I've said it before and I'll say it again!

One of my favourite things about teaching voice feminization, voice masculinization, and trans voice alteration in general, is that there is actually a finite amount of information to learn and digest.

This is extremely good news for trans voice students because, although it can seem daunting at first, they can take solace in the fact that they can learn everything they need in a reasonable amount of time, and the rest is just repetition and rehabituation.

You can appreciate that this is very different from my life as a singing teacher! In singing, there is really no limit to things a musician can learn to improve their skills.

So whether you're learning how to feminize, masculinize, or neutralize your voice, I'm happy to let you know that there is one characteristic of the voice that reigns supreme above the others. If you're stuck on what to focus on today or you're just not sure where to start, keep reading!

The voice characteristic that has the greatest influence on the gendered perception of the voice is something called resonance.

Resonance is a measure of how bright or dark a fundamental pitch is. If you change the resonance while staying on the same note, you'll hear that that one note can become more feminine (brighter) or more masculine (darker). Resonance matters much more than the actual pitch of the note!

This may sound a bit confusing but I'm happy to report that you're already an expert at this because controlling resonance is how we differentiate vowels in speech.

Try this exercise:

• Sing one continuous note on "ee"
• Sing that same note on "ah" (if you're struggling to maintain a note, sing along with a drone track like this one)
• Now sing that same continuous note but change slowly between an "ee" and an "ah"
• Feel how the shape of your mouth, throat, and tongue shift to create those two vowel sounds.
  • "ee" may feel like a smaller space and therefore will produce a brighter vowel sound
  • "ah" may feel like a larger space and therefore will produce a darker vowel sound

And that's it! If you're able to do the above exercise, then I have no doubt that you can do the necessary work to control the gendered perception of your voice on a permanent basis.

I go into this in a lot of detail in my course, Trans Vocal Exploration, and I also have some good exercises for controlling resonance on my TikTok.

The exercise I've linked above is called the Key-Oh exercise and it's my absolute favourite resonance exercise. It can be a bit tricky when you first start out, especially if your ears aren't used to hearing fine changes in resonance.

If you get stuck or have trouble, try recording yourself and listening back, or doing the exercise with a friend. Members of my course have access to a Discord server full of other trans voice explorers looking for study buddies, but there are tons of other places you can find comrades online, such as the comments of that very same TikTok post I linked above!

Every little bit helps when working on developing vocal control so if all you do today is the exercise I've written out here or the Key-Oh exercise, congratulate yourself on taking that positive step towards your gender euphoria!

Renée ✨