Gender-Affirming Voice 101: Pitch

Welcome back to Gender-Affirming Voice 101! This is part 4 of our 8-part series, where we explore the basics of gender-affirming voice work. Today, we’re focusing on Pitch—also known as the fundamental frequency, which determines the highness or lowness of your voice.

Hi, I’m Renée, a gender-affirming voice teacher, and I’m excited to guide you through this journey of understanding and shaping your voice. If you’re new here, be sure to get on my newsletter so you can keep up with the rest of the series!

Understanding Pitch

Pitch is essentially a measure of the fundamental frequency of your voice. When you speak or sing, your vocal folds (often called vocal cords) come together and vibrate in tiny waves. These vibrations are influenced by how much the vocal folds stretch and how fast the air flows through them. A tighter stretch means faster vibrations, which results in a higher pitch. You can think of it like tightening the strings on a guitar; the tighter the string, the higher the note.

To get a clearer sense of this, we can measure the fundamental frequency of your voice using a tuner. It’s a handy tool that lets you see exactly where your pitch sits.

Pitch and Resonance: A Dynamic Duo

In the last part of this series, we explored resonance and how the vocal tract modifies the sound created by the vocal folds. One crucial thing to remember is that you can never hear the pitch of your voice without the influence of your vocal tract. Essentially, to hear the pure tone of your vocal folds, you’d have to remove the entire head—which, of course, is impossible! This means that while we can measure pitch accurately with a tuner, what we hear is always a combination of pitch and resonance.

This combination is key in gender-affirming voice work. We often focus on raising or lowering the average pitch of the voice. For some, it’s helpful to choose a specific pitch range and practice staying within it, rather than aiming for a single “average pitch” because natural speech is dynamic, with lots of highs and lows.

Pitch in Gender-Affirming Voice Work

There’s a common belief that pitch is the most critical aspect of the voice when it comes to trans voice training, and this can lead to worries about needing to make significant changes. However, resonance is actually the quality that has the biggest impact on the perceived gender of the voice. This means that sometimes, even small adjustments in pitch can be highly effective in achieving the desired outcome.

That wraps up part 4 of Gender-Affirming Voice 101. If you have any questions or comments, I’d love to hear from you! In part 5, we’ll be exploring vocal weight, so stay tuned and follow along to continue learning. I hope you found this helpful, and I look forward to seeing you in the next part of the series!