Voice

Voice is probably one of the least documented parts of transition and can be really confusing. This guide should break it down into some simple steps that along with practice will help you speak with a feminine voice.

A quick note on safety: Please please please listen to any pain you're experiencing. Some muscle fatigue/burning will be normal during practice, but if your throat ever feels raw, swollen or irritated please take a break and drink some water. Usually those feelings are a sign that you're doing something wrong. Pushing through it could injure your voice and halt a lot of the progress you could be making!

Why practically everyone can do girl voice

Girl voice is all about constricting airways in two places: the larynx and near the the back of the throat. Everyone has the ability to block those passageways off, like when you hold your breath or swallow. The hard part is gaining the dexterity and stamina to do it consistently and sustainably.

Anecdotally, I can attest that people with very low ranges can still pull off a convincing female voice. There are girls with voices that dip into what could be considered a "male" range, and you can get up to that pitch fairly easily. The more important part is shaping the sound correctly. And if high range is something you really want (ie for soft loli asmr) there's a way you can fake it.

Theory

There's two main techniques that go into girl voice that we'll go over quickly.

If you've ever watched the Disney movie Lilo and Stitch, female voice uses a lot of the same techniques that go into that, just more toned down and with a different nuance. It might help to find tutorials on the voice as a supplement to this.

Raising your larynx

Your larynx is the thing that holds your vocal cords tight, and is where your adam's apple juts out of. When it raises, the range of pitches you can hit goes up. For girl voice we want to keep it in a higher position, which we can do by building up muscle strength.

Shaping the back of your mouth

To do girl voice we need to make the opening in the back of our throat smaller. We can do this with our tongue by raising it and pushing it to the back of our mouth.

The other part is raising the soft palate. The soft palate starts where the hard bone ends in the roof of your mouth, and extends all the way back into your throat. You can feel the back end of it vibrating when you snore. When yawning it raises, making your voice sound more open and loud. For girl voice, we want to raise it while speaking to get a toned down version of that quality.

These are the two techniques that go into shaping our voice. When speaking in the right pitch, the shaping is what will differentiate our voice as female, as opposed to just a high pitched male voice.

Technique

Raising your larynx

The muscles you'll need for this are engaged when you swallow, and if you place your hand on your throat while swallowing, you'll be able to feel your larynx go up. Try and keep those neck muscles engaged at your larynx's highest point, while still being relaxed enough to breathe and make sound. Make sure you're relaxing the muscles that connect from your larynx to your chest, and are only tensing up the muscles that run from your larynx to your upper neck. One of those muscles connects to the back of the jaw, so you might need to tense your jaw up a bit.

Shaping the back of your mouth

First, practice raising the soft palate. You can do this by yawning, and keeping those muscles engaged after the yawn ends. Another way is to make an "aaah" vowel sound, like when you're at the doctor's office, and then engage those muscles in the soft palate as much as you can. You'll want to experiment with how raised it is to find the sweet spot for the pitch you're using. Usually you'll need it to be more raised for higher pitches.

Once you have that down, raise your tongue up to the top of your molars, keeping the middle part tensed to keep it flat. Then pull your tongue back a bit, so it's closer to the opening in the back of your throat. Your tongue makes a similar shape when you make an "eh" sound. More or less you'll be shifting any tongue movement slightly towards that "eh" shape.

Experiment with that arrangement until you get something that sounds female when vocalizing in a higher pitch. A lot of it is trial and error, but once you get one voice nailed down you can build off of that experience to figure out one that you like more.

Speaking with the tone

Once you have the muscle memory of that all down, you should start practicing speaking at the same time. It's going to feel awkward because your attention will be divided between which muscles feel engaged, how it's sounding in your head, and thinking of the next words you want to say, but in time it becomes second nature. It might help to read something you enjoy out loud so you won't have as much to think about while practicing. To solidify the muscle memory it can help to try and aim for a higher pitch at first, then slowly move it down to something more comfortable. That way you don't need to worry about dipping into too low of a range by accident.

Mannerisms

The last thing we need is female mannerisms that fit the way our voice sounds. This is pretty straightforward once you have everything else down. Some ways you can do this:

  • Spend time around girl friends and pick up the mannerisms you like from them
  • Save voice clips of a youtuber/twitch streamer whose voice you like + imitate it
  • Watch shows with female characters, and actively listen for vocal ticks you can mimic

Practicing

You'll want to find ways to consistently practice and experiment, otherwise you won't make much progress and may lose motivation. Try and work it into your life as much as you can, some good times would be while doing housework, during a commute, in the shower or before bed. Reading things aloud, acting out scenarios in your head, or repeating nonsense phrases are all good, you don't necessarily need to use the weird rainbow sentence all the speech therapists love to force people to recite. Immersing yourself in voice work will give you steady progress, but again be careful not overstrain yourself.

Higher pitches with falsetto

If you don't already know, falsetto is the "mickey mouse" voice. It lets you hit a higher range than normal, but sounds really thin and weak. If you do falsetto with the shaping we described before, it does a good job of masking the thinness of it. It's a bit different from what you'd use for speaking since the pitch is higher, you'll need to open up your soft palate a lot more. You shouldn't go into falsetto when speaking, but if you're singing and need to hit a note outside of your range, or you want to pull off that cute loli voice in VRChat, this would be how you'd fake it.

Further Reading

In-Depth Written Guides

Video Tutorials

Voice Examples