Is Your Voice Too Buzzy or Too Hollow?

[Music] fullness is a perceptual description which can be thought of as emergent based on the way that we have our weight relating to our size and if you recall our weight and our size are two of the most important and functional properties that allow us to change the sex perception of a voice and this is because once again if we recall we can think of weight and size as being almost expressing some degree of androgenizing right so let's say that you are exposed to testosterone that changes the vocal structures just a little bit and we can almost think of this soft pairing between these these sort of perceptual features of weight and size as the sort of result of androgen exposure now of course it is not one-to-one like that but having that in mind really helps us understand why understanding the intersection between weight and size is so important so this is actually more like a meta variable right like we talked about weight as a variable and we talked about size as a variable and now fullness is a new description based on how the two enter so really here's the key with fullness that we like to preach um fullness is this interesting idea because oftentimes what people struggle with the most is this idea of resonance versus weight how do you know if your residence is high enough how do you know if your weight is low enough we're going to go ahead and make a beautiful graph here to show everyone how this works but basically the reason why fullness is so amazing is because all of you were able to instantly start saying oh that's hollow oh that's overfull oh now we're starting to hear it be more full right well the wonderful thing about this is that means you are actually hearing incredibly important intersections of voice so we're going to go ahead and make a little graph here together interactively okay so a little x and y mostly equivalent in size okay and then we're going to go ahead and label these so on this side we're going to have light weight and i'll go ahead and make that by itself ah oh oh your turn can you make some light sounds for us while i populate this ah hello good to not make a heavy sound for us ah and what in the world yep lovely now can you give me high resonance voiceless yep and we'll say this is we'll say this is a small size slash high resonance kind of the same thing and now let's do it low and large yeah wonderful and let me add this little thing down here large and low resonance wonderful all right and now we have the basis of what we're gonna be talking about here made up when you're thinking about hollow and everyone was able to identify hollow hollowness is actually the combination of low resonance and light weight and what we see a lot in trans feminine voices is they go to try and feminize the voice and they often have this kind of like quality about them where they're a little bit too hollow and really what that's saying is that they've changed their vocal weight accurately but they don't have enough resonance so what they would need to do is raise their resonance enough to end up over here okay so this is like the intersection of things and what's interesting is if you try to think about this as light and large or you know i'll go ahead and get rid of low resonance i'll just get light and large it's a little easier to look at but you know if you try to think about juggling these things it's a lot harder than if you just think about their resultant sound everybody was able to hear holo but i doubt a lot of people were hearing hollow as light and large large vocal tract with lighter sound so this allows us to reduce the complexity of us understanding where we are with our resonance versus our weight and when i and when we did the over full sound here really that's like this area up here that means yes we have smaller vocal tract we have higher resonance but we're also too heavy with the sound and we end up here we can think that an average masculine voice is going to end up in this kind of quadrant down here and the average feminine voice is going to end up somewhere in this quadrant over here and these deviations towards hollowness or fullness give us important information about our vocal weight and our resonance relative to each other i'm going to go ahead and put fem full here and then i'll go down here and put mask full and i would like to just move around this graph with you a little bit clover and maybe we could just show them how some of these things sound okay um i can't see the graph so no worries i'll describe what we're gonna do all right okay so we're gonna go we're gonna go from hollow which is a large vocal tract and light vocal vocal sound and then we're simply going to try and add smaller vocal tract higher resonance and end up on a full feminine sound so um bear let me get a little more full yes not bad now did everybody notice that clover kind of did this oh starting to want to cheat a little buzzy oh and then that way so that was a bit of a hook around we like that now let's go ahead and do whenever we're doing these clear gender modifications from masculine to feminine what we're really doing is riding this balance line between weight and resonance so um uh one one one one one one one one pitch is not a part of this graph one fee that was a wonderful question or one fill i think i think it was one feet yep so when we just move purely across in this gender axis we're existing mostly within the sort of normal boundary of what we would expect voices to operate inside so it's like when we deviate from that we end up with a hollowness or a buzziness so um your turn one one one one one yep and that was the holo going to full fem now let's do masculine going to fem uh one one one one one one one one one one one one one wonderful now let's go ahead and do the same thing here but then what we're going to do is we are going to accidentally go too heavy this is a common mistake for trans feminine speakers so we're going to go 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 one one one one one one one yes and now let's add another complex step to this how about we do that and then lighten so everyone can hear us go from over full to full femme so we can go one one one yes now those are some of the most common mistakes that trans feminine speakers make they have most trans feminine speakers accidentally end up pairing their reduction of vocal tract size they're raising resonance with getting heavy and so this sort of quadrant one sound this overfull quality is kind of what has been commonly referred to in the trans community as oh you've got that nasally trans voice or whatever you know now another thing that we can see another common trans feminine mistake is this and we'll we'll talk about trans mask in a second because there's a lot to gain here as well from that but check this out so another common trans fem mistake is they'll start here you know we'll start to raise the resonance we'll start to lighten the weight but then the resonance will plateau and then we'll get stuck here and we'll stay out of this zone which we're looking for which sounds like this one one one one one one one two three four that's what it's like when we shift the shift the weight but we didn't quite raise the resonance go ahead one one one one one one two three four yes exactly exactly someone says just to reiterate to get a film voice from hollow it's just a resonance adjustment right yep that's the observation to be made here indeed indeed now what we're going to do is we're going to end up in that hollow space again and then we're going to fork up and find good good femme one one one one one one one one one one one one one one one one one one one one yes exactly so i hope everyone can see from this that it's actually way easier to think about the way andrea says wow this graph made me understand everything yes indeed and here's the key is that it's much harder to think about this as vocal weight independent from resonance if you try to think about combining your vocal weight with your resonance it's quite difficult because you're juggling two things at once but when you think about this entire sort of topological space when you think about this entire little sort of field we can we can easily hear hollow we can easily hear over full and that allows us to figure out if we are where we are and yes literally anna says notice that pitch isn't a factor here that's correct these properties work the same regardless of what pitch you're at and of course there are some qualities where pitch will start to influence things someone says i love this graph it's so helpful for beginners wonderful i'm glad it's so helpful for you understanding intersection is so important one of the biggest complaints that i hear from students both in private lessons and in group lessons is that they have trouble sort of adding things together i often hear a lot of students be like okay well i know i've got this piece and this piece and this piece and this piece but how do i you know when i try to add them together or combine them something happens with the voice and it doesn't work the way i want it to well that makes a lot of sense because you see we don't control our voice that way we don't want to think about the voice as a bunch of little pieces that we then slot into the right place it is actually easier for us to do everything at once than it is for us to do each thing one thing at a time and this is what intersection allows us to do we may think of intersection as increasing the complexity because there's two things going on but at the actual user level understanding intersection reduces complexity it makes it a more direct experience so instead of trying to balance your weight against your size you're simply going to try to hit what happens when the two things are combined period it saves us a step in the whole process so let's do some more of these let's go ahead here and start um overflow and go to hollow ah one one one one one one one one yeah and you'll see what's interesting is this diagonal that we just moved across this diagonal is like the opposite of what we normally see standard voices operating on this is like the affectated quality someone says it's good that clover is doing it too it makes it easier when you have a masculine reference in general yeah i mean that's kind of the thing is it's not just so much that it's that having multiple people demonstrating these sounds makes it way easier you know and that's one of the benefits of the group class that we have is that we have three teachers you know that participate in things and you get to hear it really manifesting in different teachers so very good now let's go ahead and try some more of these let's go ahead here and try to do how about we keep our let's go ahead here and go let's do like a z i've never i've actually never tried this let's try let's try it so we'll go ah one one one okay go ahead here okay so um hello one one one one one one one one one one one one one one one one one yeah not bad good now what other letter how about we try an a oh god yeah well we'll do a a i'll sort of trying a baseless triangle so one one one one one one one one oh that's hard that's hard hold on let me try that again i messed that one up um one would you consider these demonstrations good exercises yeah absolutely the thing is there's no such thing as like necessarily a good or bad exercise doing literally anything with your voice is going to be better for your voice you know yeah we're gonna do voice anarchy here so one one one one one one one one one one there we go that's the that's the triangle without a base wonderful okay um one one one one passing voice but heavy you know like like something like that or whatever which isn't necessarily like excessively full someone says c next sure let's try c oh goodness oh this one's fun this one's fun very spherical ooh my c looks so ugly okay so here we go so we're starting over full and then we're going to kind of lightly pass over average feminine to hollow and then we're going to go into masculine oh wasn't that cool your turn okay okay um so starting here one two three four five six seven eight nine 10 11 12 13 14 15. yes okay you know this is why like physical descriptions of how to like change resonance to me don't really make a lot of sense because it's not really about oh someone said do a heart next okay i'm gonna cover you up for a second now clover so let's do a heart so we're going to draw a heart here and we're going to go ahead and do this oh hold on let me get an even better one oh [Music] okay that heart kind of looks not like the best is that all right so here we go let's try it so let's see here we're going to start large and somewhat halt um um so that like maybe like this is more so like we're pseudo hollow kind of more in the masculine area so like um let's let's try this so one one one one one one one one one wait one one one one one one one one one one one close that was pretty good all right your turn this one's tough i like that you know particularly this is amazing practice for me i hadn't even considered this that sort of drop at the middle of small almost allowing a tiny bit of size gained back anyways it's very fun go ahead try that one okay um so starting off uh pseudo holo um one one one one one one one one one one one one one one one one one i wasn't sure what to do there yeah i know right well i i kind of did it in mine where it was just like one one one one you know like not that didn't necessarily go all the way to like a masculine sound but i sort of let it let it one come in one one one one one one yeah yeah just opening the space a little more anybody else have some shapes in mind for us to play with that's so this is such a good exercise i'm so glad that everyone is so so receptive to this you know clover and i have been working on things like this for a while um and really this sort of description of paul holland's fullness is something that clover sort of prophesized and you know one of the main ways that one of the main ways that we've been training residents and our students for a long time is having someone go from hollow to full but having it in this kind of shape or having it in this kind of quality tends to to make it a little easier can you do an example going through each axis like large or small with neutral weight yeah yeah yeah uh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh uh uh uh uh [Music] it's not really heavy not really light getting larger and smaller and then i'll try to keep neutral resonance ah it's hard for me to do like neutral resonance because my default is really small what does large small mean small meaning high resonance large ming meaning low resonance we're referring to the size of the vocal tract so vocal tract size here it just makes it a little easier for people to grab onto when they're thinking about resonance instead of raise your resonant frequency you know so um sizes sizes what we're talking about here [Music] all right clove are you going to talk about this hi so uh this is uh a slightly more accurate per transformation um way of thinking about the the shared size and weight space um so uh as we talked about previously right um if you if you want to go back to the cartesian graph z just for a sec um so uh as we talked about previously you you can actually be large and heavy but too large right or you can be small and light but too small and still wind up in this under full or overfull space respectively and uh this this cartesian uh graph doesn't really allow for that so much so um if we if we go back to the to the ufo fam space that's just a little bit more uh functional when you when you start to think about extremes right so if we if we have a uh an under full feminine sound right by uf and we get smaller hello hello hello hello hello we might end up uh at a pretty reasonable space but then if we continue to get smaller hello hello hello hello hello we end up again in that over full space right because we've continued to decrease size past what is typical so uh we can we it's a little easier to think of it as a sort of cross hatch like this um so yeah and i also want to point out that uh while we have listed these things as feminine androgynous and masculine they are not necessarily going to be perceived as such so uh as like z pointed out you know you don't necessarily have to have a small light sound or a super small and light sound to be perceived as feminine and uh i want to say too that if if all i were to change about my my uh speech was my size and my weight i might not sound super feminine and and i did this a couple of times in our demonstrations i might just sound younger i might just sound like literally a less androgenized version of myself so check it out hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello one two three four five i mean you know it's not necessarily a very feminine sound but it is balanced right and so there there are more things that can be changed but this is necessary for communicating on an auditory level a certain degree of sexual development and that's that's what we're targeting here it's also great because it allows us to decouple like this kind of makes it almost seem like oh in order to sound feminine i need to be here in order to sound masculine i need to be here but as we can see you know you can have androgynous voices that are um you can have androgynous voices that come in like all sorts of different uh all sorts of different balances of different amounts of vocal weight or whatever right so it really lets us be more flexible with what we're thinking about and uh yeah so very useful also i'm sending an emoji combination here in chatwich which is very cute so uh ufo fam okay great now lastly there's one other thing that we're gonna talk about before we go into breakouts okay um and this is the androgenization space so this is like a perceptual thing fullness right but if we think about what does all of this represent why does it tend to work this way it tends to be based on our socially reinforced perception of how we hear androgen development in voices so for instance this one has size negative weight and negative size going in the same space right which is a little weirder because large would be like plus and small would be like negative and light would be like you know it changes the the positive or negative a little bit but basically here less size and less weight are going to run in the same direction because they're suggesting less androgen exposure together and as size increases and as weight increases it's going to suggest more androgen exposure and this is why you know coming back to these imbalance qualities over full and under full that's why they not tend to not sound exactly like normal or regular it's because we really don't hear a lot of situations in day-to-day life where we hear a very noticeably smaller size but a very noticeably larger weight so it ends up in this sort of androgynous space here where the the sort of features that may indicate sex development are mismatched a little bit and i mean there are certainly some notable cases and that's why i mean think about it that's why when we did those corners everyone wanted to say cartoon characters and character voices it's really not that common to hear your average speaking voices existing in those spaces now of course we do hear some but it's it's a bit rarer and so you want to think about the way that this size and weight relate to each other as essentially a sort of androgenization layer okay um i i want to add too that if you so so if you don't have uh if you if you don't have this stuff if you don't have androgenization uh down and you make other changes to your voice to to change your style of speech to to be more feminine um hello hello hello hello one two three four five right uh this doesn't alone this does did not pass right it just kind of sounds gay so uh if we if we add both of those things together right vocal gender and vocal sex hello hello hello hello hello so here i am i've de-androgenized my voice and i'm gonna take on more feminine speech patterns now hello hello hello hello hello hello one two three four five right this is where we you know we see that combination come into play and we we get kind of where we want to go and this is exactly why um in the very beginning of our class we did take note of how there are sex features in voice that we think about and there are gender features in voice right the the pattern of clover's phonemes changing that way and lilting and the pitch contour changing that's not something that's going to be based on your sexual development you know that's something that's going to be based on your cultural exposure and where you are in the world and what cues you're picking up on in terms of communication so both of them are very important now once again in this course you know since this is the six week like fundamental course the majority of what we're dealing with here is the androgenization stuff that's what this course is focused on these are the sex elements that kind of form the foundational core for you being able to feminize or masculinize your voice but there's still you know stuff that you can explore and play with with involving style that makes quite a big difference now lastly a couple other things um weight and size work relative to each other as we've learned and this one kind of comes back to what we're just saying about that cultural exposure average perception of fullness tends to change depending on what culture you are you know one example that we talk about is two speakers that are in the uk american voices tend to sound more full like they tend to almost sound over full bordering that direction and for american ears voices in the uk tend to sound a little more under full like there's a different normalized point in the cultures between where their sort of equilibrium of weight and size tends to exist and this changes elsewhere depending on where you go and everything and so do be aware of that it's so important to listen and and really sort of expose yourself to lots of different voices especially lots of different feminine voices and it doesn't necessarily have to be voices you like the sound of just a lot of different feminine voices that's more stuff that we talk about during style but just to make sure everyone is also listening the more you feed your ear the better you're going to be able to calibrate kind of where your perception lies against everything else and then lastly clover can you talk a little bit about the connections to registration singing yes okay so uh about a thousand and one people over the course of uh the past few years since we've really started taking this uh perceptual dominant approach to voice have asked me um well should i shouldn't i not be in falsetto like i need to avoid falsetto right um and it usually comes up when we're working on like just finding a light sound or let me let me jump in here you some people may even heard like singing teachers claim like female voices don't have falsetto that's so weird now continue because that'll plug in it is odd um so uh yeah we especially when we're working on light and large sounds right people will often say like oh yeah that's a falsetto sound because it sounds like mickey mouse and ha ha right um and so i i have i have the hardest time telling people well like you know you know this this model that we're working with uh doesn't mesh with ideas of really what registers are um so yeah uh this is this is not something uh if you're playing with this that you would actually really want to be even worried about what is falsetto um it's it's more so the the only thing that is relevant to the idea of falsetto that i would want you to be looking out for is does my voice flip or yodle or break as i go to get higher and lighter that's that is pretty much it and no we you know we kind of want that all to be smooth unless you're looking to yodel in which case great cool um see yeah the whole idea of falsetto is weird right because when you actually listen to how people use it in colloquial description it's whenever someone is in that that higher register or the higher space of their voice but they sound under full that's what it is and that's why there's been this weird i mean i mean i'm pretty sure it goes back in the singing literature like over 100 years like female voices don't have falsetto and the reason why people claim this and why this claim has been so pervasive is because let's say that you don't have any androgen exposure your vocal tract is going to be small so when you do get lighter as you go higher in that other register it's going to sound normal it's not going to sound under full anymore and so this discrepancy of it sounding like a masculine falsetto sounding under full if it's not trained and a feminine falsetto sounding full if it's not trained makes people in the past who don't have the ability to sort of check the stuff or or research this stuff deeper like 100 200 years ago it has a tendency for them to be like oh they have separate registers they have separate effects the idea of registers and singing and traditional voice pedagogy is really a composite of different arrays right they're not their own baseline building blocks they're descriptions about things that are woven together around a bundle of features and so they can be useful in those seeing context but when we're trying to think about the voice more in this way they're they're not so useful at that point like we can do like a falsetto where it sounds like this um where i can like be a lot smaller with my falsetto and i'm in my falseto right now but yeah it doesn't really sound like that like weird it sounds like a little off but it doesn't really sound like empty or hoodie like we would normally anticipate falsettos to sound yeah it also doesn't help that there are dozens of different definitions of falsetto so you know pick your favorite um all right so further uh can connections to singing uh for fullness um uh let's just do it do a quick equation i guess and this this is more of an analogy not a perfect one-to-one thing but generally uh you will find that over full sounds uh people will tend to identify with falsetto and full sounds hello hello hello hello full sounds people will tend to identify with a mix or a mixed voice and then over full sounds people will tend to identify with a beltier or chestier uh sound uh or registration so uh again that's not really one to one but i prefer the way that we discuss it so let's just if you if you yeah if you find it easier if you find it less confusing i would say uh you know just call it light small one other thing if you are if you are interested in singing and you want to feminize your singing voice the biggest thing you're going to be looking out for is once again sounding under full when you try to sing at really any place in your vocal range because it's going to basically tell the listener like your vocal tract is larger relative to what it's anticipated to be and so often when i'm singing i'm just trying to snipe areas where my voice accidentally became a little too a little too underful also maverick siat says my voice hurts just listening i'll just tell you right now our voices don't hurt our voices feel fine we are not we are not stressing hurting or doing anything uncomfortable whatsoever with our voice and if we were we wouldn't be doing it so yeah um yeah this uh the the changes that you would be making for this really do not require tons of muscular engagement um mo and that's that's one of the number one mistakes that people make is they will kind of throw everything in the kitchen sink at a sensation and they will be prescriptive with how creating a sound should feel and they feel like oh it's a big change in sound so it needs to be a big change in muscular effort and that's just not the case that's why earlier uh z mentioned that sort of being intentionally as lazy as possible intentionally strategically lazy that's what that is it is it is understanding that oh okay uh there is actually a very uh precise and not demanding way that i can make these changes that i want [Music] you [Music]

Channel: TransVoiceLessons

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Id: uVJuUoypVHE

Length: 33min 45sec (2025 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 10 2022