FEMINIZE YOUR VOICE: 8 Exercises to Reduce Vocal Fold Mass | Exercises, Demonstration, & Document

[Music] hi there it's your girl z from transvoicelessons.com and in this video i want to talk all about vocal fold mass and how we can manipulate it to get a thinner lighter and more feminine voice this video is for anyone who thinks they sound too buzzy heavy dense screechy or clumsy with their voice we're gonna break this down into five parts one the basics two ear training three how to use these exercises four the exercises five theory and some extra information [Music] first there are two primary differences between masculine and feminine vocal physiology one the vocal tract length and two the vocal fold mass so the larynx the pharynx and the oral cavity what we call the vocal tract they expand and grow under the exposure of testosterone when we're doing resonance and we're controlling our resonance we're trying to shrink that container so that we can undo the effect of testosterone alteration of the vocal fold mass seeks to reverse the sonic effects that testosterone has on the vocal folds so by reducing the mass it makes your sound thinner and smaller which is more in line with feminine vocal physiology the active vibrating mass of the vocal folds can be controlled by the interaction between a few basic variables one air flow force two vocal fold closure and three configuration configuration refers to a spectrum of thick to thin sound quality which is controlled by engaging or disengaging more or less of the vocal fold tissue closure refers to the clenching or opening of the vocal folds what we call adduction adding force or abduction a boarding force force of air refers to how much strength is applied with the lungs to actually displace the error all of these elements are deeply connected but these elements can be controlled pseudo-independent of one another control over all three gives the greatest freedom but control over thickness and thinness yields the greatest feminization effect out of these vocal fold mass ingredients while thinness and thickness is a continuum there is a discrete flipping point between the two physical states learning how to alter the vocal fold mass and ultimately reduce it for your speech is a fundamental part of voice feminization [Music] so let's go ahead and listen to the difference between thick and thin so first i'm going to go ahead and do a thick sound and i'll do it with darker resonance and a slightly lower pitch [Music] now a thin one at the exact same pitch and everything else so i'll go ahead and use feminine resonance first here's what feminine resonance with a thick quality sounds like heat from fire fire from heat now with a thin quality ha ha ha heat from fire fire from heat now let's go ahead and just listen to some different ones oh oh very thick and kind of noisy false fold engagement oh now i'll go ahead and do thin at a low pitch oh oh so this is what a thin voice really really thin sounds like at a lower pitch with dark resonance you can hear it sounds very empty right uh and now i'm just gonna go ahead and do thicker vocal folds you can hear that sound ha part okay so here i am thin right this is a thin sound and now i'm a lot thicker and i'm adding a lot more weight to the sound increasing my vocal fold mass let's go ahead and listen to some audio examples so i want you to close your eyes and just focus very carefully on the sounds that you hear all right in this ear training file i will demonstrate the difference between thick and thin i won't try to keep it at any particular pitch i will just freely play around with thick and thin so first i'll go ahead and use thin sounds part okay so um all this has been uh um um um all of this is thin you can hear how like it's like really really light right um and and the volume doesn't really matter like i mean and then i'm high part i'm still thin all this time um uh okay and uh now i'm thick and uh yeah uh uh now i'm thick all the way up here i'm still very thick with my vocal folds right uh hot part and now i'm back here in a center configuration you can hear the thinness right and now i'm here back to a thicker configuration and now i'm here back to a thinner configuration so thickness has this very cumbersome clunky feeling when you try and take it higher it sounds like this oh kinda sounds like i'm just shouting or yelling at the top right whereas thinness when it goes up in pitch it feels much lighter and much easier let's listen to me start thick go thin and then bring it down to the original starting pitch while staying thin [Music] so as you can hear the thick sound is very dense and heavy and buzzy this is what people are always talking about when they say get the sound out of your chest what they're really referring to are thick vocal folds high density high mass vocal folds that are vibrating with a lot of engagement and as a result it creates more movement so you can feel more of it so thin often makes you sound much sweeter and lighter and softer and more feminine and it's much easier it can go in and out of the airflow so that you can have greater dynamic control plus it also allows you to access higher pitches which is pretty advantageous for what we're doing here now let's go ahead and look at some exercises to help you learn how to control your vocal fold mass [Music] okay so first let's talk about how to use these exercises to make the most of these exercises listen first to the ear training section to gain an idea of what you're seeking then explore and experiment with all the different approaches these exercises provided primarily focus on inducing and building awareness of these different discrete configurations thick or thin while thick to thin is a continuum there is a clear audible and physical crossover point between the two qualities students should work to isolate the sensation experience and sound of both different modes ideally we want to use the exercises as a landscape to allow us to observe these things explore the concept isolate the sensation really think about it try to implement it with basic speech gain greater control of it try to apply it to much longer passages of speech or while you're just speaking throughout your day and ultimately that allows you to normalize this through consistent application exploring conquering and cultivating the discrete break or glitch that separates the two different thick and thin states is very beneficial it's one of the best ways to directly feel the very subtle muscle differences between these two states listen very carefully have fun and be very observant exercise one pitch slides for thinness now this is a wonderful exercise that takes advantage of your body's natural tendency to want to thin as you go up in pitch so what we're going to do is we're going to start in a thick starting place and we're going to slide up in pitch and let's first try and slide up in pitch while maintaining thickness oh feels like an uncomfortable shouting now let's try to slide up in pitch and thin it should sound like this [Music] if you think you have that then try to slide down in pitch while maintaining it like so oh here that's not buzzing right it's not oh oh it's which is what we're looking for don't go up too high in pitch when you do this otherwise you'll have a tendency to flip into falsetto like this oh we're not looking for that we're looking to stay in our normal voice just find that thinner mode one two three four five then you can start to talk with that so let's try this we're gonna start thick go up and find thinness and then bring that thinness back down now the lower you go the more compensation and thinness you have to add lower pitches want thicker vocal folds higher pitches want thinner vocal folds also with this pitch slide exercise some people actually find it easier to find thinness when you start in a fry so you can go like ah as opposed to ah which is what would be going to thick so you can experiment with this one as well [Music] exercise two thick to thin pop test now a pop test is sort of a community word that references when you go between different modes of your voice so we've got falsetto and we've got our normal modal voice and when we go between them there's this awkward little gap okay a pop test is when you try to induce that awkward gap to show yourself what mode you're in now there is a very subtle pop difference between the thick and thin mode take a listen oh if i exaggerate it even more this exercise is incredibly useful because if you can reliably get this pop to occur between thick and thin you can focus really hard on what the different muscle sensations you're experiencing is and then you can extract thinness more easily this is also great if you're having trouble finding thinness with a high resonance so for instance if i start with high resonance and then i hit it really thick i can just pop test it heat from fire so to accomplish this it's sort of a few things we can kind of induce it by letting a quick burst of hot air come into our sound so if we're like oh and then we try and go that sometimes induces it so oh but it has to be like a kind of burst of air not a okay so we want and that should induce it so have fun explore this exercise diligently and if you have any questions post below [Music] exercise 3 pure mimicry so you're going to listen to what i do and you're going to try and mimic it now there are more audio files for this on the document as well so let's just do a few of them here ha ha ha ha part oh [Music] see how i'm coming onto the sound very delicately i'm not going ha ha it's ha ha heat from fire fire from heat let's try to mimic this three short ones and they'll all be thick now let's try three short ones all thin ha ha ha oh [Music] mimicry is always a great approach because there's going to be some of you out there that can just mimic that right away so for those of you who can do that have fun exercise four physical compression of the head and the neck to induce thinness or thickness if i extend my head forward and up without moving my shoulders we will hear thinning isn't that cool and the opposite works for thickening we can bring our head down like this so you can also do this in other ways by like tucking the neck down or pushing the head back or whatever but essentially when you compress the structure you gain thickness and when you expand the vocal folds or you stretch the vocal folds you gain thinness so that is why popping your head forward thins out your voice the moment i learned the anatomy and physiology behind the thick and thin stuff i immediately realized that we could just have students do that so if you're having trouble getting your body to produce these sounds try this approach and listen to what it sounds like and maybe that can give you a stepping stone to try and find it other ways as well and of course i don't want anybody out there like going throughout their day like sticking their neck out or whatever you know or that's not the goal of this this is a fun exercise to show the intersection between the anatomical components that are going on and the actual sound components that are going on okay so have fun with this [Music] exercise five onset and offset based approaches now when you have thick vocal folds or you're in the thick mode it's actually really difficult to gracefully start a sound without being super breathy now when you're in the thin sound you can start and end sounds way easier so by training our onsets the way that we start sound and the way that we let go of sound we can actually get a lot of great thinness training out of that too so for instance we're looking for ha ha notice i'm not breathy there right there's like no breathiness there's no leakiness there's no added air it's just a thin tone that can swell in and out ah part notice the ending too it's very graceful if i'm thick it will be more like now i'm being breathy to try and fake it right so ah that is not what we're looking for that is breathy thickness and it pretends to be thinness [Music] as opposed to which is what thick causes the thicker the vocal folds the greater the vocal fold mass which means you require more energy or more sort of force to get them moving and when they do get moving they have more inertia so they're even harder to stop moving as well so play around with your onsets and offsets listen to the audio file provided on the document and if you have any questions reach out exercise number six behavioral triggers well it turns out there are a lot of day-to-day sounds that actually require or often use thinness if we imitate the sound of a yawn or a sob or when we talk really cute to a puppy dog or a kitten or if we whimper all of these things induce thinness so for instance try to mimic some of these oh that's very thin that is also a very dark and low resonance because we're yawning which causes the larynx to drop but that's a very simple approach another behavioral trigger is um like if i'm sobbing you hear that now that also drops the resonance a little bit as well but it does induce thinness um i really like this one like if you're like ah ah how cute you know like ah that is a behavioral trigger that induces thinness so if you imagine yourself talking to a cute baby or petting a cute kitten or something like that that will typically induce thinness as well you can also experiment with like whimpering like right that induces thinness but watch out because it also causes the resonance to drop another common behavioral trigger approach that people do is when they're really pleasantly surprised to see someone and they're like oh hey these behavioral trigger approaches are likely going to be very useful for a lot of people out there but i find that for untrained voices or for inexperienced voice alterationists this is a little harder of an approach because you really have to commit to the character so like if you're going to do the sobbing one you really have to get in the headspace of sobbing or if you're going to yawn you really have to get in the head space of yawning and experiment with those and see if you can leverage that into using it with your voice [Music] exercise number seven semi-occluded vocal tract exercises to find thinness if we block part of our vocal tract it creates semi occlusion and that causes backed up air pressure to go back to the vocal folds we can do this tons of different ways like this semi-occlusion z semi-occlusion semi-occlusion all of these create this sort of padding effect for the vocal folds because you have air pressure down here and then you have air pressure here that's backed up it sort of sandwiches your vocal folds with air pressure and it does a lot of really awesome therapeutic and beneficial things to help you find better onsets and find better thinness now for voice feminization we can take advantage of the sound m the m sound right now this sound has the lips closed so as a result it creates fairly light semi occlusion that causes back pressure to go to the vocal folds because of this we can usually find thinness easier on an m so let's try this [Music] and whenever you think you have that thinness try to gently open your lips if you open them too quick you'll destabilize the air pressure and your folds will probably go thick so try this [Music] part part and try to use it if you're doing this exercise and you're feeling very buzzy like that's an indication that you're thick okay if you want even more occlusion you can block one nostril and lightly block the other and adjust the amount of occlusion you have which is kind of fun if you've ever noticed the speech pathologists who teach this stuff are obsessed with the ms and the straws and everything and the whole goal of that is they're trying to teach people how to find this thinner quality they call it head voice i'm calling it thinness but they try to teach you how to find this thinner quality by way of semi-occluded vocal tract exercises so have fun with these you can do them with a straw you can do them with a lip trill [Music] you can also do it with an n [Music] exercise number eight voiceless thinness and thickness so if you've watched my previous videos you know that i'm a big fan of voiceless exercises that don't actually use pitch instead what they do is they use this what we call a glottal fricative now the quality of that sound can teach us so much it can teach us what you're doing with resonance it can teach us what you're doing with your vocal folds and it can teach us what you're doing with your false folds that's thick i'll do it at different resonances as well now you should also be aware that when you do this thick you're also getting a lot of false fold engagement which is something that we often have to train in voice feminization so now i want you to try this so you're going to make a thick air sound then you're going to try and make a thin one you should feel the air flow through with much less turbulence when you're thin now this is also training false fold constriction and retraction so when you hear all that noise the ah it almost sounds like a frying skillet you're hearing a lot of the false folds above the true vocal folds coming in so we're actually training both of these things during this two you can also plug your ears and if you hear the h sound you're thick or you have a lot of false fold activation and if you can't hear it while you blow out an h sound you are using thinner sounds and no false fold engagement this one is super important because if you're going to do the voiceless exercises that i have in my other videos you need to make sure that you're doing it in a thinner non-constricted quality so for instance if you're going we don't want you going because that's that's noisy that's false fold that's heavy we want ha part part here's the difference once again thick plus false folds thin without false folds that one feels a lot more like you're just exhaling air continue to drive the airflow through but try to reduce the density of that sound part okay have fun with this one [Music] all right so remember these exercises are exploratory the goal of them is not to get you to point a to point b but to give you an environment to observe these behaviors of your body so that then you can start to reflect on what they are how they work so that then you can control them and use them in speech essentially what we're doing here is micro stretching or micro contracting our vocal folds there are a few schools of thought about what this is and how this works but i figure i'll save that for an anatomy overview video sometime but essentially what you're doing is we're sort of stretching the folds and causing them to thin out right uh thick thin okay and there are a few different muscles that we use to change the tension distribution of the vocal folds the vocalist muscle the thyroid arenoid the cricothyroid um and there might be some other things here as well that are sort of still in debate in the voice community about what it actually is if you look at different voice models everybody sort of includes this description of this process but everybody has a different sort of understanding of what's going on with it so by changing the vocal fold mass we change something called spectral roll-off which is this overall curve to our voice okay so this happens before resonance occurs you can think about thickness and thinness and vocal fold mass as almost like a pre-filter filter so you make sound and then depending on the combinations of this thinness thickness airflow closure false fold stuff you will produce a different source tone and then you will feed that source tone into your resonance okay so we can think of this as a foundation now something else that will be very useful for you all to know is that this is what people are usually talking about when they're talking about getting your vibration out of your chest and into your head many times people will call this chest voice and head voice i really refuse to use those terms because they are so fuzzy and ambiguous it's a nightmare because some people call head voice falsetto some people conflate head voice with thinness and some people even use the word head resonance this is not resonance this is vocal fold mass and it changes the spectral profile of your sound resonance is accomplished by changes of the vocal tract i'm not sure why the speech language pathology community still chooses to teach trans women this concept as head voice and chest voice we can describe it as thick and thin which relates it back to the physiology much better and it relates it back to the sound much better plus when we think of it as thick and thin then we understand that it is a glottal parameter it's not some magical thing that you're moving your sound up you can't move your sound up it doesn't work that way sound is a point source wave it just echoes out in a spherical pattern until it hits something which either dampens or reflects okay so you can't change the spatial position of sound in your body you can change your vocal fold mass that creates less buzziness or sort of dense vibration down here or you can change your vocal tract which changes the resonant frequencies which redistributes energy across your spectrum so when you have a thinner sound you have more spectral roll-off it means that your voice is softer and less buzzy there are less high harmonics in the voice when you have a thick vocal fold sound we would say you have a very flat spectral roll-off which indicates that your really high harmonics are piercing through ah which is what gives that buzzing quality that the male voice has okay now the muscles that we're controlling they do help you change pitch and they are actually active when we go to change pitches once we leave the thick zone of our voice so this is somewhat related to pitch but it's not really we can go up in pitch without using the muscle that we're using for thinness but we can also go up in pitch and use it now if you look at this on a spectrogram you'll see that when i go from thick to thin there is often a sort of pitch up moment like that okay and this is because i'm performing that micro stretching and then compensating elsewhere with the vocal muscles in order to get the vocal folds back to their original pitch but with less of the tissue activation shout out to my wonderful friend nick onlinevocalcoach.com shout outs to rachel for first getting me interested in this phenomenon of what she calls trans feminine buzz um special shout outs to erica special shout outs to wellington special shout outs to kelly special shout outs to savvy shout outs to literally everyone in the voice community who lets me springboard ideas off them and gain information from them and engage in this discourse that lets our community grow so in conclusion i hope you all now have an understanding of vocal fold mass why it's important how we can change it and how it's going to help us when we reduce the thickness of our vocal folds it allows us to be much more agile with our voice it allows us to reach higher pitches and allows us to sound much much much more feminine so yeah thank you all so much for watching if you have any questions comments or concerns please just post those down below in the comments don't forget to like subscribe and share this video if you enjoyed it or found it helpful please check out my patreon if you would like to support the work that i'm doing here on this channel um and if you'd like to work with me in private lessons please email transvoicelessons gmail.com and you'll be added into my waiting list for lessons and of course don't forget to check out my music both on band camp and my other youtube so otherwise thank you all so much for watching and have a great rest of your night bye [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: TransVoiceLessons

Views: 676,063

Keywords:

Id: 1PNnBRBfOVY

Length: 30min 18sec (1818 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 30 2020