Awaiting on you all chords8/11/2023 ![]() ![]() The app averages the results from three different tries, with any score above 80 percent as passing.ĮVA provides guidelines, Perez says, but it simply cannot give everyone identical voices even if everyone breathes the same and hits the target range. A 22-year-old woman who is 5’6”and a 50-year-old woman who is 5’10” are limited in which notes they can hit by both age and physicality, but as long as they are both within the range, they will both receive 100 percent accuracy. If someone’s pitch hits anywhere between 196 hertz and 246 hertz-two semitones above and below 220-she will receive a perfect score. Perez built the app to be pitched around 220 hertz, with some wiggle room on each end. We know, for instance, that the pitch of most female voices hovers about 200 hertz, a measurement of sound wave frequency, though there is natural variation given women’s height and age. ![]() “The human voice has been very well-studied, so we do have parameters and general guidelines of what the characteristics of a female voice are,” she says. She then receives a score based on her accuracy.ĮVA’s strength is the specific, quantifiable feedback it gives, but this doesn’t mean it’s training everyone to achieve the same female voice, according to Perez. On EVA’s pitch lessons, for example, the app plays a note and the user tries to match the note when singing it into the phone. Tools like EVA have specific voice targets with which women can practice. Two years after EVA’s launch, these questions are no less salient when it comes to whether voice training teaches transgender women to speak in a specific, stereotypical manner. Femme coaches who work with transgender clients readily admit that their expertise involves conforming to gender stereotypes. Last year, feminist writer bell hooks criticized transgender actress and "Orange is the New Black" star Laverne Cox for conforming to “stereotypical” ideals of female beauty. These cultural expectations around women and gender have featured prominently in debates over transgender issues. And some of the issue is cultural, adds Perez: “As a society, we are more apt to overlook a soft-sounding man than we are apt to overlook a very large, masculine-sounding woman.” For transgender men, taking testosterone creates much of the same effect, so they require fewer lessons to get to their targets.įor transgender women, though, estrogen treatment doesn’t “thin out” the vocal chords and raise a voice’s pitch, making it more necessary to take lessons or, in extreme cases, have vocal surgery. When cisgender males hit puberty, the extra testosterone thickens the vocal chords to produce a lower pitch. Though she created versions for both transgender men and women, far more of her customers are women, Perez says, because feminizing a voice tends to be more difficult than training it to sound more masculine. In two years, some 10,000 users-a respectable but not staggering number-have downloaded the app. The app-called EVA, or the “Exceptional Voice App”-is based on the audio program and charges $4.99 a lesson. She started receiving so many similar requests that she put together an audio program that sold in 55 countries. Perez was running her private practice in 2000 when she received a call from a transgender woman who wanted help training her voice to sound more feminine. Speech-language pathologist Kathe Perez launched the first such voice-training app in 2013. Now, researchers are developing voice-training apps specifically for the transgender population in hopes of making these lessons more accessible. Weizenbaum has taken private voice lessons from a speech pathologist, but at $1,000 for 11 sessions, those can be prohibitively expensive. “Beyond that, I want to be the one in control of how people understand me, and, well, I was just getting really fed up with the sound of my own voice.” “There are tangible safety benefits to being able to pass as cis when you need to,” says Natalie Weizenbaum, a transgender woman and software engineer in Seattle. who requests we not use her full name.Īfter mobile apps became commonplace, people switched to using electronic tuners, she says, but these only provide an absolute indicator of pitch with no voice-specific feedback.įor transgender women, seeking therapy to modulate to a higher, more feminine voice is about more than identity. “You would go to music stores to get a guitar tuner so you could do your homework and figure out and adjust the pitch you were speaking at,” says Lauren, a transgender woman in Washington, D.C. For transgender women, the quest for the “right” voice used to begin with a trip to the music store. ![]()
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