How do I train my voice to be higher or lower? Changing the pitch of your voice naturally is difficult, and takes a lot of time and practice to achieve noticeable effects, but there are a couple of things you can do to safely train your voice to be lower.
However, none of the suggestions here come from medical professionals. These methods have been selected because they shouldn’t damage your vocal cords, but if ever you feel like they’re straining your voice or damaging your throat, you should stop immediately. When you start out, you might only be able to practice for five minutes a day.
While this can be frustrating, it’s better than causing permanent damage to your voice. It’s a good idea to find someone you can practise with when you first start trying to train your voice, for safety and for conversational practice. If you’d find it helpful, you can record your voice so that you can hear the changes over time and monitor your progress, which might give you a boost in confidence.
There’s an app you can download for free called ‘Eva’ which is designed for trans people trying to train their voice. There are two versions of the app, ‘Eva FTM’ and ‘Eva MTF’. The apps include video-based instruction and practice, different ‘lessons’ such as on breath and pitch, self-guided exercises, visually interactive tools, and a pitch-tuner and tracker tool.
Deepening your voice: Firstly, you might want to do some vocal exercises. If you sing, you can use very similar exercises to what you use when you’re warming up your voice, such as scales. If you’re not the singing type, a simple exercise you can do is to pick one sound, such as ‘ahh’, and try raise and lower your voice as much as you can, holding the sound, until you run out of breath.
- If you like singing, practise singing along to songs with male singers whose voices aren’t too deep, and try to match their pitch.
- You can also try humming deeply from your throat, raising your chin a little, slowly, as you hum.
- Begin speaking directly from your humming voice.
- Obviously, you can’t burst out humming in everyday interaction, so this is something you’ll have to practise when you’re on your own.
However, you can achieve a similar effect if you start your sentences with an ‘umm’, ‘uhh’, or ‘mm’. It won’t make you sound particularly articulate, but if you’re feeling especially dysphoric or nervous, it can help you deepen your voice a little bit quite quickly.
- Experiment with your breathing.
- Try to breathe in from your diaphragm, rather than taking shallow breaths.
- If you take a breath and feel your chest and shoulders rise, you’re breathing from your chest, not your diaphragm.
- When you breathe from your diaphragm, you should feel your stomach expanding and contracting.
Inhale through your nose and down to your belly, and speak when you breathe out. When you speak from your diaphragm, you’ll project more easily, and your voice will be a bit deeper. Try speaking through your mouth, rather than your nose. It’s possible to get a deep nasal voice, but it sounds more masculine if you speak through your mouth.
- To deepen your voice, you’ll want to try and lower your pitch.
- To do this, relax your throat as much as possible, to avoid tightening your vocal cords.
- Moisten your mouth and throat, and hold your chin up.
- Swallow before you speak, and speak slowly, lowering your voice at the beginning of your sentences and trying to maintain that pitch.
If you find yourself speaking quickly, you’ll probably also find your pitch rising. Try not to raise your pitch at the end of your sentences, but keep your tone more monotonous. Emphasise sounds that allow you to deepen your voice; for example, lengthening your vowels allows you to make them sound deeper.
- Experiment with what you find easiest to pronounce with your deeper voice and play to those strengths.
- When trying to deepen your voice, you quite literally want to speak from as low down as possible.
- Pay attention to where you feel and hear your voice emanating from; it’ll probably be your throat.
- Your pitch is highest when you speak at the top of your throat, or when you use your ‘head voice’.
Speaking from your chest will produce a deeper sound, although it might be airy and a little soft. Ideally, you want to learn how to speak from what feels like your gut. To do this, you’ll have to project your voice, which comes from breathing from your diaphragm and reaching down to your belly before you speak.
This process of learning to speak from your diaphragm takes a lot of practice, and initially you probably won’t hear much of a difference, but in time, you’ll be able to make your voice deeper and deeper. It might be frustrating, but take baby steps. If you try to make drastic changes to your voice, you’ll risk straining your vocal cords.
Avoid speaking with a growl or rasp, as although this produces a deeper throat voice, it can damage your vocal cords and you’ll end up with a hoarse voice. It’s also more difficult to project when you’re speaking from your throat. Start out by using your deep voice for short periods of time, and gradually build them up.
- It’ll take time, but eventually you’ll be able to lower your voice quite substantially, just from practice.
- Feminising your voice: Unfortunately, oestrogen won’t change the pitch of your voice, so there are more barriers to feminising your voice than masculinising it.
- However, there are a couple of techniques with which you can safely train yourself to raise the pitch of your voice.
As suggested above, singing and voice exercises can help you loosen up your voice box and extend your pitch range. If you like to sing, choose a song with a female vocalist, with a voice that isn’t too high-pitched, and sing along, trying to emulate her pitch.
- You can also use vocal exercises, such as singing a rising scale.
- Every time you do this, try to reach a note higher than you did the previous time.
- The aim is to create a higher ‘baseline’ pitch than you previously used.
- Don’t overdo it, or you’ll end up sounding squeaky; if your throat starts to feel scratchy, you’re straining it too much.
Take baby steps, keep practising, and see what works for you. Another exercise you can do to build up muscle control in your throat is raising your larynx. Take a sip of water so your throat isn’t dry. Put your hand on your larynx, so you can feel what’s happening.
- Don’t hold it in place – this will damage it. Swallow.
- You should feel the bump hop upwards.
- Eep doing this for a few minutes, and try to hold the bump up there for as long as you can, using your throat muscles, not your hand.
- Because you’re swallowing, you won’t be able to breathe; this is normal, but make sure to stop if you get out of breath.
The aim of this exercise is to eventually be able to consciously control your larynx, so you can hold it higher in your throat. To soften your voice, you can try to speak more breathily, which is what you do naturally when whispering. This is called opening up the glottis.
- This is achieved when your vocal cords do not vibrate (such as when you say ‘hhh’ or ‘ssss’) – the air simply passes through.
- You can hear the difference between when your vocal cords don’t vibrate, such as with the sound ‘sss’, and when they do vibrate, such as with ‘zzz’.
- Try to find a semi-whispering position somewhere between these two, which will add a breathiness to your voice.
When you speak, try to hold your tongue higher and flatter, producing a ‘dental’ sound (one that involves the teeth, like ‘t’ and ‘d’), and use lots of breath. This comes across as softer and breathier. Initially, it might sound husky rather than breathy, but keep practising and eventually you’ll be able to master it.
- Altering your intonation is another way in which you can feminise your voice.
- Try raising the pitch of your voice at the ends of your sentences, so it sounds like you’re speaking ‘up’.
- This is what you naturally do with questions, but try do this with statements as well.
- In general, try adding a bit of a lilt to your speaking pattern, rather than speaking monotonously.
Start your sentences softly, and speak slowly, pronouncing your words clearly. Round your lips a little as you speak and enunciate each word; try not to mumble. Try not to ‘swallow’ small words like ‘the’, ‘him’, ‘she’, and so on. Use full sentences, and avoid short cuts, as these are typically associated with a more masculine way of talking.
Finally, you can train yourself to raise the pitch of your voice. What you need to try do is speak with your head voice’, rather than speaking from your chest. Open your mouth a little more, use more air, and push’ your voice up into your head. Speak as if you’re really excited about something (or even better, talk about something you’re genuinely excited about), and you should hear your voice rising until it feels like it’s so high in your throat that it’s in your head; this is ‘head resonance’.
After a lot of practice, you should be able to feel your voice vibrating at the top of your throat. Initially, your head voice or ‘falsetto’ will sound like Minnie Mouse – this is normal, and a stage that most transfeminine people have to go through when trying to use their head voice.
- Practise speaking in this voice and gradually try to lower the pitch of your falsetto to something more natural-sounding.
- Learning to speak loudly while retaining a higher pitch can be especially difficult – it’s hard to project using your head voice, and can be tiring, so build up stamina by practising regularly for short periods of time.
All of this will take time, and it won’t feel natural until you’ve been practising for quite a while. The trick is to do it for a short amount of time every day, and gradually, you’ll be able to raise the pitch of your voice bit by bit, and it will come more naturally.
Contents
- 1 What makes your voice get deeper?
- 2 Does a deep voice turn a girl on?
- 3 Is deep voice genetic?
- 4 Can I deepen my voice with testosterone?
- 5 Why is my voice not deep at 14?
- 6 Why is my voice still high at 18?
- 7 Do guys with deep voices have big balls?
- 8 Do deep voices scare people?
- 9 What voice is attractive to a girl?
- 10 Why do guys lower their voices?
- 11 Why is my voice so high?
What makes your voice get deeper?
What Causes My Voice to Change? – At puberty, guys’ bodies begin producing a lot of the hormone testosterone (pronounced: tes-TOSS-tuh-rone), which causes changes in several parts of the body, including the voice. For starters, a guy’s larynx (pronounced: LAIR – inks), also known as the voice box, grows bigger.
- The larynx, which is located in the throat at the top of the trachea (pronounced: TRAY-kee-uh) or windpipe, is like a hollow tube about 2 inches (5 centimeters) high.
- The larynx is responsible for creating the sound of your voice.
- Stretched across your larynx are two muscles, your vocal cords, which are kind of like rubber bands.
When you breathe, your vocal cords relax against the walls of the larynx and completely open to allow air to get in and out of your lungs. When you speak, though, your vocal cords close together by stretching across the larynx. Air from your lungs is then forced out between your vocal cords, causing them to vibrate and produce the tone of your voice.
When you lower your voice, your vocal cords are relaxed and more floppy. When you make your voice higher, your vocal cords tighten. (You can notice this difference in how they feel as you adjust your speech.) As your larynx grows, your vocal cords grow longer and thicker. Also, your facial bones begin to grow.
Cavities in the sinuses, the nose, and the back of the throat grow bigger, creating more space in the face that gives your voice more room to echo. All of these factors cause your voice to get deeper. Think of a guitar. When a thin string is plucked, it vibrates and produces a high-sounding tone.
- When a thicker string is plucked, it sounds much deeper when it vibrates.
- That’s kind of what happens to your voice.
- Before your growth spurt, your larynx is relatively small and your vocal cords are relatively thin.
- So your voice is high and kid-like.
- But as bones, cartilage, and vocal cords grow, your voice starts to sound like an adult’s.
Along with all the other changes in your body, you might notice that your throat area looks a little different. For guys, when the larynx grows bigger, it tilts to a different angle and you can see a bump in the front of the throat called the Adam’s apple.
Will my voice ever deepen?
Does Your Voice Get Deeper as You Age? Reviewed by Jennifer Robinson, MD on April 26, 2023 When you go through puberty, your voice deepens. Men’s voices often deepen up to an octave, while women’s voices usually move about three tones lower. After and well into older adulthood, some people’s voices may change, but not everyone’s.
Lower volumeLower resonanceTiring more quicklyTremors or shakinessSounding weak
Most of the time vocal changes such as deepening are completely normal. If your voice changes as you age and it bothers you, there are special exercises and potential treatments that can help. Lack of flexibility. As you age, some of the mechanisms of your “voice box” can lose flexibility.
This alters the tone and pitch of your voice. Vocal fatigue. As you age, all of your muscles naturally lose mass. This includes the muscles of your vocal cords and voice box that make your voice work. The older you get, the more your voice may become hoarse or “tired” feeling as a day wears on. You may also find it tiring to talk for long periods.
Medical issues. Neurological conditions, polyps, nodules, or can all affect your voice. Visit your doctor. If you suspect your vocal changes are caused by a medical issue, visit your doctor. They may refer you to an ear, nose, and throat specialist (). To diagnose you, they will perform a physical examination, take your medical history, and review your symptoms.
- They will also examine your vocal cords and larynx using a flexible or rigid laryngoscope.
- A doctor inserts this device through your mouth or nose to get a good look at your vocal tissue.
- They may also conduct a videostroboscopy exam, which is similar but takes a slow-motion video to get an even closer look.
If your doctor diagnoses you with a medical issue affecting your voice, they may recommend treatment. Depending on the issue, treatments may include:
Exercises: You will work with a specialist to learn daily exercises to strengthen your voice. Microsurgery: This treatment is for polyps and cysts on your vocal cords. Injections: injections can help with a tremoring vocal fold. Other injections make weakened vocal cords plumper, producing a stronger sound. Vocal Fold Implant: A vocal fold implant can help people with partial or complete vocal cord paralysis.
Throughout the aging process, it’s important to protect and care for your voice. Here are some tips to prevent or slow your vocal issues and significant vocal changes. Speak daily. Use your voice daily. If you don’t have anyone to talk to on a particular day, read a story from the newspaper out loud or call a friend on the phone.
- Hum. Humming into a straw, also called straw phonation, for 15 minutes per day can keep your vocal cords and larynx healthy.
- You can try using different lengths and diameters of straws to strengthen your vocal cords further. Sing.
- Try singing.
- If you’re not a great singer, join a choir or sing along to your favorite song in the shower.
Try alternating singing with straw phonation for variety. Practice good hygiene. Here are some easy ways to practice good vocal hygiene as you age:
Avoid irritants like cigarette smoke.Drink at least 64 ounces of water per day.Avoid whispering.Don’t or clear your throat if you can help it.Stay active with the rest of your body.Get enough sleep.Warm your voice up before doing something demanding like making a speech.Use an amplification system instead of trying to shout over a crowd.Move to a quieter area when trying to converse in a loud space instead of yelling.Stomp and clap at sporting games instead of cheering or yelling.
© 2023 WebMD, LLC. All rights reserved. : Does Your Voice Get Deeper as You Age?
Are deeper voices more attractive?
✽ For many people, Barry White crooning in his thick, honey voice how he ” Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe,” is the ultimate sound of desire and sexual attraction. American television host David Letterman once asked the singer to read a list of mundane words, including “gingivitis” and “gubernatorial,” to prove they would sound romantic in White’s bass-baritone voice.
They certainly did. Research confirms that deep voices give men an aura of power and sexual allure. Men with low, resonant voices are more likely to be perceived as attractive, masculine, respectable, and dominant, “Judgments of anything that contributes to success in competition—age, size, muscle mass, confidence, leadership—they are all strongly affected by voice pitch,” says Carolyn Hodges-Simeon, an anthropologist at Boston University.
This preference for virile voices extends beyond cisgender, heterosexual, industrialized contexts. One study found that single homosexual men rate low-pitched voices as more attractive. In another study of trans men undergoing testosterone therapy, vocal masculinization was found to be the most important trait participants wished to change.
Achieving a deep voice is also associated with greater well-being in trans men. Among Hadza hunter-gatherers in Northern Tanzania, women perceive men with lower voices to be better hunters, and such men father more children, possibly because they are considered more attractive and high status. Given the widespread fondness for baritones and basses across various sexual identities and cultures, it seems likely that there is an evolutionary reason behind this preference and that vocal pitch may have been an important element in how humans selected mates for millennia.
But why would that be? For years, anthropologists have been trying to discover if male vocal parameters evolved as reliable signals of bodily condition, be it robust immune systems, reproductive fitness, or brawny physiques. Are men who sound like Barry White really more likely to fend off attackers and sire healthier children than men with tenor tones like Justin Timberlake ? In the last two years, a spate of anthropological studies suggests that deep voices really are honest indicators of many stereotypical traits, from handgrip strength to fighting prowess.
- However, there are contradictions hidden in vocal tones—and not everyone is convinced that vocal pitch speaks volumes about men’s vigor.
- In many animal species, males sound lower and deeper than females—it’s true for baboons, field crickets, red deer, and certain types of frogs, for example.
- Compared to other apes, though, humans have particularly large sexual differences in voice pitch, which is determined by the rate of vibration of our vocal cords.
“There is so much attention in evolutionary literature on height, and selective pressures on height, and that’s only an 8 percent difference, In voice pitch, we are looking at more like 60 percent. That just doesn’t come about by accident,” Hodges-Simeon says. It could be that women simply tend to choose men with low voices, allowing them to pass on their Barry White–like genes. In addition, men with deep voices might be more successful at intimidating and outcompeting male rivals. From sea lions and koalas to giant pandas and dogs, males of various species appear to judge how dangerous other males are based on their voices.
Humans make similar judgments about men. Research shows that both men and women tend to perceive men with deeper voices as more alpha. In a 2020 study published in Scientific Reports, David Puts, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University, and his colleagues revealed that men with lower-pitched voices were viewed as more likely to win a fist fight.
In other studies, such men were often seen as more effective CEOs, more deserving political candidates, and in some cases, better leaders. But just because baritones and basses are perceived as badass doesn’t mean they actually are. So, several recent studies set out to determine if there were biological truths underlying these assumptions.
Puts’ Scientific Reports study found that men with lower formant frequencies—a deeper resonance in their voices—tended to be taller, larger, and stronger. (That’s partly because longer vocal tracts and larger vocal folds generate lower, more resonant voices.) Lower-pitched voices also predict higher testosterone levels, they noted.
Based on this research, Puts and his colleagues then tested whether voice pitch was an honest indicator of formidability, which they defined as “the ability to inflict physical damage on others in combat.” In a study published in 2021 in Evolution and Human Behavior, they found evidence that taller men are perceived as more formidable in part because their voices are lower in pitch.
Voice pitch seems to be part of the reason why when we hear an actually formidable male, we perceive him that way,” Puts says. In another 2021 study, Puts showed that among professional male mixed martial arts fighters, voice pitch can be a valid cue of how well someone would do in a sparring match.
However, the effect was small—just a 3 percent difference at most. But of course, as Puts points out, professional fighters have a low degree of variation in their fighting ability compared to the general public. In a different study published in 2021, a group of scientists, led by Katarzyna Pisanski at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and Karel Kleisner at the Charles University in Prague, recorded urban Cameroonians and nomadic Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania talking and roaring.
They found that while the quality of one’s voice during normal speech is linked to handgrip strength, the rough, harsh sound of a roar is an even better indicator. The researchers posit that these aggressive nonverbal sounds telegraph signals about brawniness through a combination of many acoustic traits, including pitch.
A similar show of strength or aggression might be happening in athletic competitions, Hodges-Simeon observes. “When I played sports, we would come and put our hands together, and we’d yell before we’d go out on the field. It’s such an interesting behavior.
- Why are we yelling?” The demonstration of deep or harsh voice qualities may have been involved in conflict between hominin groups, Hodges-Simeon says.
- She points out that when chimpanzees patrol their borders, they often make vocalizations together, perhaps to display their strength and aggressive intent to potential enemies.
Voice pitch may also reveal something about men’s underlying health. Puts’ Scientific Reports study showed that when male cortisol levels are low, more testosterone is linked to lower pitch. According to Puts, this fits with the immunocompetence handicap hypothesis, which states that since testosterone takes away energy from the immune system, only men in the best of health—whose immune systems are not suffering due to physiological stress—can afford to develop testosterone-dependent traits.
- Likewise, Hodges-Simeon’s research suggests that lower voice pitch may be linked with higher levels of salivary immunoglobulin-A, an antibody that is the body’s first line of defense against infections.
- Despite the growing pile of evidence that voice pitch and resonance tell us some truth about men’s strength, health, and desirability, the connections aren’t always clear-cut.
For example, in his Scientific Reports study, Puts pointed out that the preference for deeper voices runs only up to a certain point, with the lowest male voices seen as less attractive. “I’m assuming that it sounds scary,” Hodges-Simeon says of these extreme bass voices.
- There is research out there showing that potentially hypermasculine males might be more prone to aggression.” What’s more, several studies have linked low male voice pitch with sexual infidelity.
- This may be why women tend to favor more masculine voices in short-term relationship contexts rather than long-term.
And in a study of homosexual males, single men preferred deeper voices, but men in couples showed no such preference. Research on voices and body condition aren’t always consistent. “Many studies suggest there is no relationship between men’s size or strength and their vocal pitch,” says Steven Arnocky, an evolutionary psychologist at Nipissing University in Canada.
And one recent experiment by Puts and Hodges-Simeon found that although voice pitch had little to do with a speaker’s self-reported health, listeners ranked people with lower voices as healthier. A further complicating factor could be that people deliberately change their voices. Want to sound more knowledgeable and successful? Lower your voice.
Both men and women have been shown to do just that, successfully fooling others. It seems researchers still have many questions to answer, including how voice pitch is linked to health history, hormones, genetic predictors, sexual selection, and more.
- In addition, health and lifestyle choices interact with vocal variations in complicated ways.
- Smoking cigarettes can deepen the voice but harm health.
- A man with a higher-pitched voice, like boxer Mike Tyson, can train to become a formidable fighter.
- And Barry White, with his velvety baritone, was an imposing man—6 feet, 4 inches tall, and stout.
But he struggled with hypertension and other health problems and sadly passed away at the young age of 58.
Does a deep voice turn a girl on?
9 Reasons to Get a Deeper Voice – Vocular | How Deep is Your Voice? The world is full of people trying to look as good as they can, but when it comes to sounding good people become strangely bashful. They describe their voices with contempt and avoid recordings of themselves for years like some strange creature, afraid of its own reflection.
This seems to be driven by an idea that your voice is ‘all in your head’: if you don’t care about how you sound then no one else will. Well, I wanted to write a series of posts to show you how this simply isn’t true. Even something as basic as your spoken pitch can have a profound impact on the way you influence others.
And by ignoring this fact, you’re really missing out – 1. Women are more attracted to men with deep voices – and this attraction is strongest among prettier, more feminine women. In fact, women prefer a masculine voice more strongly and more unanimously to a masculine face.
- This might lead you to think you should be the next Barry White, but a recent study found that the most attractive male voices were the ones around 96Hz (that’s deeper than average, but not incredibly so.) Once this average pitch fell into the 80s, women preferred a higher voice.
- Barack Obama, Alec Baldwin, Jason Momoa, Patrick Stewart, Morgan Freeman and Gerard Butler all speak with a median pitch of ~96 Hz 2.
Deep-voiced men are rated as being significantly more dominant, both physically and socially, to men with higher voices – and men who believe themselves to be more dominant subconsciously lower their tone when faced with competition. This is probably why powerful characters such as Darth Vader or Smaug are traditionally given very deep voices.
They’re supposed to intimidate on a very primal level, and a low pitch and low variance is the best recipe for that.3. In fact, owners of a deep voice get better ratings for all kinds of qualities, A 2012 study on electoral success found they were considered more intelligent, more trustworthy, more confident, more likable, healthier, and of a higher social status than high-pitched men.4.
People prefer voting for politicians with deep voices, especially during wartime. Most famously, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher underwent vocal coaching to lower her voice by a whopping 46Hz, more than half the difference between male and female voices.5.
- CEOs with deeper voices tend to run larger companies, make more money and keep their jobs for longer,
- From a sample of 792 CEOs, a 1% decrease in voice pitch was found to be worth $19,000 in CEO pay and $30 million in the size of company managed.
- And the CEOs at ‘the deep end’ earned $187,000 more on average and ran companies that were $440 million bigger.
Tesla’s Elon Musk has a median pitch of ~90 Hz, about 30 Hz lower than the average man.6. Men with deeper voices report more sexual partners and start having sex at a younger age, A study in Tanzania even found that the deeper-voiced tribesmen fathered more children, despite the fact that a naturally lower voice has been linked with a lower sperm count.
- The Hadza tribe of hunter-gatherers 7.
- Lowering the pitch of your voice makes you feel more powerful,
- Much in the same way that certain ‘power poses’ boost confidence and reduce anxiety, researchers found that “participants who lowered their voice pitch perceived themselves as possessing more powerful traits”.
They also found that they gained, in their own words, “a higher level of abstract thinking”, which is associated with people in high power positions.8. Lowering your pitch also makes you more persuasive and influential. This finding came from an experiment in which groups of people were asked to discuss which objects would be most useful after a crash landing on the Moon.
Speakers whose voices deepened during the discussion were more likely to convince others to support their ideas and more likely to be rated as of a high social status. And this was independent of their average voice pitch – even guys with high voices had the same benefit.9. Women retain information better when listening to a man with a deep voice,
Unfortunately, this study was not done with male listeners, so we can’t really tell whether this is because of the attractiveness or the authority of deep voices. It’s not all good news for the low-toned though. A deep voice also carries connotations of promiscuity and selfishness within relationships.
So, while they’re seen as generally more trustworthy, this gets reversed in a romantic context. It’s also worth saying that, for male voices, the most attractive feature was not depth, A recent study found that the greatest predictor of vocal attractiveness by a long, long way was a thing called H1-A2 (which roughly corresponds to how ‘breathy’ a voice is).
And this was so important that a high-pitched, breathy voice was found to be more attractive than a deep, non-breathy one. We’re currently working on adding this to Vocular. Finally, I have to add that it’s not worth getting bogged down in this. Yes, every point here comes from peer-reviewed academic studies, but it’s clearly not the only thing that matters.
Is deep voice genetic?
Is singing genetic or can you learn to sing? – Even today, studies are still ongoing into whether the musical ability is genetic or learned. There’s no conclusive answer about whether singing is something we’re physically built for or a skill we train ourselves to do.
But scientists suggest that it’s likely to be a mixture of both. Genetics play a large role in your singing ability. The size and shape of your vocal folds, skull, nasal cavities and facial structure can all influence your tone and how your voice sounds. Singing is also thought to be genetic because gender can affect your voice; differences in the size of the larynx mean men have deeper voices while women have higher, breathier tones.
The natural timbre of your voice is determined by genetics, but you can learn how to train and develop your voice. Pitch, range, tune, and confidence are all aspects of singing that can be learnt and developed.
Can I deepen my voice with testosterone?
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We do the research so you can find trusted products for your health and wellness. Your voice is crucial to how you see yourself and how others may see you. How people perceive your voice can affect how you’re gendered. Voice masculinization is one way to change this aspect.
- Usually, deeper voices in cis-hetero normative society are associated with men, and higher voices are associated with women.
- But men can also have higher voices, and women can have lower voices.
- There’s also a discussion to be had on what a ” neutral ” voice would sound like.
- How people perceive your voice can affect whether they gender you correctly.
For transgender and nonbinary people, misgendering is a common source of gender dysphoria, Voice masculinization is a way to change aspects like pitch, resonance, registration, prosody, articulation, musicality, interpretation, characterization, and gesticulation to influence listeners to perceive a more masculine, though not necessarily or exclusively “male,” voice.
- Of course, anyone of any gender can use voice masculinization for any purpose, including voice acting and cosplay.
- For transgender, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary people with gender dysphoria, vocal masculinization may be something you intensely desire to be seen as your correct gender.
- If you’re uncomfortable with your voice but cannot place the discomfort, are unsure whether you have dysphoria, or have questions about your gender, consider reaching out to a gender therapist to talk through your feelings.
Yes, testosterone hormone replacement therapy (HRT) can help with voice masculinization. Testosterone can elongate and thicken your vocal cords — similar to what happens during puberty for people assigned male at birth — when used for an extended period of time.
Researchers in a small 2017 study followed seven transgender men starting testosterone for the first time over the course of 1 year. All seven participants experienced significant voice deepening within the first 6 months. Four of the seven participants continued to see a reduction in frequency after 6 months.
A meta-analytic review published in 2018 found that, although testosterone can make a difference, it may not lower the voice as much as is desired. If you’re not interested in testosterone or want further changes to your voice, working with a vocal coach or speech instructor can be beneficial.
A professional linguist can teach you how to form your words with your mouth and project through your posture to sound masculine. It’s important to find a coach who has experience working with gender-diverse clients and affirms your identity. You may be able to connect with a coach online or in person in your community.
To get started, Google search “voice masculinization coach near me” plus “.” If voice training and HRT haven’t given you the results you’re looking for, you can consult a vocal surgeon about voice masculinization surgery. They can assess your individual risk for complications and discuss your options.
Voice masculinization surgery typically involves thyroplasty. During this procedure, a surgeon removes a strip of cartilage from your voice box (larynx). This loosens the vocal cords, subsequently lowering your pitch. Thyroplasty is an outpatient procedure. You’ll likely be discharged from the hospital the same day or the following morning.
Follow-up appointments with a speech-language therapist will help you make the most of your surgery, protect your vocal health, and learn to use your changed voice. There are two main things to consider: how long you want your voice to be perceived as deeper or masculine and whether you’re interested in HRT.
If you want a temporary or short-term change, practicing vocal exercises on your own may be best. If you have the means, working with a speech therapist can also be beneficial. If you want a permanent change, consult a healthcare professional about HRT and voice masculinization surgery. They can help you determine whether to start with HRT or proceed with surgery.
If you want to learn more about self-guided and professional voice training, you can check out the following books in written or audio form:
” One Weird Trick: A User’s Guide to Transgender Voice ” by Liz Jackson Hearns” The Voice Book for Trans and Non-Binary People ” by Matthew Mills and Gillie Stoneham, and illustrated by Phillip Robinson and Matthew Hotchkiss” Voice and Communication Therapy with Trans and Non-Binary People ” by Matthew Mills and Gillie Stoneham
If you have a smartphone, there are free apps you can download, like:
Voice Pitch Analyzer on Google Play and the App Store Voice Tools on Google Play and the App Store
You might look into the following online video lessons and in-person classes:
Trans Vocal Training The Voice Lab Your Lessons Now
Soren Hodshire (he/him/his) is a queer trans writer based in Chicago, Illinois. After getting his Bachelor of Arts in cultural studies and minoring in women, gender, and sexuality studies, Soren has been organizing, writing, fundraising, and facilitating for queer and trans organizations.
Why is my voice not deep at 14?
It’s a function of the size of your larynx, your hyaline cartilage in your trachea, and your vocal chords. These develop at different rates. By the time you’re 18, your voice will deepen. Don’t worry about it.
Why is my voice not deep?
Why You Need to Stop Trying to Sound Like James Earl Jones – You’re working against nature. The deepness of a voice is primarily determined by the length and thickness of the vocal cords. Longer and thicker vocal cords produce lower, James Earl Jones-like pitches. So, if you want a deeper voice, you just need to thicken and lengthen your vocal cords.
Easy, right? Hate to break it to you, but unless you can travel back in time to when you were 12 years old, there’s nothing you can do to naturally lengthen and thicken your vocal cords. Puberty was your magic window for developing that signature Darth Vadar voice. Remember all that embarrassing voice cracking? That was your vocal cords being exposed to increased amounts of testosterone.
As your body went into testosterone overdrive during puberty, the hormone went to work on your vocal cords, causing them to lengthen and thicken. Boys who produced more testosterone during puberty turned into men with thicker and longer vocal cords, and consequently, naturally deeper voices.
- Researchers theorize that this, by the way, is why women prefer deeper voices; they signal that a man has more T, which back in primitive times might of meant he was a stronger and more virile protector and provider.) It can damage your voice.
- Because men usually want a deeper voice than the one they have, they’ll artificially lower it by projecting their voice from the lower part of their throat.
To hear and feel what I mean, speak in the lowest pitch that you can, and pay attention to where you feel the sound emanating. Did you do it? You felt the vibrations primarily in your throat, right? While you may feel uber-manly talking with that low voice, you’re actually doing damage to your vocal cords.
- Consistently producing sound primarily from your lower throat does some major wear and tear.
- If you lose your voice or feel hoarse frequently, it’s probably because you’re speaking with an artificially low pitch. John F.
- Ennedy had this problem.
- In everyday conversation, JFK would use his God-given natural pitch.
But during debates or speeches, he’d start projecting sound from his lower throat to get that deep, manly, and authoritative voice. The result? Hoarseness and oftentimes voice loss. No one can understand you. When you speak from your lower throat to get that low pitch, you produce a sound that lacks carrying power.
Try speaking with an artificially lowered pitch again. Go as low as you can, but speak as loud as you can. Dimes to donuts you couldn’t get very loud and your voice sounded sort of muffled. I also bet your vocal cords felt a bit strained too. I remember when I was an insecure 13-year-old, I’d speak with an artificially lower pitch.
I thought I sounded like a grown-up, but nobody could understand what I was saying. When I’d talk to people they’d lean their ear towards me and ask me to repeat what I just said. I finally gave up and just started using my normal voice. Your primary concern when speaking is to communicate.
Why is my voice still high at 18?
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Puberphonia (also known as mutational falsetto, functional falsetto, incomplete mutation, adolescent falsetto, or pubescent falsetto ) is a functional voice disorder that is characterized by the habitual use of a high-pitched voice after puberty, hence why many refer to the disorder as resulting in a ‘ falsetto ‘ voice.
- The voice may also be heard as breathy, rough, and lacking in power.
- The onset of puberphonia usually occurs in adolescence, between the ages of 11 and 15 years, at the same time as changes related to puberty are occurring.
- This disorder usually occurs in the absence of other communication disorders.
There is a higher male prevalence of puberphonia, as the voice disorder is characterized by a high pitch that would be inappropriate for the age and gender of the patient. Typically, individuals with puberphonia do not present with underlying anatomical abnormalities.
- Instead, the disorder is usually psychogenic in nature, meaning resulting from psychological or emotional factors, and stems from inappropriate use of the voice mechanism.
- The habitual use of a high pitch while speaking is associated with tense muscles surrounding the vocal folds.
- Assessment and treatment of puberphonia is usually conducted by a speech-language pathologist (S-LP) or an otolaryngologist (ENT).
Puberphonia is not a disorder that is likely to go away on its own. Without treatment, the changes in the patient’s voice can become permanent. Treatment can involve direct voice therapy, indirect voice therapy, or audiovisual feedback.
What age does voice deepen?
Your voice during puberty – Puberty is a process of sexual maturation. A voice change is one of the secondary sexual characteristics adolescents develop. In boys, this happens between ages 12 and 16; in girls, between ages 10 and 14. The first sign of puberty in girls is breast development, while in boys it’s an increase in the size of the testicles.
- As this is happening, the voice tends to change as well.
- Before puberty, your larynx, or voice box, sits higher in the neck.
- As you go through puberty, the larynx grows and moves down lower in the neck,” explains Dr. Milstein.
- Your vocal folds (cords) also thicken and enlarge.” This change is more noticeable in boys.
“They develop the typical jumping pitch, and their voices can suddenly drop about an octave lower,” he says. Girls’ voices also change as they mature, but less dramatically. Their pitch drops only about three tones. This process may take up to a year. Usually, by age 17, the voice fully stabilizes.
If a teen’s voice hasn’t changed by that time and other secondary sexual characteristics have not developed, hormonal issues may be at play. “Check with your child’s pediatrician if there is no change in voice, no growth, no lowering of the testicles in boys, no breast development in girls and no development of body hair,” says Dr.
Milstein.
Do guys with deep voices have big balls?
Women with high-pitched voices go nuts over men with deep voices It’s not easy choosing a guy. Do you go for the big man with the deep voice, strong jawline and pugnacious streak, or the nice sensitive chap with the squeaky voice who’ll take good care of you, but then run away when there’s a fight in the offing? Researchers at Aberdeen University have confirmed that women are attracted to guys with deep voices – as long as they say nice things.
But it seems a woman’s preferred pitch in a man’s voice depends on the pitch of her own voice. The researchers measured the average voice pitch of 113 heterosexual female undergraduates as they spoke vowel sounds, read a standard sentence and a standard passage of text. The women then listened to recordings of four men saying either “I really like you”, or “I really don’t like you”, and scored their preferences.
The voice recordings had been digitally altered to sound more masculine or more feminine by increasing or decreasing their pitch. The women generally preferred deeper “masculinised” voices to the higher-pitched, more “feminine” recordings. But when the men were saying “I really like you”, it was the women who had the highest-pitched voices who had the strongest preference for men with deep voices.
- When the statement was “I really don’t like you”, the relationship between the woman’s own voice pitch and her preference disappeared.
- So women aren’t just attracted to a deep voice, lads.
- You have to say nice things too.
- The preference didn’t depend on the woman’s age, what point she had reached in her menstrual cycle or whether she was on the pill.
“We have shown in previous studies that women’s voices with relatively high pitch tend to be judged as attractive,” said of, who led the study. Voice pitch indicates a woman’s average oestrogen levels and so might be a cue advertising her health and fertility.
The researchers suggest that it may be adaptive for a woman with a high-pitched, attractive voice to prefer deep male voices because she may be more able to attract and hang onto a masculine partner than women with lower, less attractive voices.The study is published in the current issue of,”If females prefer men with low voices, that suggests the pitch of the voice gives some sort of indication of the underlying quality of the men,” said Dr Alan McElligott of Queen Mary, University of London, “but the exact link between quality of the men and pitch of the voice is not known.”McElligott studies vocal communication in fallow deer, where the females prefer males with deep calls. “Doing this on human speech is very complicated,” he said, “but if you compare humans to other large mammals there are lots of similarities”
It used to be thought that voice pitch in mammals relates to body size, but that is no longer believed top be the case. McElligott pointed out that you can have big men with higher-pitched voices, or smaller men with lower-pitched voices, so pitch is not always an indication of body size.
- The pitch of a man’s voice also changes with stress and in response to the prevailing social hierarchy.
- But pitch does give females some sort of cue to the quality of males.
- It’s tempting to think that differences among people in the types of individuals that they find attractive and unattractive are simply due to rather random aspects of personal taste,” said Jones.
“But this work, along with a lot of other work that we have published over the last few years, shows that at least some of this personal opinion can be predicted by, for example, measures of women’s own attractiveness.” It seems the finding doesn’t just apply to young women in Aberdeen.
Do deep voices scare people?
Fellas, if you think your deep voice will attract ladies, scientists say you’ve got it all wrong. In a new study, U.S. researchers say your deep-pitched voice makes you sound more dominant and intimidating to other men, but it does little to impress women – over the long-term. This all goes back to evolution, according to Penn State University doctors. The researchers looked at a wide variety of primates around the world, from monkeys to apes. Turns out, the deep, throaty voice hands males a “competitive advantage” in fighting or threatening the competition.
A lower pitch made men attractive to women. But it especially made men seem more dominant to other men,” lead researcher and anthropologist, Dr. David Pets, told NBC News, Pets focuses his research on gender-based differences. He learned that humans have the greatest sex-based differences in voice pitch out of all the primates he studied.
That means women’s voices are much higher than men’s. Story continues below advertisement READ MORE: Beards aren’t attractive to women and scare other men away, study suggests “We find that masculine traits in humans are not the same as, say, in peacocks where the beautiful tail attracts a mate.
- For example, beards make men more dominant looking, scarier and seemingly more dangerous, but most women prefer clean-shaven men,” Pets told Penn’s university news,
- His study is based on a series of experiments.
- For starters, Pets and his team worked with more than 1,700 vocal calls from primates that are closely related to humans, such as gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans.
The voices were then grouped according to monogamous, promiscuous, or polygynous, which is when there is more male competition for fewer females. The more the primates had to compete for their female mates, the deeper their voices got and the more there was a disparity between the sexes.
- Anthropologists say that humans are “moderately polygynous.”) READ MORE: Women are attracted to men with deep voices, but only for a fling, study suggests In another experiment, about 430 university students’ voices were recorded reading a standard passage.
- Another 1,100 people rated the recordings for short- and long-term attractiveness, but men’s recordings were also considered for dominance.
In this case, deep voices didn’t necessarily attract women but it definitely scared off men. Men thought deep voices belonged to a dominant man. Women liked low-pitched voices, but not consistently. Story continues below advertisement When it came to women, men didn’t care if they had high-pitched or low-pitched voices.
This isn’t the first study to call out men with deep voices. In 2013, a Canadian study out of McMaster University found that women are drawn to deep voices – but only for short flings. They suggested that it’s because women perceived deep-voiced men as cheaters. In another study, as Pets noted, women weren’t attracted to men with beards, but the facial hair was enough to garner respect from other men.
Pets’ full findings were published Monday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Read the study, [email protected] Follow @Carmen_Chai © 2016 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
Do skinnier people have deeper voices?
On the flip side, losing weight may lighten your voice if you’re a female and deepen your voice if you’re a male. If you’re not losing a dramatic amount of weight, likely, you won’t notice a difference at all in your voice. If you were severely obese before the weight loss, you might notice more clarity in your tone.
What voice is attractive to a girl?
– In the wild, animals determine the type and behavior of other animals by the frequency, quality, and formant distance, or resonance, of the sounds they make. For example, a low, deep growl typically indicates a large animal and signals dominance or an imminent attack.
- On the other hand, pure tones—such as those made by buzzing insects—indicate smaller body sizes, submissiveness, and fear, researchers said.
- Fun fact : Koalas in Australia can bellow loudly enough that other animals think they’re as large as a bison, according to a study in the Journal of Experimental Biology,
But the University College London researchers wanted to know how qualities of the human voice affect the way we estimate a person’s size and attractiveness. The researchers used prerecorded statements from males and females and asked participants to judge the attractiveness of the speaker and the emotions being displayed.
Researchers changed the median pitch, formant dispersion, and pitch slope of the voices to reflect different body sizes. Their study revealed that males find female voices that indicate a smaller body size—high-pitched, breathy voices with wide formant spacing—most attractive. Females, on the other hand, prefer to hear a low-pitched voice with narrow formant spacing, reflecting a larger body size.
This explains one thing women are looking for in a quality mate and probably a third of Barry White’s album sales. However, low voices with short formant spacing are typically interpreted as aggressive, which may explain why women also prefer breathiness in the voices of their potential suitors.
Why is my voice so high for a guy?
Why do some men squeak? Simple. High-pitched voices exist thanks to vocal cords that aren’t as long, strong, or ready for good vibrations as others, Ingo Titze, Ph.D., executive director of the National Center for Voice and Speech, told Fatherly. Now, size isn’t everything.
- But the discrepancy does explain why some men aren’t all about that bass.
- The larynx is a sexual organ, because it’s very different between one sex to the other, and that has to do with how much testosterone there is compared to other hormones that balance it out,” Titze told Fatherly, adding that testosterone levels shape the length and musculature of the vocal folds, which vibrate to produce sound and ultimately dictate pitch.
Substantial vocal folds also explain why men tend to have deeper voices than women. During puberty, a surge of sex hormones causes vocal folds to lengthen and build up muscle, more so for boys who experience a spike in testosterone at this time. On top of that, there’s a part of the vocal folds that vibrate and a part that does not, and the part that vibrates is about 60 percent longer, on average, in men.
That’s why men speak at about 130 Hz, and women at around 190 to 200 Hz, and why pitch fluctuates with age as the concentration of sex hormones in the body rise and fall. (Titze assures us that the temporary testosterone decline from fatherhood won’t impact vocal pitch). Men might also experience pitch changes as a result of injury to the vocal folds or disease and, if your voice suddenly changes pitch, it’s important to have your vocal cords checked out by a specialist.
But don’t worry too much — the most common vocal disease Titze has seen has been acid reflux. “These days, people have a lot of reflux and those acids go onto vocal folds and change the tissue properties,” Titze says. “But there are many diseases and injuries that can happen in our larynx that can cause our overall pitch to change.” Lifestyle decisions and environmental toxins, such as cigarette smoke, can also play a role in vocal changes.
- Adjusting some of these unhealthy habits can help with pitch, and exercise can help ensure that you maintain vocal muscle in your old age.
- Otherwise, there’s not much to do except embrace that Grandma and Grandpa are starting to sound alike.
- In fact, embrace your progressive vocal cords — pitch is as much cultural as it is physiological.
“You speak at a pitch that is modeled to you,” Titze says, noting that genders are becoming more equal across the board. “This equalization of gender we have a lot of in our culture right now does affect how people use their voices pitch-wise.” This article was originally published on June 27, 2018
Why do guys lower their voices?
Want to Know If He Likes You? Pay Attention to This When you’re wondering whether a guy likes you, his flirting signals can be maddeningly hard to decipher. Luckily, a new study is here to help you out with some advice: Tune in to a guy’s voice if you want to know how he really feels, says a fascinating,
To start, researchers had heterosexual men talk to a beautiful woman. They discovered that when men were sexually attracted to the women, the “paralingual” features of their voice (like pitch and modulation) gave it away. So what does that actually sound like? Their voices got deeper and their tones became more sing-songy, sort of like the way you’d speak to a baby.
Apparently, the reasoning behind this unconscious reaction is rooted in evolution. The study authors theorize that men’s voices instinctively deepen in order to appear more masculine to the opposite sex, but they also implement the varied pitch so they’re less threatening.
Why hasn’t my voice changed at 17?
Your voice during puberty – Puberty is a process of sexual maturation. A voice change is one of the secondary sexual characteristics adolescents develop. In boys, this happens between ages 12 and 16; in girls, between ages 10 and 14. The first sign of puberty in girls is breast development, while in boys it’s an increase in the size of the testicles.
- As this is happening, the voice tends to change as well.
- Before puberty, your larynx, or voice box, sits higher in the neck.
- As you go through puberty, the larynx grows and moves down lower in the neck,” explains Dr. Milstein.
- Your vocal folds (cords) also thicken and enlarge.” This change is more noticeable in boys.
“They develop the typical jumping pitch, and their voices can suddenly drop about an octave lower,” he says. Girls’ voices also change as they mature, but less dramatically. Their pitch drops only about three tones. This process may take up to a year. Usually, by age 17, the voice fully stabilizes.
If a teen’s voice hasn’t changed by that time and other secondary sexual characteristics have not developed, hormonal issues may be at play. “Check with your child’s pediatrician if there is no change in voice, no growth, no lowering of the testicles in boys, no breast development in girls and no development of body hair,” says Dr.
Milstein.
Why is my voice so high?
Apart from anatomy, stress, anxiety, excitement (any emotion that causes us to move from baseline), causes our voice to increase in pitch. When people become frightened or excited, the muscles around the voice box (or larynx) unconsciously contract, putting strain on the vocal cords, making the pitch higher.
Can I deepen my voice with testosterone?
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We do the research so you can find trusted products for your health and wellness. Your voice is crucial to how you see yourself and how others may see you. How people perceive your voice can affect how you’re gendered. Voice masculinization is one way to change this aspect.
Usually, deeper voices in cis-hetero normative society are associated with men, and higher voices are associated with women. But men can also have higher voices, and women can have lower voices. There’s also a discussion to be had on what a ” neutral ” voice would sound like. How people perceive your voice can affect whether they gender you correctly.
For transgender and nonbinary people, misgendering is a common source of gender dysphoria, Voice masculinization is a way to change aspects like pitch, resonance, registration, prosody, articulation, musicality, interpretation, characterization, and gesticulation to influence listeners to perceive a more masculine, though not necessarily or exclusively “male,” voice.
Of course, anyone of any gender can use voice masculinization for any purpose, including voice acting and cosplay. For transgender, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary people with gender dysphoria, vocal masculinization may be something you intensely desire to be seen as your correct gender. If you’re uncomfortable with your voice but cannot place the discomfort, are unsure whether you have dysphoria, or have questions about your gender, consider reaching out to a gender therapist to talk through your feelings.
Yes, testosterone hormone replacement therapy (HRT) can help with voice masculinization. Testosterone can elongate and thicken your vocal cords — similar to what happens during puberty for people assigned male at birth — when used for an extended period of time.
- Researchers in a small 2017 study followed seven transgender men starting testosterone for the first time over the course of 1 year.
- All seven participants experienced significant voice deepening within the first 6 months.
- Four of the seven participants continued to see a reduction in frequency after 6 months.
A meta-analytic review published in 2018 found that, although testosterone can make a difference, it may not lower the voice as much as is desired. If you’re not interested in testosterone or want further changes to your voice, working with a vocal coach or speech instructor can be beneficial.
- A professional linguist can teach you how to form your words with your mouth and project through your posture to sound masculine.
- It’s important to find a coach who has experience working with gender-diverse clients and affirms your identity.
- You may be able to connect with a coach online or in person in your community.
To get started, Google search “voice masculinization coach near me” plus “.” If voice training and HRT haven’t given you the results you’re looking for, you can consult a vocal surgeon about voice masculinization surgery. They can assess your individual risk for complications and discuss your options.
Voice masculinization surgery typically involves thyroplasty. During this procedure, a surgeon removes a strip of cartilage from your voice box (larynx). This loosens the vocal cords, subsequently lowering your pitch. Thyroplasty is an outpatient procedure. You’ll likely be discharged from the hospital the same day or the following morning.
Follow-up appointments with a speech-language therapist will help you make the most of your surgery, protect your vocal health, and learn to use your changed voice. There are two main things to consider: how long you want your voice to be perceived as deeper or masculine and whether you’re interested in HRT.
- If you want a temporary or short-term change, practicing vocal exercises on your own may be best.
- If you have the means, working with a speech therapist can also be beneficial.
- If you want a permanent change, consult a healthcare professional about HRT and voice masculinization surgery.
- They can help you determine whether to start with HRT or proceed with surgery.
If you want to learn more about self-guided and professional voice training, you can check out the following books in written or audio form:
” One Weird Trick: A User’s Guide to Transgender Voice ” by Liz Jackson Hearns” The Voice Book for Trans and Non-Binary People ” by Matthew Mills and Gillie Stoneham, and illustrated by Phillip Robinson and Matthew Hotchkiss” Voice and Communication Therapy with Trans and Non-Binary People ” by Matthew Mills and Gillie Stoneham
If you have a smartphone, there are free apps you can download, like:
Voice Pitch Analyzer on Google Play and the App Store Voice Tools on Google Play and the App Store
You might look into the following online video lessons and in-person classes:
Trans Vocal Training The Voice Lab Your Lessons Now
Soren Hodshire (he/him/his) is a queer trans writer based in Chicago, Illinois. After getting his Bachelor of Arts in cultural studies and minoring in women, gender, and sexuality studies, Soren has been organizing, writing, fundraising, and facilitating for queer and trans organizations.