend trying all of these exercises, but know that there is no “right” answer for which drill you should choose. I would find one that you like the best and try to stick with it.

  1. Small dog, big dog. This exercise, coined by Charles Armstrong of CRAMD Voice Lessons, is the same as the "Big Dog; Small Dog" exercise you might find in guides for transfeminine voice, just in reverse. It comes in two parts.

    1. The panting. Essentially, pant as though you are a Chihuahua. Make the "pitch" of your pants nice and high. Then, pant like a bigger dog, like a Golden Retriever. Make the "pitch" of your pants really low.

    2. The second part of this drill is called the phonation test. You want to take the aspirate sound (the H from your panting) and propel yourself onto a vowel. "Ha, Ha, Ha" "Ho Ho Ho" "Who Who Who" and so on. You can then move on to sentences starting with “H”. “How are you?” “Who is that strange man with the long arms? Example Clip

  2. Whisper Slides. Whisper slides are based on the same idea as “small dog, big dog” which is that modifying resonance with an unvoiced sound is easier than doing so with a voiced sound. It also has two parts.

    1. The Whisper. Repeat the word “Whisper” over and over as you try and whisper at a high pitch to a low pitch

    2. Unvoiced ---> Voiced. Basically, once you are at the low pitched whisper, try to maintain your low larynx as you begin to speak. You can use this to work your way into sentences.

Example Clip

  1. Yawning. Another exercise you can do is simply yawning to lower your larynx, and trying to “speak with a yawn”.

Example Clip

Closed Quotient / Thick Folds

If you aren't on T or haven't been on T for very long, this is going to likely be the thing that is most difficult for you. The end goal of this exercise is to make yourself sound "buzzier".

Quotient Slides: To do a quotient slide, you're going to want to pick a low note. There is no hard and fast rule, but, generally, you want to slide down from as far as you can comfortably go. As you descend the slide, you want to try and increase the heaviness or buzziness of your voice, like I do in this clip. You’ll probably go into vocal fry at first, that’s okay, but overall you want to try to avoid it while working on quotient. Once you’re picked up the vocal weight, you can try to speak. If you’re unable to maintain your pitch down there, you can slide back up to a range you are more comfortable speaking in.

Example Clip

Embouchure and Vowels

Embouchure is a French loanword that we are using to describe the shape of the mouth. For masc voice, you should, as a general rule, open your mouth more as you speak. The goal here is to make your consonants sound darker.

For vowel modification, we're going to take the darkest vowel (the one most “open” and “back”) and use that as the base for the rest of our vowels. Specifically, an /ɒ/ sound. You can find this on the IPA vowel chart on Wikipedia on the lowest column and furthest right corner. Try to make that /ɒ/ sound, and notice the feeling you get when you make that vowel. Try to hold your mouth in that general position as you continue to speak. The end goal here is to lower and retract the tongue more. However, I advise against trying to modify the tongue position directly, as we are desensitized to the way our tongue moves and direct modification can sometimes lead to “knödel”, a sound that lends itself to kermit the frog.

Example Clip

Bringing It All Together

This section assumes that you have already mastered each of the exercises individually. Now it is time to bring them all together! To do this, you can "stack" the drills on top of each other. For example, doing a larynx height drill, then directly afterward doing the CQ drill, and then applying the darker vowel configuration.

Example Clip

Video Resources:

Bottom Line

Progress probably won’t be instant. Nailing all of these things will probably take a while. Keep practicing and don’t give up hope. You might want to check out a voice teacher. Here is a list of voice teachers I highly trust:

Me (lol): Ama#7619 on Discord (My Current Rate is 30$/Hour Long Lesson)

CramdVoiceLessons: CRAMD Voice Lessons#3144 on discord, or CRAMDVoiceLessons@gmail.com https://www.patreon.com/CRAMDvoicelessons

Savvy: https://www.patreon.com/ScientificallyAugmentedVoice

Nick Grigsby: Contact transvoicelessons@gmail.com

Wellington Da Silva: vox.nova.studio@gmail.com and wellingtonofthejungle#5960 on Discord

Transcriptions were done by Sleet - Thanks!

Thank you for reading my guide! If you found this helpful, you might find these other resources below helpful as well!

Resources you should check out:

Scinguistics Discord Server: https://discord.gg/Khugsm3

Scinguistics Blogopedia: https://cramdvoicelessons.blog/encyclopedia/