nikkaelle

This poem is beautifully referenced in Mark Campbell's libretto for _As One_, an opera about the life and self acceptance of a trans woman, Hannah. Her class is also assigned the poem to study. This part destroys me every time:

*Hannah before, Hannah after, Conductor, Quartet:* “…Any man’s death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind…”

*Hannah before:* I am the lone, Dissenting voice In the classroom. I rise and declare To a sea of non-islanders: “It isn’t true, I am an island.”

With all the experience Of my fourteen years, I see no other life Than one apart, Alone.

I need no one. No one needs me. I consigned myself To my own island long ago. Long ago.

I argue, and, Satisfied by My brilliant discourse on independence, Sit back down. The classroom is silent. The teacher seems impressed. (Or was she concerned?)

I have mild visual aphantasia in that I by default do not picture an image for something like the ball test, but instead have something between a concept and a wireframe or flat boxy rendering of it. When pressed for details I can fill those in and form a reasonably vivid mental image, but it is not by any means the default.

However, I have almost hyperphantasia for audio. I can hear near perfect recreations of the sound of something in my head, especially if it's music. This turned out to be extremely handy for voice modification training, as I could hear the target sound exactly in my head and then work to match it.

I've seen some people attempt to make a voice gender recognizer through machine learning, but nothing that has actually worked well. I'm not an ML expert, but I expect they're overfitting on just a small subset of accents and specific formants. The one I played with (can't find the link) was just trying to show weight vs resonance, and it got very confused by my voice. I am never misgendered from my voice but I (intentionally) have a slightly deeper femme voice than what it had been trained on.

IMO, the best way to learn to control your voice is to learn to hear variations in size, weight, pitch, open quotient, prosody, etc. From there you can become your own coach so you're not focused on an app while having a real world conversation with someone. Would a gamified version help? Possibly.

(sorry for the delay, I have no idea if you'll see this. I wrote it last week but apparently never pressed the submit button??)

More or less everything changes. For trans men who are on HRT the voice's lowest pitch will get lower, as it would for someone AMAB going through puberty (since a second puberty is literally what's happening on HRT). Trans women do not get any voice changes from HRT though, so they train to raise their larynx when speaking to get up into the "perceived female range."

But pitch is far from the only thing that someone gendered one way or another in western culture (and presumably elsewhere). Resonance, weight, breathing patterns, word choice, and prosody all matter too. That's way too much to go into in a post here on HN, but the easiest one to understand is resonance or "size." Female-perceived speakers have higher resonance / smaller size. This means that some of the higher harmonics are amplified more than the lower harmonics, an it's called a "small size" because the actual resonating area from the larynx to the tongue is made smaller (mostly through tongue placement). Male-perceived speakers do the opposite, creating a larger space for resonance and resulting in a lowered resonance.

I know quite a few cis people who are also going through some of this training to help with their voice acting, or even just for fun.

There are a lot of good (and unfortunately some bad) resources online for trans voice training in both directions. My personal favorite (and where I started my lessons) is Seattle Voice Labs, but Online Vocal Coach / Vox Nova is also a great resource.

I'm trans.

The ability to switch mid-sentence is mostly just something I discovered I can do and is fun. But the ability to pass as my real gender is something that helps me feel safe. And when needed, being able to occasionally pass as my prior gender (e.g., when calling my bank until I can change my name/gender legally), it also quite useful.

I'm referring to speaking, not singing. After a _lot_ of work, I can speak passably as a woman or man and switch freely between the two. Depending on context I generally choose just one for the entire conversation, as switching tends to cause whiplash in the listener (^_^).

Vocal lessons are both a lot of fun and a lot of work. I haven't been using any voiceprint systems but I know most humans are unable to tell that my trained voice is the same physical person as my old voice. Would be curious to find out if an AI voiceprint system can discern whether it's the same or not.

As a trans woman who started transitioning at 43... I agree 100%.

This article mostly discusses waist size, for which I'm in the lower quartile. But after 40 years of testosterone poisoning my underbust is above the median. Finding clothing that fits and is flattering is really difficult!