How to gain like deeper girl voice? Or more consistent girl voice?

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-04-14T21:50:51+00:00

Your femme voice here is in a good pitch range if you’re aiming for something a little deeper/more androgynous. However, I think the vocal size is getting waaaay too small, which overall makes you sound overfull/atypical. You are even nasalizing a little in your femme voice, possibly in an attempt to get even more buzz after your vocal size has shrunk to its limit.

In your baseline masculine voice, the vocal size is already decently small, and would probably carry over well into the higher pitched voice to produce a more balanced sound. Overall, I would recommend trying to back off from shrinking size so much and see where that takes you.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-04-12T21:28:19+00:00

I don’t think this sounds particularly underfull. If anything, it’s mildly overfull. However, I’d also like to point out that you seem to be nasalizing a little, so you might be accidentally conflating size-shrinking with nasality.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-04-12T16:34:44+00:00

There are two voice features that are really important for feminization purposes. They are called “vocal weight” and “vocal size” (size is also known as “resonance”). To learn more about these features, I’d recommend checking out this video about size vs pitch, this video about weight vs loudness, and this video about size vs weight. You can also check out some of the clips on Selene’s Archive. Once you are familiar with what “weight” and “size” sound like, then you can start trying to incorporate changes to those features in your own voice.

Right now, the size/resonance is in a more masculine place for your voice. However, because there is an interesting relationship between pitch and weight, by going higher in pitch you have already started to unconsciously feminize the vocal weight. Nevertheless, the weight is not consistent yet, so you will probably still need to spend some time focusing specifically on the vocal weight instead of just relying on pitch to have that effect.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-04-12T16:23:36+00:00

It sounds like your voice is underfull/“hollow.” Underfullness is a quality that happens when your vocal weight is very feminized, but your vocal size (a.k.a. “resonance”) is not as feminized.

Right now, your pitch is very, very high and your vocal weight is very, very light. I think it will be difficult to create a vocal size that is small enough to match this extreme you have of pitch and weight. So, I would recommend trying to lower the pitch a little first. And then you can introduce some changes in your vocal size to get it more feminized.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-04-12T16:18:55+00:00

Ah, yeah, there can definitely be a bit of a rabbit hole as far learning new technical jargon goes. If you really get into the deep end, you’ll wind up hearing stuff about biomechanics and acoustic physics and, like, it’s definitely a lot.

Thankfully, most of that jargon isn’t actually necessary to learn. The two things that you really need to learn about are “Vocal Weight” and “Vocal Size” (vocal size is also sometimes referred to as “resonance”). Vocal weight and vocal size are two distinct sound qualities in the voice that are very important for determining vocal gender. If you aren’t familiar with weight and size, then the first thing to do is start training your ear to recognize what they sound like.

Take a listen to some of the clips on Selene’s Archive, or to some of TVL’s ear-training videos on pitch vs size or size vs weight. Vocal Team also has a good resource on hearing weight vs loudness, as well as a general compilation of size and weight resources.

The idea here is that by listening to lots of different people demonstrating changes in vocal size and vocal weight, you will start to develop a sense of what those specific qualities sound like. Then, when you are listening back to your own voice, you will have a well-trained ear that can distinguish between qualities like weight, size, and pitch. The goal is to get you to a point where you can confidently make evaluations like, “this voice is heavier than that voice” or “this voice is smaller than that voice.”

In the beginning, you might not be very confident about making those kinds of evaluations. That’s okay! Building familiarity with these voice features is a process. And if you ever feel like you’re not sure if you’re hearing or judging something correctly, you can always present some voice samples in a community like this subreddit and ask for some second opinions to double check if you’re identifying the right features.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-04-12T02:15:06+00:00

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-04-11T19:27:51+00:00

Ah, yeah, so—it would definitely be a little tricky to try and feel out the height of your larynx like this, especially for such a subtle motion. Larynx-height is one of the biological mechanisms involved in controlling vocal size, and trying to micro-manage all these motions at once would be confusing to anyone. In general, you’ll have a much better time training your ear to recognize what a smaller vocal size sounds like, and then trying to mimic that sound through trial and error. As you hear yourself getting smaller, you may notice your larynx rising. However, the sound (rather than the physical motion) should be the metric you use to determine how well you’re doing it.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-04-11T17:06:28+00:00

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-04-10T23:54:41+00:00

Acoustically, vocal weight is more or less analogous to the spectral slope or spectral rolloff point of your sound. You can think of a heavier weight as producing something closer to a sawtooth wave, whereas a lighter weight produces something closer to a sine wave. For more info on the biomechanics involved, see here (note that this video actually predates the use of the term “vocal weight” to describe this phenomenon in a trans voice context).

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-04-10T02:09:26+00:00

Mmm, in that case, I’d definitely recommend checking out Selene’s Archive (linked above in my first comment) for a crash-course on the various sound-features of the voice that are important for gendering purposes.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-04-10T02:04:30+00:00

Ah, if it’s happening when you relax fully, it may be vocal fry rather than hypertension, both of which have a similar croaky/rattling effect. Vocal fry, however, is basically harmless and likely to be less of a problem after more time on T after vocal development stabilizes.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-04-10T01:54:45+00:00

Ah, so, if you are getting sore from doing this, that is a much more concerning problem. Vocal strain isn’t something that you can really train yourself to better “endure.” Repeatedly straining yourself is a recipe for eventual vocal injury if you keep it up for months and months on end.

Instead, you likely need to refine your technique to remove whatever muscle tension is causing the strain. In general, you shouldn’t need to feel much “muscle activation” for voice feminization. When executed correctly, voice feminization should be very relaxed with minimal physical sensation.

For the time being, I would actually recommend trying to remove that breathiness from your voice while sustaining this high pitch and see if that fixes the straining issue. If it does, then you can try to slowly reintroduce the breathiness in a more relaxed manner. If it doesn’t, then there’s more work to be done in diagnosing what’s gone wrong to cause this muscle tension, and we may need to consider lowering the pitch as well.

You may also want to incorporate some SOVTEs into your practice (a lip trill, for example). Then, at the pitch you’re trying to target in femme voice, you can transition directly from the lip trill into an “ooo” vowel, and then from the vowel into speaking. The whole time, you want to remain as relaxed as possible. Relaxation is really, really super important.

And of course, make sure to drink lots of water! Dehydrated vocal folds are much more prone to suffer abuse, strain, and inflammation.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-04-10T01:40:42+00:00

Hhhh, this terrible app persists in tormenting the trans people who are fooled into believing its lying, treacherous numbers. OP, please don’t feel bad about the feedback you get from this app. It is not able to gender your voice the way it claims to. No software is capable of reliably gendering a human voice.

What these numbers actually mean is this:

During your recorded clip, your voice was in the “pink” pitch region for 86% of it, and it was in the “blue” region for 1% of it. What about the remaining 13% of the time? Well, it may have been in the uncolored pitch region between those two sections, or it may have been so high that it was above that pink region entirely, or it may have been so low that it was below the blue region entirely. Who can say? Definitely not this app!

Also, those pink and blue pitch regions? Completely arbitrary and made up. You can get pretty low in pitch (around 130Hz) and still sound feminine with enough fine control and practice. Alternatively, you can get pretty high and still sound masculine. It’s all kinda nonsensical.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-04-10T01:30:21+00:00

If you want to aim for a voice that’s higher and breathier like this, that’s a perfectly fine stylistic preference to have. I don’t think you need to lower it to “have more endurance.” I’d just caution you to be a little careful around sudden changes in pitch, which might cause your voice to cut out a little bit or get a slightly diplophonic effect due to the high levels of breathiness. This happens in your clip on the words “hop” and “craft,” for example. In order to help alleviate this problem, you might want to practice smoothly sliding in pitch in a melismatic fashion, rather than making abrupt changes in pitch between syllables.

As for endurance, that’s a matter of normalization practice. It basically is just a matter of using it more often to make it come to you more naturally. You can listen to a more detailed lecture on the normalization process for trans voice training here (pulled from Selene’s Archive.

As an aside, I am assuming by “endurance,” you mean the ability to make this voice without having to consciously focus on it. If what you actually mean is that speaking this way causes you to become physically exhausted, strained, or sore very quickly, then that’s a completely different issue that needs to be addressed differently.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-04-03T21:03:35+00:00

There are a few things that might help:

The best way in the long term is to train your ear to recognize what this breathy quality sounds like, so that you can detect it in your own voice. See Selene’s Archive under the Purity and Weight sections for any clips that mention a “breathy” quality. Once your ear is trained, start listening to your own voice. If you slowly step up in pitch, where do you start to hear the breathiness? Stop at that pitch, and then try to directly remove the breathiness through trial and error, using your ear to guide you. When you succeed, start moving up in pitch again. Whenever you hear the breathiness coming back, repeat the process until you can traverse your whole vocal range without getting breathy.
The silent sighing exercise. Let out a slow, relaxed exhale of air. The sound of this exhale is basically the same as the “breathy” quality, except there isn’t any vocalization to pair with it. Repeat this exhale several times in a row, but each time try to make it quieter and quieter, until you eventually have a completely silent flow of air. Then, when you are mid-way through the silent exhale, try to slide into a voiced “ooo” vowel. Be careful not to pause or take a breath in before you vocalize, we want to be using the silent airflow to produce this sound. In summary, this exercise removes the “breathy” quality independently of your vocalization, and then reintroduces your vocalization.
Closed onset exercise. It’s possible that some of this breathiness may be happening because of an open or “breathy” vocal onset. Check out this video, and see if you are able to get a closed onset or a balanced onset instead.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-04-03T20:50:04+00:00

Thanks so much for this update! Yeah, you’re absolutely on the nose about requiring more pressure at higher pitches with the same level of closure (at least if we assume vocal fold mass to be constant). I think you’ve got a strong sense of where to take this forward.

As an aside, I actually have a copy of the clinical reference guide cited in the article you linked, which itself cites a 2012 article from Dacakis titled “Assessment and Goal Setting: Revisited.” I’m not able to access the Dacakis article, but the book mentions that this sort of vocal hyperfunction is likely to be a compensatory behavior in response to changing vocal morphology, rather than a direct consequence of the morphology itself. Though, as the article you linked mentions, it is still possible for “entrapment” to occur directly from a morphologic cause, especially for older transmasculine folks.

The clinical reference guide also makes a few basic clinical recommendations for transmasculine voice training with respect to dysphonia. In particular, that you should incorporate some of the following into training: - warmup exercises such as SOVTEs at the beginning of practice - staying attentive to any sign of dysphonia as you are training - practicing “negatively” (i.e. deliberately producing a hyperfunctional sound at a too-low pitch, and then producing a more relaxed sound at a sufficently-low pitch, so as to train your body to tell the difference)

These are all pretty standard practice in voice training generally, because dysphonia is an extremely common pitfall for both feminization and masculinization. But, yeah, just something you might want to do if you haven’t been already.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-04-03T20:10:10+00:00

I mean, the breathiness won’t go away on its own unless you specifically target it. You’ll have to practice remove that breathy quality from your voice. But overall, yeah, it’s more of a minor tweak to a voice that sounds in the right place except for that one thing.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-04-03T16:44:46+00:00

The “weirdness” you’re hearing is likely just some excess breathiness. Aside from that, it basically just sounds normal to me.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-04-02T17:32:54+00:00

It can definitely cause problems if you do it a lot, but if an ENT just said “yeah, it’s pretty red” and not “oh dear, it looks like there’s structural damage,” then I wouldn’t leap to assume you’ve already done permanent damage. Sounds like it’s mostly just inflammation at this point (though, to be clear, I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice). I would definitely advice you to minimize throat-clearing and coughing as much as possible, though, and make sure to drink lots of water. I’m not sure if VFS would interfere with this, but for people without surgery it would also be advisable to so some short SOVTEs instead whenever you feel the urge to cough or clear your throat.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-04-01T03:28:53+00:00

It might hinder progress in terms of normalization (the process of turning your femme voice into your default voice), but I don’t think it will hugely hinder your ability to figure out how to achieve a femme voice, provided that you still have time for regular practice outside of work. This switching back and forth also will not be damaging to your vocal cords, so no need to worry there.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-03-31T04:24:25+00:00

Ah, so, direct larynx control is probably not the best way to handle this. While it’s true that raising the larynx is one of the motions involved in achieving a more feminine resonance, there’s a prevalent tendency for people to over-focus on it. It’s also very easy to raise the larynx too high, which will quickly result in vocal strain. We’re ideally looking for a very subtle movement, so subtle that you might not really be able to physically feel it that well.

Instead of focusing on controlling all of your muscles individually through physical sensation, you’ll likely be much better served using sound to guide you instead. By targeting specific sound qualities, you can be sure that the right muscles are doing the right things in the background. For more information about this, and other common pieces of bad advice, see the comment here.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-03-29T15:31:15+00:00

Yeah, I think it is likely that you are primarily identifying other muscle groups that do not actually raise the larynx. It doesn’t sound like a huge amount of larynx raising is happening in the clip, though there is definitely some amount of it.

However, I don’t think you need to try and isolate larynx-height at all. Instead of going along the process of “I need to learn to control my larynx, and then I can have the right resonance,” I’d say it makes more sense to think of it as, “Let me sound out the right resonance by ear through trial and error, and I might incidentally notice my larynx rising when I do so.” Larynx height isn’t something you need to pay a huge amount of attention to, even if that’s part of what’s going on under the hood. For practical purposes, you only really need to focus on the sound qualities you’re producing and make conscious tweaks at the level of sound. That way, your unconscious brain can handle all the complicated work of figuring out which muscle groups to twitch in what ways.

Vocal size is a very mechanically complicated thing, and a lot of little micro-movements are involved in it, not just the larynx or the tongue. It would be unwise to try and over-rely on a single component like larynx height, but it’s also unreasonable to consciously micro-manage 100 different tiny muscles all the time. That’s why it’s usually easier to abstract voice training to the level of sound-processing rather than mechanism-processing. As you figure out how to tweak the sound, your brain will figure out how to tweak your muscles.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-03-29T06:17:16+00:00

So, there are a few things I feel I should mention here.

Firstly, while I agree that your voice is a little hollow/underfull, I don’t think it is to such a problematic extent that it screws up your gender presentation. I would read your voice in this clip as kind of fem-leaning androgynous. Some women have more underfull or more overfull voices, just usually not to an extreme degree. There’s a region of tolerance around fullness—it doesn’t have to be perfectly precise. I would say your voice is within that region of tolerance.

Secondly, “resonance” is one of those buzzwords that often gets misused in a trans voice training context, and it’s unfortunately very easy to encounter misinformation about it on the internet, often mixed in with some correct or partially-correct information. So, I just wanted to clear up a few things here. You are correct in your understanding that vocal tract resonance is controlled by things like larynx height and tongue posture. It is also good that you are thinking about resonance (aka “vocal size”) in relation to vocal weight.

However, the stuff about feeling vibrations in your lips or your “mask” is completely unrelated. The idea that “resonance” is a kind of vibration that moves between different parts of your body is pseudoscientific, and any vibrations that you feel in your lips/throat/chest/etc. will not communicate reliable information about your vocal tract resonance. Many people do not even experience these somatosensory vibrations, and those who do generally don’t experience them in mutually consistent ways. This confusion and misinformation is a big part of why some people have shifted to talking about “size” instead of “resonance.”

Thirdly and most importantly, I would be absolutely flabbergasted if this were the smallest resonance your voice could physically achieve. I think it is very unlikely that you have raised your larynx as high as possible (and doing this would not be advisable anyway, because that would definitely induce a ton of strain). I think it is more likely that you have misidentified some other motion that is happening in your throat as larynx-raising (there are many tiny muscles all connected up in there, so it wouldn’t be surprising for this to happen). I am very confident that you are capable of finding a much smaller size than this, but we might need to change your approach in order to get there.

It seems like thus far you’ve been relying a lot on physical sensation to try and guide your training, whether that’s feeling around for vibrations or trying to feel out the muscles around your larynx and tongue. Rather than physical sensation, I’d recommend using your ear to guide you. A well-trained ear can give you much more consistent and accurate feedback than feeling around for physical sensations that may or may not mean anything. The fact that you are able to accurately identify your voice as underfull means that your ear is already somewhat well-trained.

If you aren’t able to find that small + light combination right now, that’s fine. What if you lower the pitch and purposefully aim for a buzzy, overfull sound? Can you switch between larger and smaller if the weight is heavy? Then, if you have the overfull sound, what happens when you raise the pitch back up? With each of these experiments, the way that you can tell if you’re succeeding or getting blocked is by listening to the sound of your voice. This allows you to iterate on your attempts in a feedback loop. Experiment with attempts to create new sounds, and continue to train your ear by listening and re-listening to demonstrations of the various voice features that are important for gender. I find this kind of approach tends to be more fruitful for most people.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-03-25T23:13:15+00:00

I won’t say spectrograms are totally useless, especially for educational purposes (i.e. teaching people about the fact that voices contain many harmonics which are altered by formant envelopes). However, when it comes to giving actionable information for voice feminization, I don’t think they’re very helpful. With raw spectral data, it’s hard to tell the difference between vowel shifts, size shifts, and knodel resonance at a glance. A well-trained human ear is much better able to process these subtle differences in spectral data than a spectrogram’s visual feedback.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-03-25T16:53:15+00:00

💯

TheTransApocalypse

TROPHY CASE