transvoicelessons

(Workshop Series) #8: Identifying Strain and Effort 2/3 MUST WATCH

Added 2023-11-15 20:11:30 +0000 UTC

Hi everyone! Regardless of your skill level, this is an essential video for feminization. Please watch and listen carefully!

Our previous video focused on hearing and identifying strain against pitch as a sound quality. Today, we are going to look at several other indicators which are important to listen for. Remember that sound quality is not reducible! This means that getting the right "quality" doesn't only mean you make the right sound in isolation. Voice unfolds with time. Since the voice is always occurring and changing in time, listening to quality necessarily involves moving and using what you're playing with. Often I see students who wish to "wait" till they have the right sound before they try and proceed forward into speech but definitionally, having the "right sound" means having the right quality DURING speech. Most goals aren't "I want to get good at vocal exercises". Most goals are "I want to speak comfortably with the sound I want". Because of this, we want to expand our perceptions of vocal quality outwards beyond a single "is this low/high/strained/x/y/z in isolation?" inquiry and instead look for signs of quality while in motion (onsets, creak, pitch flexibility, fluidity overall, volume range, etc) because speech is motion. It seems counterintuitive but it is often easier to produce the sound you want when you are doing the *whole* action rather than trying to attack it in parts because the sound you want is inherently a *whole* action of speech rather than a chemistry experiment where you put the "elements" in the right order to synthesize your goal.