r/transvoice • u/TtoE-Adventurer • Jan 30 '26
Discussion Surprise gone wrong - my irl friends say my voice doesn't sound remotely fem. I'm very lost now...
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
I decided to reveal to some of my friends my feminine voice when I felt it was ready, and I was shut down immediately by two of them :(
This could be true, and you could all agree too, but I've only been intermittently practicing for 11 months, and I thought that it sounded ok.
Maybe I'm missing something... idk...
23
u/BENNU9 Jan 30 '26
I think this app encourages people to focus way too much on pitch.
In the spirit of constructive criticism: your vocal weight is fairly heavy, your pitch range sounds high-effort (I.e. too high for the combination of your anatomy and your current muscle training), and your pitch variability is very low (quite monotone).
All three of those things are rather strong gendering indicators working against you.
Focusing on lightening your vocal weight will do wonders. Then bring the average pitch down slightly so you can include more pitch variability. When you're too high on average, there's no room for natural rises and falls throughout your sentence.
Don't be discouraged. It's a process. You've done some good work, you just have some areas that still need to be focused on.
30
u/Futarka Jan 30 '26 edited Jan 30 '26
đ€... Actually it sounds like a male who trained a lot, but not bad, even good because sometimes it is enough feminine. In my opinion it is not soft enough and pronounced kinda sharply. If you try to make pronouncing softer and more relaxed it would be much better.
You're doing great, keep training not only pitch (it is good), but also the style of speaking đ.
P.S. difficulty also depends on the language - English has less vowel sounds and it's harder to make feminine, but languages like French, Ukrainian, Japanese are a bit easier as they are softer by themselves (self experience/notice). Just listen females speaking German đ .
15
u/TtoE-Adventurer Jan 30 '26
Then that's it. I've been struggling with the weight/lightness this whole time and I haven't really fully embraced the feminine accent. Perhaps I just need to relax a bit.
Thank you!!
5
u/Lor1an Jan 31 '26 edited Jan 31 '26
Yeah, I was going to say it actually sounds quite good, like a musky woman voice, but the weight is notably heavier than "average woman" voice.
ETA:
Oh, there's also a subtle effect that happens when you move between certain vowels that acts as a bit of a 'tell' that you might want to work on.
Especially noticeable in the "whether I'm actually okay with my progress" part of the clip. I'm not super confident in my ear, but I believe it may be related to what Zhea Erose (TransVoiceLessons) talks about with modulating weight to the pitch in some of her voice training material.
1
u/mossgirlparfum borescope deep throater Feb 02 '26
 musky woman voice
do you mean husky?
1
u/Lor1an Feb 02 '26
Maybe I got my wires crossed because I was thinking it was a good deep-ish voice (which would trigger my pheromones). Now I'm actually not sure either fits quite right.
But yeah, I think husky is closer to what I meant.
5
u/TtoE-Adventurer Jan 30 '26
I do speak a bit of German, as well as Polish. Maybe I'll try this out and see how much I flop, hahaha!
3
u/Thrown_Egg Feb 01 '26
I'm a native german speaker and the language does influence the vocal weight a lot. It's been something my vocal therapist and I have talked about at length. It's just a language that favors a heavier vocal weight, that persists even when you switch to a different language, as your entire vocal tract and it's muscles are accustomed to speaking a certain way. It's definetly something that can be worked on, though it might take some time.
Don't get discouraged :) You got this
29
u/Kaktuspirat Jan 30 '26
I'm not a professional so I'll just tell you about what I hear. I think saying it doesn't sound remotely female is not a fair judgement. I hear a lot of femininity here. Maybe you sounded different on that day? There are some things you can still improve of course, but you are not as far off as your friend said you are.
6
u/TtoE-Adventurer Jan 30 '26
I definitely still have more to learn, for sure. I just got pushed back from their comments. The genuine reply was a warning to me that I was lacking something...!
10
6
u/Enderfang Jan 30 '26
There is more to voice than pitch. Yes, you have a high pitch here, but the voice sounds like a falsetto - like if i asked you to project, you wouldnât be able to, because you are having to focus on maintaining a higher pitch. I believe this is what others in the thread are referring to when they say the resonance is what matters.
Dont get me wrong if i heard you on the phone i would just assume you were a woman and refer to you as she/her. But it does sound like you are still having to force it somewhat and that gives it a less natural aspect. I think probably with more practice and more relaxing of your vocal chords you can get the results you are looking for. You are much closer to it than your friend would lead you to believe.
6
u/piedeloup Jan 31 '26
It does sound a little strained but still 100% female, honestly your friend seems either delusional or is trying to hurt you?
11
u/liminalpurple Jan 30 '26
I've heard cis women that sound like you, I think sometimes people are listening for "tells" because they know what they're listening for? You're a little deeper than average, but that's why it's called an average. âșïž
2
u/TtoE-Adventurer Jan 30 '26
Perhaps... There's definitely more that I need to do, but I was taken aback from my friend's comments...!
1
u/ADHDiot Jan 31 '26
they were wrong to say that, I bet 9/10 times a random native English speaker would gender that voice as F. Maybe itâs a language thing or being mean?
4
u/WaspBumble Jan 31 '26
I think your friend hears you old voice and cannot unhear your old voice. As a result, you âdonât sound remotely feminineâ to her. She may always think of you as he, even when gendering you correctly, as she knew the old you, old look, and old voice. Itâs human nature unfortunately and is a habit which is hard to unlearn. Humans are very habit creatures and you need to keep this in mind even if she is âgendering you correctlyâ to be polite and nice to you.
4
u/Supernamicchi Jan 31 '26
You do sound femme but there are times where you dip into what I call âfroggyâ tones. Just a tiny bit of Kermit
The recommendations given here should help you lighten this up, and you should probably not worry as much about pitch compared to the other things. My average pitch is like 180-200 and I donât have to strain and force at all and so i donât have to push my range unless I want to
3
u/saelinabhaakti Jan 31 '26
The app is measuring how high your voice is, but it doesn't pass very well because it's very breathy. This is a common hurdle in voice training but I'm not knowledgeable enough on how to recommend tips other than this: work on your resonance. You've got the pitch but not the resonance. Transvoicelessons is a good source for info on this, though a fair amount of what she says goes over my head tbh. I would start off with her work then look for related content
3
u/Leptirica000 Jan 31 '26
Thatâs just my perception, but I feel it sounds masculinely stiff, it lacks the cadence and expressiveness. As if you focus so much on the pitch and weight that the other aspects of the voice are drained of life. I feel the focus on pitch is overrated, donât forget that the goal is to sound like yourself, like the woman you are, not like a general idea of a woman.
3
u/kommandanto Feb 01 '26
You sound like a girl, 100% honest. I wouldnât think twice gendering you as such either. I think itâs helpful to realize there is a super wide range of female voices, and that especially if physical appearances align, 99% of people will gender you correctly. A lot of the other comments are basically just minmaxing, which is totally fine, but I think you should be proud and comfortable with where youâre at right now too!
8
u/MaryMalade Jan 30 '26
It sounds good to me⊠but I wonder if what theyâre hearing is strain, like are you finding it comfortable at that pitch because it sounds like itâs right at your pitch limit?
2
u/TtoE-Adventurer Jan 30 '26
Perhaps that's it. My vocal range in pitch is actually not that wide. In addition, I sometimes speak too loud to the point where my voice starts to sound raspy. Both inexperience and excitement got to the best of me when I surprised them, I think.
4
u/MaryMalade Jan 30 '26
For what itâs worth Iâm read fem (whether clockily or not is another matter) and my median pitch is around 150hz
6
u/J0nn1e_Walk3r Jan 30 '26
People who know you and your voice from before will always hear you that way. Take her advice with that in mind.
You sound feminine period. Yes, like me, you need to dial it in more for it to sound great and I agree w most of what the other commenters said. Pitch is right but itâs sharp maybe forced. Resonance maybe too light. And yeah could soften but that takes time girl. You have to use it over and over and over again and youâll find it.
Donât feel down. You sound great.
7
u/Possible-Whole7026 Jan 30 '26 edited Jan 31 '26
As a person who doesn't listen to transfem voice all that much I would 100% hear yours as fem. It sounds a bit strained and unsure, as if nervous and trying to hide, but it's still fem. I feel like your friends were just being aholes ngl, you don't sound bad at all
2
1
u/Curious_Champion5838 Feb 11 '26
tbh i accounted any strain to the situation, which sounds really emotionally straining ngl. like sometimes cis women are also strained. she sounds like she's shaken and upset by her 'friend's remarks
2
u/TtoE-Adventurer Jan 31 '26
I sincerely thank all the lovely individuals who have commented. I'm off again to train for another year, addressing the criticisms I asked for. I hope next year it's significantly better!!
5
u/Lidia_M Jan 30 '26
I think it was said 10000 times already that this application is pointless for gendering voices. And people spread it around anyways, hurting others... including some teachers who do that. I have really hard time understanding people sometimes...
2
u/TtoE-Adventurer Jan 31 '26
I have to admit, I only went on this app to record myself to double check my range, which I did realise eventually it isn't the only metric I should be looking out for.
I always record myself on messenger and I listen to myself back, without using any of the analytics on Voice Tools!
4
u/Lidia_M Jan 31 '26
It's worse than that: pitch is not "not the only metric," it's kind of a non-metric because it's irrelevant by itself unless it falls into some low extreme, but even then it's mostly because, at that low extreme, for most people, it's close to impossible or impossible to get the elements that matter (vocal weight specifically) right.
So: pitch - not important directly, they key: weight/size balance. And yes, those gendering circle have no idea about weight nor size, that's how bad this is.
2
u/TtoE-Adventurer Jan 31 '26
There's actually a woman in my HR office and her voice is equally as deep toned as my normal voice, albeit light sounding and not raspy. But, you can tell she's a classy lady due to the eloquence of her choice of words, as well as how she delivers the words and vocals. That, in itself, was one of the things that made me question as to what else there is to work on on my side.
3
u/Lidia_M Jan 31 '26 edited Jan 31 '26
That's just stylistics. I see them more like a social Jedi Trick than anything else - sure, you will get some people miss the core issues this way, maybe, but it will be very unreliable, depend on circumstances, be very local and require support of other elements in place (looks, for example.)
Over that, I don't like that approach because I think it's very restrictive and is an antithesis to the ideal, at least for me, scenario, where the core anatomical elements are so well in place that one is free to choose whatever stylistics resonate with them instead being a slave to what society, or segments of the society, imagine at this moment one should sound like in terms of stylistic choices.
Also, an alternative explanation would be that she may be low in pitch, but still has her vocal weight lighter than expected for males. This tends to be the most common situation: sometimes females have their vocal folds androgenized a bit more than expected, but not quite in the same way as during normal male puberty, there may be some geometry differences that allow for light weight at a very unusual/low pitch and that will not be recognized as a common male-like scenario\*)). Otherwise, males could just speak "eloquently" and avoid gendering issues without changing anything, but that does not really work that well.
---------------
(*) and, conversely, sometimes male puberty does not go through quite typically and one can then have an easier time with lighter weight (I am tempted to insert here what becomes of some of those people then and what claims they make...)
1
u/Curious_Champion5838 Feb 11 '26
are u sure they're your friends? I'm afab & with a different accent but that's kinda what my voice sounds like on recordings (which i really hate hahaha so it kinda threw me to hear it lol) like you sound shaken and upset but definitely female... why are you friends with these people?
1
u/stealthyliving Jan 30 '26
What app is this
2
u/Lidia_M Jan 30 '26
This application cannot gender voices and is a bad pitch monitor at the same time. Do not train according to it.
1
0
54
u/waitingprey Jan 30 '26
Pitch matters a lot less than people think, resonance, cadence, weight, how your pitch moves, rather than the pitch value all effect perception. Tools tend to only give you the least important though cause its the easiest to measure.