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.
You’ll really like this then, it’s a clip of Phil Hendrie who I recently discovered. He does tons of voices and sound effects, his studio has multiple microphone and switches between them for different speakers.
Here is a clip of him when someone called his studio thinking they were the local Pizza Hut. Phil does all the other voices, including the phone system.
Are you talking about singing lessons, or actual talking training? Singing lessons helped me sing but didn't change the way i talked at all, but i was only able to afford them for a summer so maybe it takes more time than that
When I was in NYC a while back, I met a woman at a friend's dinner party. She sounded totally American, but was in fact Brazilian. She worked as a lawyer, and said that she'd had to get extensive voice training in order to sound American so that people would take her more seriously professionally. I have no idea if the professional part worked, but the accent, mannerisms etc was amazing - I would never have guessed.
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 (^_^).
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.
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.
Thanks - that matches my little observations and clears up a few questions I had. I did notice that spectrogram views are almost the same regardless of perceived gender except that the strongest bands and their distributions change, and also that perceived pitch isn't as dynamic as actual frequency shifts of harmonics, but didn't realize that the center frequency moving up had to do with both physical and figurative size. It makes sense.
One thing I've been feeling itchy regarding this domain is that a lot of existing resources are shallow and there aren't many gamified options even though things like rhythm game feels like a perfect fit. I think not a negligible number of people, especially young and inexperienced, are struggling with aggressive or dis-satisfied sounding voices against their intent. Just a laptop app to feedback the error between their intended voice and recognized voices to let them minimize the error feel like a useful thing to me.
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??)
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!
A few years back I discovered that the third-party licensing files we had used in the '90s would roll over in 2016. The format used four ASCII digits for the number of days in an otherwise binary file and the epoch was the founding of the licensing company, sometime in 1988. If they had just used a 32-bit integer instead it would have saved me a lot of headache!
DEC WARS is full of great computer jokes. It's a 1983 Usenet posting by Alan Hastings and Steve Tarr: https://www.bsd.org/decwars.html
> It is a period of system war. User programs, striking from a hidden directory, have won their first victory against the evil Administrative Empire. During the battle, User spies managed to steal secret source code to the Empire's ultimate program: the Are-Em Star, a privileged root program with enough power to destroy an entire file structure. Pursued by the Empire's sinister audit trail, Princess _LPA0: races aboard her shell script, custodian of the stolen listings that could save her people, and restore freedom and games to the network...
I particularly enjoyed _Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity_ by David Foster Wallace. It gave me a new appreciation of not only the last two centuries of math, but also the english language and the abuse of sentence structure, asides, and footnotes[1][2][3] for educational and entertainment purposes.
[1] so
[2] many
[3] footnotes[a]
[a] Which, I must say, I found interesting and informative[b]
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