This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3,919 for Thursday, the 10th of August 2023.
Today's show is entitled, How I Hacked My Voice.
It is the 50th show of Tuku Toro Toe and is about 16 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
This summary is Tuku Toro Toe Toe talks about what she is doing to change her voice.
Hi, this is Tula Toro and you are listening to the Hacker Public Radio.
Today's episode I'm not talking about the Haskell surprise surprise, but rather I'm talking
about how I Hacked My Voice.
Also, if you have been listening, my episodes over time, you might have noticed that my voice
has changed a little bit over the years, and this episode will be about how I did that,
but kind of things I did to achieve that.
So for the record, I used something like this, I'm reading out a weekdays in Finnish.
Manantai, tea, tea, keskivikko, torstai, periantai, lauantai, sunontai.
And nowadays, if I do the same thing, it sounds like manantai, tea, keskivikko, torstai, periantai, lauantai, sunontai.
So this is a noticeable sense in there.
So a whole process to maybe couple of years, I was doing it every day, but I wasn't doing
exercises every day, but I was working with the voice more or less every day, so the first
resource I looked into, like, and, like, so many other people, because that is a very
recommended resource, is the trans voice lessons channel in the YouTube, there will be a link
in the show notes for that. And there is a lot of exercises, a lot of really interesting
theory and science behind the voice. There's tons and tons of videos there, so I started
with that. And basically the first thing, there's a, I think, three video series that
talk about very basic things, how to change your voice. So I started with figuring out
what the difference with we, chest voice and head voice voice. The problem with voice
is that, or rather, the challenge with the voice is that when we speak, we tend to speak
very instinctively. We don't really think how all the muscles in our body are moving and how
they produce the sound. It's just do it. We learn that as a day piece and then we do it
instinctively, we don't really think about that. So a lot of the theory was really tricky to get
because if it says that contract specific muscle to change your voice like this, you have no idea
what that muscle is. You might see a picture, but if you haven't trained that muscle, it's really
hard to do anything with that muscle. You cannot just start doing that. But the exercise they had
were easy in a way that they said that try to make sound like this and then try to make the sound
like this and you start mimicking those sounds and from there you learn to control all those
muscles that change the change the voice because the voice is produced by the vocal folds in your
throat and then it is amplified and filtered by the rest of your head basically.
So the chest and head voice, the chest voice is the, it has more, I think the words are the
thing, but you can think when you speak, you can sort of feel the voice coming from your
abdomen or your chest and then you try to switch it to your head. It really doesn't change the
location where it comes from but the feeling helps you to manage the voice production in a way
that it switches to sounding differently. So instead of producing it in deep of your body, you can
do it like you produce a vocal and then try to move higher. So you go like, ah and at the end you
add the head voice and if you keep continuing to the higher you end up with the falsetto that sounds
very comical and might be useful sometimes but it's not very useful, very useful and speaking.
And at that point, it helps if you're holding your finger on the larynx and you can feel how it
is moving and then I started doing the exercises that I just tried to lift the larynx on
it road and give it up because that's the changes the voice, because it showed on the distance of the
voice, so it goes on the higher sounding, more feminine sounding. Because the thing is that while the
pitch of the your speed of voice has effect on if it's perceived as a main of email, the
actually the resonance has even bigger effect on that. The transverse lessons talks about this a lot
lot more detail but basically it's not just just a pitch but also the resonance on your voice that
changes how it is perceived. So I was just trying to hold my larynx up, first with the voice
producing a sound and then just trying to hold it up without producing a sound and basically
just try to keep it at high as long as possible and then letting it drop and then lift it up.
Basically just like doing a muscle training with the waves, because the muscles that move it
weren't used to that is how they got fired very quickly so I just had to train them to be
stronger and regain control of moving the larynx and at this point I switched using a
trying to use the new voice in everyday speech and I found it really dreadless and funny when I
thought I just decided that it's the easiest if I don't do it only training 50 minutes a day
or some amount of time but try to keep doing that all the time because then my body gets more used
with quicker and once funny trick was that I was reading my social media feed allowed and
just reading it allowed but people were posting and trying different voices for different people
and just playing it, playing it with the voice, seeing what works and what notes and what kind of
things I can do and because there was an opening listening that at least I hope nobody was
listening at that point but it was very low pressure and gave me an opportunity to play with the
voice and see what I can do and how things affect to each other. Okay and the next peak improvement I
think I was told was adding a little bit of twang into my voice and of course that's again
if somebody comes and says hey I just had to present more twang into your voice and it sounds better
you don't know that means unless you have studied that stuff but I had this coach actually told
me that you can just pretend to be a witch like old croaking witch who is speaking with a funny voice
that just helped me to realize what the twang is. So if I imitate a witch it sounds like I am
the evil witch and that's a that's a that's a creaking is the is produced by the client. Of course that
that point I'm adding it a lot more than I'm doing it now I'm still doing it but not that high level
and there's a little flat in your throat that closes it's basically you can imagine it's
a selector bit in your fined fight and it your biggest impact. So when you're speaking
you're speaking from that. But when you're drinking or eating that flat moves and directs the
directs the content in your stomach and you can control that flat if you close it a lot you get
a freaking sound but if you close it just a little bit you actually get a clear and more strong sound
like voice that carries a longer distance and doing that witch for impersonation as doing that
and then I was feeling a weekdays and then I was just doing the woevers like yeah yeah yeah just doing
doing the woevers and training to control that little aspect and basically again strengthening the
strengthening the muscles and learning how to use that and now that I have some idea how that works
I can add it just a little bit when I'm speaking normally and if I'm speaking in a place where
there's a lot of noise or there's a lot of people so that I have to have a voice that carries a
third of a day then I can add it a little more it still sounds natural I'm not going to do it
do it here because it gets it actually gets quite loud and might hurt your ears but anyway that
that having the control of that means that I can move on the scale like no tongue or lot of tongue
or even up that witch-inverse and impersonation and the annotating I don't I don't actually
know how it works with affect is that the coach said that you can pretend that you are smiling
you don't actually have to smile but you they're just pretending to think of like
see what's talking about inner smile it sounds really silly but it works you can do it first you smile
very widely and that changes again your voice because of course the smiling changes how your face
looks like it changes the oral cavity in shape of the oral cavity and that changes how the
how your voice is filtered and amplified and that's of course directly affects to how you sound like
so that was the second thing or third thing and these three things basically is what I learned to do
and it changed my voice quite a bit as you can here okay and then I have the problem that my voice
gets tired eventually if I talk about talk long time it gets tired it gets scratchy and raspy in my throat
so I asked about how to how to do what to do about this and the coach gave me a couple
simple tricks that I can use first the most important is staying hydrated you have to
have to drink in us over course of the day because if I I'm not drinking in a photo it's directly
how I sound like the second one is that using the resonator tube it's a funny it's about
20 cm long metal pipe or tin tube apart of size of a pencil basically that I the
one end is placed into the water and I'm making a oval sound from the another end and just going
up and down the scales and the water has the back pressure and somehow that calibrates
how my voice sounds it's fascinating I was quite skeptical but after trying that out it
now it is that it really works and the third one is it's a hard to carry the cap of water
and after metal tube it you all the time is just doing the a sound and just going up and down on the
scales like just and that has the similar effect it's not as strong but it's strong enough
okay and that's that's basically all the tricks that I have done to change my voice
in the trans voice lessons there's a lot more things that you can do but a lot of those are quite
quite a bit more involving and requiring more practice and I have to say that I'm too lazy to do those
consistently or even figure out how to do those works maybe I get to taxi those at some point
but currently I'm quite happy how I sound like so that's how I hacked my voice so if you have
questions comments or feedback leave a comment in the comment field comment box whatever
or even better record your own episode you can also email me at the tool at the tool at
workshop that I do not that's all for today you have been listening to hacker public radio
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