Three months on and I’ve definitely improved since last time. This was the best of several takes, and although I was trying a bit harder than usual it’s not too far from my usual zero-effort voice. I just need to remember to keep the resonance tight and stay bright.
I’d give this a C- “almost satisfactory”, so let it rip!
It doesn’t strike me as that different from your last clip, and I think my comments from last time are still relevant: it has a dopey underfull sound for how light the voice is. I think working on a smaller size would be a good idea, maybe play around with both R1 (throat) and R2 (oral) resonance and through ear training, careful listening, mimicry and experimentation, learn to produce a natural sounding full-fem voice?
The voice doesn’t sound overtly masculine or boyish, which is good - just sounds a bit imbalanced and unnatural because of the underfullness, so it’s a matter of small adjustments at this point. Well done, keep going!
EDIT: here’s a clip of my voice if you’d like to roast it:
https://vocaroo.com/1kSpmaG1Khj2
anyone is welcome to leave impressions or critiques 💗
EDIT2: I see you gave yourself a C-, I don’t know how the grading scale works there but I would say it won’t help much to see it in such stark terms, esp. without any objective rubric - much better to focus on training your ear to constant qualitative analysis, so you learn what sounds good and is working, what isn’t, what would help, and that ultimately will help your voice in daily use as you constantly hear and adjust it.
For some of us, voice is a life-long project and takes significant time and effort. I had to see a speech language pathologist (SLP) once a week for over six months and spent every day focusing on my voice and working on it before my voice started passing in some social situations like on the phone. What surprised me was how much of it was really more about my understanding and cognition and less about my actual anatomy or capacity - I realized I always had the capacity to make a natural sounding woman’s voice the whole time, and in fact had made sounds that fit that in the past already, i.e. this was essentially nothing new even though it felt that way.
Not everyone is voice dysphoric, but it’s one of my biggest sources of dysphoria, and I pretty much hate my voice - I would give my voice a failing grade always 😅 But I think that kind of thinking usually is just counterproductive, it makes me feel like I’m failing or not doing well, and is a way to self-punish rather than improve. Instead I find the brain responds better to rewards - seeing what you’re doing right and rewarding yourself for it (while grounded in non-judgemental but acute awareness), that is a path of improvement.
Holy shit, voice goals right here! You sound 100% female to me–maybe someone in her 30s or so?
I try to listen to myself as I speak at work, so it’s definitely a gradual process of tweaking things here and there. Thanks for the feedback!
that’s surreal to me that you hear a female voice - and hey, that’s not a roast!
One problem I’ve run into is that I can analyze someone else’s voice pretty well, but my dysphoria brain worms distort my perception of my own voice - it’s hard for me to hear it accurately or know how it sounds to other people, the same as it is hard for me to see a woman in the mirror or know what others are seeing.
It makes it hard to get a sense of when I’m overshooting or overcompensating, or when I’m not compensating enough - that finesse is difficult when your perception is constantly distorted.