Comment by exelius
6 years ago
To be honest, it’s not really all that unusual once you start paying attention to it — plenty of women have deeper voices than mine.
I transitioned from male to female some years back and trained my voice from a deep, masculine voice to one solidly in the female range. Pitch is only one aspect of how we gender speech, and I think that’s why it feels off to you.
I would say this voice uses pretty male-coded speech patterns with a higher pitch than you’d normally hear a man speak in. The pattern of clear starts and stops between words and limited range of pitch used sounds “male” to my ears.
>> The pattern of clear starts and stops between words and limited range of pitch used sounds “male” to my ears.
This sounds like an exaggerated stereotype of how men speak. Interestingly, the stereotype is different for men from Southern European countries who are said to speak in a sing-songy voice with vowels flowing together between words like vocal ligatures.
For example, this stereotype is used for satirical effect in the following strip:
https://pbfcomics.com/comics/automatic-business/
I wouldn’t say it’s particularly exaggerated; the “gay voice” is basically male pitch ranges with stereotypically feminine prosody and/or alliteration (I don’t say this as a mockery at all; there’s a documentary on Netflix that goes into the origins of this).
Though I do agree that gender norms are largely cultural — but it doesn’t change the fact that a Spanish man sounds “gay” to most Americans.
>> Though I do agree that gender norms are largely cultural — but it doesn’t change the fact that a Spanish man sounds “gay” to most Americans.
In that case, talking of a certain vocal style as being masculine or feminine, without a cultural qualifier, is meaningless. You should clarify that "this is how men speak in the US" or some such.
I don't know if I'd take a Netflix documentary as evidence that a stereotype is accurate.
4 replies →
I'd guess you're noticing voices a lot more because of your efforts. I don't really notice at all, possibly because I'm not paying attention. I wonder if I heard the Q voice in normal usage (like on a phone system) I'd notice?
I’d actually be interested to see how it performs under heavy voice compression (such as a phone system).