this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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Trans Voice Help
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Hi! This community exists as a place for trans people of all genders (or gender fluidity, or non-binary etc.) to help them overcome the challenges of being able to speak normally as their preferred gender. Upload audio clips, screenshots from analyzers, or what ever you feel like in order to get feedback and help perfected the voice you have into a state where you are comfortable.
Rules
These are going to be fairly open, since I trust that most posts here are seeking genuine help.
- No shaming. This should be obvious. People are looking for help and advice here.
- Absolutely no transphobic rhetoric will be tolerated. One warning (with a timeout), then a ban.
- If you post an audio file, keep it SFW. We don't need to hear that stuff.
- Keep criticisms pertinent and overall kind. Part of this whole thing is practice. We shouldn't expect immediate improvement.
- This is a zero politics zone. If you bring them up, goodbye.
- No slurs (I hate that I feel this is necessary)
- If you have negative feedback, do so in a constructively respectful manner while remembering that this kind of thing is a journey and can't be immediate.
- This being the internet, help with voice mod stuff is encouraged. It can make a huge difference for someone with voice dysphoria if others hear them they way they wish to sound.
- These rules are not necessarily exhaustive, and if you are generally a jerk or toll, expect a ban
Welcome! As I find them, I will be linking resources in this sidebar.
Resources
A good, free place to upload clips.
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pitch is no obstacle for me, i can do ~200hz without trouble! my main concern is, when i begin to speak louder, i don't keep my tongue forward enough to keep a feminine (in my view) second formant frequency, and thus my voice can sound kinda weird when doing that.
i think in normal people terms this is my vocal quality being a little darker than i'd like? personally i find it easier to just visualize how the resonance works throughout the vocal tract instead of trying to abstract it, but maybe thats just the engineer in me.
uh in short i need to speak with my tongue closer to the front of my mouth
yes, making my vowels more forward by speaking with my tongue more forward in my mouth was what actually led to me having a passing voice! It was the one thing that just finally "clicked" and worked for me, and suddenly I realized I actually knew how to mimic or create that voice all along - it just was so hard for me to stumble upon it and realize that's the right voice.
It might help to use a vowel chart and practice a word with more forward and more back vowels.
Even just playing around with "umm" (which was something I had habituated as such a back vowel and would cause me to slide back frequently when I was trying to habituate more forward vowels), play around with the vowels between "umm" and something more like "erm" - the "e"-ifying of the "um" moves the vowel more forward and gives you a better perceptual sense of what's going on that isn't just about coordinating anatomy (ideally you don't really think much about your tongue, and you certainly don't want to be trying to manually control the tongue - that should all be unconscious coordination, and on your perceptual level it's best to notice when the vowel feels or sounds too back or when it's more forward - and then regularly habituating more forward vowels).
my approach initially was to treat it like pronouncing words in a foreign language/putting on an accent. the neat trick about this is that i've already done that, so all of a sudden it became a lot easier. even if one has never learned a second language, the mindset may make concepts involved with voice training seem a little more manageable.
i love the idea of using a vowel chart though! i've had a fair amount of experience with phonology, and i've noticed so much material i read on transgender voice training assumes the reader has an intuition for vowel formation—the most prominent example i see of this is stuff saying "mask the sound with /i/" (what you said with "'e'-ifying). such a chart would absolutely be helpful in demonstrating how this actually works, and more importantly that the idea refers to tongue position, and not /i/ (e as in eel) just being "higher pitch". one can of course say "just move your tongue forward", but thats a hard instruction to follow without gobs of context and explanation, and is near useless for truly understanding how it feminizes the voice.
if it sounds like i'm making an education curriculum, i pretty much have been! while my first approach was learning it like a foreign language, my approach now is to study and write about it as though i'm going to teach about it. i personally find that the best way for me to learn, but of course people differ :)
yes, I think the framing of treating it like an accent is much easier to learn and integrate - I think the vowel chart and anatomy discussion mostly misleads students, it's just not how we know how to alter and make sounds. Instead, mostly we are good at mimicry, and treating vocal feminization like voice acting or like learning an accent or a foreign language is much more appropriate. Still, it is really hard to teach someone an accent over text, which is why I think so much vocal feminization resources and lessons are overly focused on explaining anatomy, vowel formants, etc. rather than demonstrating through sound and videos.
This is why I think voice training is mostly an in-person exercise, I think it was important for me to have someone to visually watch and mimic, and also for them to be able to watch me and correct when I was making a major beginner mistake (like root tongue tension, or tightening neck muscles and my vocal folds too much, etc.). It was also helpful for getting immediate feedback on when I was mimicking or demonstrating something correctly vs not.