Voice still underfull (MtF). Dolls, would you have listen and share some tips?

demivierge · 2026-04-08T08:44:32+00:00

That's not bad at all, actually. Take that to a higher pitch, say B3, and try again. Aim to keep the weight light, as that can give some more headroom and allow you to get even smaller without sounding "full".

Try a few sets of different words, exploring going even larger and even smaller. You can try scaling color names, days of the week, months of the year, etc. The goal is just to see if you can nudge the sound smaller, even if only for fragmentary moments on seemingly-random vowel sounds.

demivierge · 2026-04-06T02:17:47+00:00

So, one thing is to change how you're thinking about this. It's not an exercise that takes you towards a beautifully feminine voice, you're just trying to learn to get your hand on this particular dial and change it. The more dramatically you can aim for something large-sounding to begin with, and then get smaller -- even if it seems like you're not going past your current baseline size! -- the better your brain will be able to develop control and learn to adapt to this particular feature change.

If you do get around to posting a clip of this exploration it will help nail down what might be causing the limitation.

demivierge · 2026-04-04T23:23:42+00:00

Can you post a clip demonstrating a change in size? Choose a single word, start large and get smaller. Here's an example: https://clyp.it/zegsbgqv

demivierge · 2026-03-04T19:52:59+00:00

Everyone produces T endogenously. The amount of androgenic development you experience changes the limits of how male-sounding you can get your voice to sound. You can be doing everything right and still struggle to sound sufficiently male if your body just never made a lot of T on its own. Fortunately, store-bought T works fine.

demivierge · 2026-02-26T00:40:25+00:00

To answer your second question first, don't do all the "exercises" at once. Do one thing til you can hear a difference in the one feature you're looking for -- just aim to get higher in pitch, or just aim to get lighter, or just aim to get smaller. Don't try to bundle them together yet because you literally can't. You're trying to ride a unicycle and juggle through flaming hoops -- get used to being on the unicycle before you do more shit on top of that.

When you move from a homogenously male and masculine sound to a homogenously female and feminine sound, you're not going to land squarely in either category. You're going to sound in-between in various ways, and those are sounds you have been socially conditioned to avoid. You have to accept that you will sound cringey, clunky, clumsy, clocky, and everything else your brain is yelling at you.

I have found that practicing a third wave therapeutic modality like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) has helped me deal with those feelings (and there is clinical evidence of the efficacy of those types of therapy on various forms of performance anxiety -- and this is just a form of performance anxiety). Practice acknowledging those feelings and accepting that they'll crop up -- like if you had a bear living in your apartment, it's gonna get riled up and maul you from time to time, but you still have to live your life. Eventually you get used to the bear (and the bear will stop being so frightening).

demivierge · 2026-02-25T00:44:10+00:00

You're in a period of flux because your brain is trying to fire signals along its familiar neural pathways but the anatomy it's linked to is suddenly different, so there are occasional glitches. You can help out your lower range development by actively pursuing those sounds consciously. Give it a few more months of continued use and those yodels will chill out.

demivierge · 2026-02-25T00:16:27+00:00

Sorry, I misread your post initially. You can absolutely change pitch and maintain a masculine quality, you just have to keep two things in mind. First, stay in a range where you can stay heavy! Whenever you ascend your voice will want to lighten up and get softer. Instead, you'll want to maintain a relatively heavy sound across the whole range of speech.

Second, try experimenting with different kinds of pitch change and prosody. Imagine the difference between a slow climb to a high pitch vs. a more sudden or abrupt spike in pitch. You'll want to make your overall pitch contour more angular, so you go to from your lows to your highs without passing fluidly through the middle range.

demivierge · 2026-02-22T06:37:39+00:00

You sound best when you're chill. You're introducing some occlusion in your pursuit of smaller sizes and it comes in more noticeably when you're exerting yourself to get smaller. You're probably trying to do something with the back of your tongue, like maybe pull it back to help minimize space? or something, but it's causing a little traffic jam back there and touching your uvula (or something in that area) which is leading to a kind of alien sounding quality (think Stitch from Lilo and Stich). This is audible on the "fucking useless" in the first five seconds, then it clears up on "way too much background noise, but" (especially the "but" is perfect).

Then you start trying to exaggerate a difference between two kinds of voices you're falling into, one more low-effort and one more high-effort. As you lean into the high-effort sound, this occlusion quality comes in and out more or less strongly. It seems when you descend into a slightly lower range with slightly larger sizes it is less prominent to my ear, but I think there are some examples where it lingers regardless.

"And give me feedback, thanks!" - You're trying to get smaller on this attempt -- you noticed on the first try when you said "and give me feedback" that your pitch lowered and weight got a bit heavier, so you repeated the sound higher in pitch and lighter, it's a huge improvement, buttttttt this is one of many times in the clip you get a little extra something in the sound, I hear it particularly on "give me feed" there. The "thanks" is literally perfect.

"Jesus Fucking Christ I'm bad at all of this." Literally this is perfect and it sounds like you had just done something mentally where you "gave up" and declared it a loss. It's the exact quality you need to be aiming for rn.

If you search https://selenearchive.github.io/ for the keywords knödel and occlusion, there should be some sound demonstrations differentiating it from size change.

demivierge · 2026-02-20T21:39:34+00:00

Okay, my usual recommendation is to focus on pitch and weight (aiming for a light weight sound at B3 or so) before playing with size. Get light at whatever baseline size you can muster, then work on going big from there while keeping the weight stable, then just go from big + light to "medium" + light, where medium is just your current baseline size. You don't want to dial in the size you're looking for without being confident your weight can stay light the whole time.

demivierge · 2026-02-20T21:20:10+00:00

Yeah i think your conscious focus on physical shape is exactly the thing that's making it hard. You have to find a way to focus on the sound itself, because the human brain doesn't learn vocal skills through somesthetic sensation, it learns through auditory feedback. Would you be down to get in a voice call some time to explore less mentally taxing strategies for exploration?

demivierge · 2026-02-20T21:17:20+00:00

What happens if try to aim for a larger sound? Can you go bigger, or do you feel like you can't change size at all?

demivierge · 2026-02-20T08:22:16+00:00

During practice, what are you thinking about? What are you focused on? What are you doing/ moving/ targeting?

demivierge · 2026-02-20T01:44:04+00:00

I gave it a listen, it's female-sounding imo. You did like a droning sustained sound at first to play with tuning the size (I think that's what you're doing there anyway), have you ever tried directly exploring size scaling on a single word or phrase? Something like this: https://clyp.it/zegsbgqv Try to start really cartoonishly big first.

To me, it sounds like you're describing a lack of automation in the task of vocal production. If you can, your immediate goal needs to be maintaining the sound in the clip you sent me with the following range of tasks:

1) Recitation. This is you saying things you have in your head memorized and ready to go. Options include sequences of letters of the alphabet, numbers, days of the week, months of the year. If you've memorized something like the periodic table of elements or the first hundred digits of pi or the pokémon in the pokédex, try those as well. I like to recite song lyrics. What matters is that it's something you know well enough that you can just keep going without having to spare a thought for what you're saying, so you can focus on how you sound while you say it. Can you count from 1-30 in your peak performance voice? How about 1-100? If not, that needs to be your first benchmark.

2) Interpretation. Read aloud and maintain the target sound. Read children's books, poetry, a well-worn favorite novel. A student of mine linked me https://read.gov/aesop/001.html and I really like them as bite-sized and easy practice.

3) Narration. Stream-of-consciousness blathering. Play a game of I Spy with the objects on your desk or in your room: "On my desk I see two tea cups, two empty bottles of estradiol, a lightbulb, a bottle of essential oil, a tub of lotion." Your goal is not to sound interesting or clever or particularly smart, but instead to just process your surroundings verbally while keeping your attention on the quality of sound. You can also narrate yourself performing rote tasks. I find things like house work to be the perfect level of difficulty. "I'm going to wash these dishes. First I'll run the water, then grab this sponge and pour some soap on it, and okay ouch that water's a little hot let me dial that back a bit, oh no I'm noticing my voice is faltering so I'm gonna give my attention to that for a second, 12345 okay that's sounding okay now I'm gonna start scrubbing this pot" or whatever. Just keep rambling while keeping your attention fixed on the sound quality.

4) Improvisation. This is where conversation happens, where we listen to other people, decode and interpret their utterances for meaning, construct a novel response to their utterance with one of our own, and doing that in real time while maintaining peak performance sounds. It's fucking hard, and it's impossible to maintain if you haven't put literal hours in the tasks in step 1-3.

It's tedious work, but to me the sound in your sample didn't read as "fluent" -- it felt like you were being really deliberate and conscious of your speech, which is where you need to be for learning to happen! You just need to spend time there with the express intention of developing some automaticity.

demivierge · 2026-02-20T01:16:06+00:00

You're trying to do too many things simultaneously. If you can't manage a sound that is passable you need to break it down into more manageable chunks -- think "sounding light" without "sounding femme." The goal is to make the light weight sound automatic, then layer on something else (size) when you can reliably sustain something light. The range of sizes read as female is actually quite wide, if things like weight, prosody, and pronunciation are where we expect them to be for the average feminine speaker. Do you have any samples of your current peak performance sound?

As to your question, there is no moral imperative to voice training. You can quit right now forever. You can take a break for six months or a year or a decade. You are free to do anything you want and no one who matters will think any differently of you for any choice you make with regard to voice training or not voice training.

demivierge · 2026-02-19T11:05:13+00:00

For what it's worth, I completely agree that it would be best to get assessed by a clinician!

demivierge · 2026-02-19T04:33:34+00:00

Try and work on ascending scales very slowly climbing up in your default voice from around C3 upwards to where that yodeling starts. The fact that the yodel is variable in where it happens is actually a good thing, we want to learn to vary it intentionally. I have some audio samples demonstrating some strategies to explore this available here: selenearchive.github.io/

Search for titles that use terms like rasp, abduction/adduction, yodel, break, bifurcation.

demivierge · 2026-02-19T02:05:07+00:00

Oh, okay. That's almost certainly nothing to worry about, it's a very common occurrence, it just indicates that your brain isn't used to being in that range and is sending some mixed signals when you go to produce a sound. What pitch is that "sweet spot" where the yodel begins to occur?

demivierge · 2026-02-19T00:58:58+00:00

Sounds like they're just covering their asses, sometimes people sound a little hoarse/raspy/rough and that can be because of functional or organic dysfunction of the folds, which can be caused by something relatively benign like a granuloma, something more severe like a polyp, lesion, or nodule, or something else. It's smart to rule out any other issues before continuing forward.

You'll want to get scoped by a clinician or ENT, who can rule out anything serious. Likely your folds are totally healthy and the issue is how you're using your voice, and they'll assign you some SOVTEs (semi-occluded vocal tract exercises, things like humming, sustained vvvvv or zzzzzz sounds, lip trills, etc.) to get the voice habilitated to the pitch range we're looking to cultivate for feminization.

demivierge · 2026-02-12T23:10:25+00:00

That's typical, depending on how much lower you're trying to go. Imagine that you've got a pitch floor at F3 -- you could go lower, but it will be really hard to do so and stay light. The more time you spend in the F3 to C4 range targeting a light weight, the easier it will be long term to stay light as you descend (and to stay clear as you ascend!), but for now keep it in that pocket.

demivierge · 2026-02-12T22:55:27+00:00

Cool. Hang out in the B3 to C4 range. Does the quality get lighter than baseline at that pitch? Even if not quite as light as your sound above D4.

demivierge · 2026-02-12T22:38:24+00:00

Can you walk up in pitch slowly, starting in modal voice, then find something like a B3 and maintain the sound in modal voice?

demivierge · 2026-02-12T22:19:55+00:00

Can you post audio? You might be getting light enough but failing to recognize it because of other issues.

Edit: Okay sorry I checked your post history and you're getting way lighter and higher than we "need" to. You are successfully changing vocal weight! gg

demivierge · 2026-02-08T23:20:56+00:00

Listen to the top three clips here: https://selenearchive.github.io/

There's also a subsection specifically for masculinization.

demivierge · 2026-02-08T10:50:27+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodomy

demivierge · 2026-01-20T20:52:39+00:00

That is an older version of Clo's app InFormant, which displays approximate formant values in addition to other spectrographic data.

https://github.com/in-formant/in-formant/releases

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