Oof so tonight’s gender expression workshop was just like, a symptom of how Kaiser approaches trans voice. I’m not going to sit here and say my voice is perfect, but talking about vocal anatomy and spectrographs and waveforms for the majority of a crash course is absolutely not how I would teach trans voice. And the SLP they brought in was a cis man who can’t really do a female voice. There was only maybe 15 minutes of actual applicable voice work
@danirabbit also ugh, I’m really sorry. I’ve been working through Kaiser with a wonderful dedicated speech therapist who has done a lot to pull in what she can as a cis woman — researched samples of speakers at Ted Talks, conversations on YouTube, she’s familiar with both Zhea and Claire (of Seattle Voice Labs), etc. But it’s hard, she’s primarily a therapist for impediments, like stuttering or lisping, and trans voice is really a very specific field where having a cisgender instructor feels like having a male gynecologist.
@caroline yeah definitely! I think that’s really the core of the problem and this guy also acknowledged that SLPs in Kaiser are really trained and focused on rehabilitation and trans voice is just way outside of that for them
I dunno, I really want to do a Duolingo-style trans voice app. Trans voice resources are too inaccessible, classes are expensive and don’t scale, it’s too hard to practice effectively, it’s too hard to track your progress. The existing apps focus way too much on pitch and only pitch. Like this is an education space that is very lacking right now
@danirabbit I'm sure somebody else knows more about this, but I kinda gather that measuring amplitude is easy enough, but resonance depends on things like the shape of the vocal chords it's acting on, and that's not constant across different people. Does that sound right?
@Tweetfiction @danirabbit yes absolutely, the closest you can probably get right now is the app Zhea (of TransVoiceLessons) sometimes uses, and it’s only on Android (and PC, the Mac version has been broken for a couple years). It at least does R1/2/3 analysis and overlay on a spectrogram, along with some other less accurate things, like estimation of glottal flow.
all that said, it’s not a teacher. You still have to figure out how to modify those resonant frequencies and change vocal weight on your own, and there’s no feedback besides “oh I think the lines are more consistently in this ratio now” 😕
@danirabbit Gotta say, following you is educational. Never occurred to me there would be whole workshops and such around this topic. Kinda just assumed most do what my friends do - wing tf out of it and ask us for feedback lol.
@JonTheNiceGuy thanks I’ll definitely listen to that! There are absolutely a lot more resources now than even 10 years ago when I was first looking for how I could feminize my voice, but I feel like there’s still a long way to go for things to be truly accessible and I know it’s a major struggle and source of dysphoria for a lot of trans women
@danirabbit feels like something Pimsleur style would be ideal here. Like you allude to, the whole point is to get you speaking and hearing yourself speak, not able to identify the soft palate on an anatomy plate
@kevinriggle Yeah and a huge problem is they focus way too hard on muscle control and mouth shape and tongue posture instead of listening and imitating. Like we don’t learn a language by thinking about tongue posture why would that suddenly make sense for learning to make other sounds? And for myself I literally can’t feel where my tongue is in my mouth when I’m speaking. It’s a super frustrating experience to approach voice with such an anatomy focus
@danirabbit I saw Vala in the repo and thought, "hmm, when I think of Vala I think of Elementary OS." Then I looked at your bio and had a lightbulb moment.
A big problem is that it is purely random which means you can get 5 deep breathing exercises in a row lol. So I need to figure out some kind of shuffle system instead of random. But, progress! Working our way towards a useful thing
Add comment