A crash course on vocal transitioning

The goal of vocal training is to alter the degree of expressed androgenic development of the voice. This includes:

• Pitch + Weight – Tackling these separately is incredibly difficult and frankly a bit of a non-starter. Pay attention to how pitch influences the weight (or buzz) in the voice. If you are aiming to increase the expressed androgenic development of the voice, get heavier. If you are aiming to decrease the expressed androgenic development of the voice, get lighter.
• Size, to Fullness – Size is the impression of how large or small the speaker sounds. Larger voices tend to convey a greater degree of expressed androgenic development; smaller voices do the opposite. If size and weight are not commensurate with one another, the resulting sound will sound atypical; seeking a balance between size and weight (fullness) is crucial to the overall process of voice training, regardless of your vocal target.

This will result in two basic combinations of full sounds: heavy and large, or small and light. You should now be expressing the degree of androgenic development you’re aiming for.

People seeking androgynous voices: early on, you will likely want to aim as far as possible in the direction of transition (or perhaps this is better stated as away from your current default) before settling on something more to your liking.

With the perceived androgenization of the voice resolved, we now look to major changes that impact our perception of a speaker’s performed gender:

• Pronunciation, on a spectrum from sharp to dull. In general, masculine speakers exhibit duller pronunciation, and feminine speakers exhibit sharper pronunciation.

These are the features I consider to be absolutely core. Most people will achieve a sound that gets them gendered correctly by focusing on the above features. If you’re seeking more things to incorporate, some other personality-expressing features to investigate would include:

• Prosody, which includes not just pitch displacement, but the fluidity vs angularity of pitch change, as well as Rhythm, which is comprised of the overall pace or tempo of speech and Spacing (whether and how much silence there is between individual words), and Stress, which we vary through elongation or by varying weight.

• Delving further into accent, we can identify some of the specific features of regional masculine and feminine accents by identifying changes in vowel shift, vowel replacement, and vowel stress and precision.

If you can do all of that without running into issues with efficiency, stability, connection, knödel (like Kermit the frog), or tongue obstruction (as exemplified by the characters Stitch or Elmo), then you’ve pretty much identified all the features of the voice that matter in any vocal endeavor.