ok, I've been deep down the voice modification rabbithole for a few days and wanted to share a couple of resources I found super helpful. I'm going to focus on voice feminization stuff as it's what I've been focused on but most of resources and exercises I'm about to point to aren't really specific to voice feminization and are more about awareness and control - if you can control the various components of your voice, you can masculinize or feminize your voice at will, or even make your own alt-gendered voice. the goal of vocal modification is to teach awareness of and control over the constituent parts that make up your voice so that you can speak the way you'd like rather than be forced to speak the way you've been socialized.

for myself, I started practicing voice stuff when I started transition about 2 years ago and my voice mostly passes at this point from very consistent usage. I've done very little structured practice up to this point, however and I mainly went digging recently to try and get a better handle on a few things (is my resonance actually correct? how can I learn to speak more loudly? coughing and laughing? develop better habituation so I "cheat" less often?). here's my dead voice, for reference, and what I sound like today. I have a lot to learn and practice still but I'm fairly happy with how far I've come.

so first things first, the most useful set of resources that exist online to learn this stuff comes from Zheanna Erose, a trans femme composer and singer that runs the TransVoiceLessons youtube channel. I'm sure most everyone here is aware of her but we have new trans babies all the time. two years ago, I went through a lot of other resources but after trying a bunch of different things, I can honestly say that she has the best theory and practice.

almost more useful than any particular set of exercises that she's put together and made freely available is the methodology she lays out. it's an incredibly systematic approach to voice modification and she has some truly incredible demos of what that kind of control offers. she's also the only trans femme singer I'm aware of that uses a feminine tone and passes for female while singing - that seemed impossible to me when I set out but it seems like it might be achievable and that's a real inspiration for me.

two years ago, everyone was talking about raising the larynx as the primary method of controlling resonance and I really love the way that she's moved away from that after teaching thousands of people in one-on-one lessons - focusing on raising the larynx leads some people to do some potentially harmful things and what ultimately matters is the sound. (a much better cue for me personally was to focus on shrinking the space in the back of my throat - you have to move the larynx to do that, yes, but you also need to raise the back of the tongue, etc.)

as a consequence, I'm not linking a bunch of other people/resources myself. if people drop good stuff in the comments, I'm happy to add them here, but I genuinely believe Zhea has produced the best set of resources that are currently available on voice modification and her results, both with herself and others, speak for themselves. I don't, however, recommend trying to get lessons from her, though. her backlog is thousands of people long and she will never have the time to get to everyone. besides, most of her work is freely available (there's some on patreon but it's less coherent/well produced - useful if you want to learn as much as possible but definitely not helpful when you're getting started) and it really pays to learn how to guide yourself through this process, even if that does seem insurmountable at the beginning.

awareness:

sound modification:

  • R1 - this is the most important topic (usually what people refer to as "resonance") and I really like the sound imitation approach of this video. it's the first thing everyone needs to learn and there's the most written about it. we all tend to focus on raising R1 but I think we should pay more attention to learning to change R1 while leaving pitch the same as this allows a lot more freedom and flexibility in the voice to express various emotions (bright resonance and low pitch is a mode I find myself wanting to use with some regularity).
  • R2 - I'm not sure if there are good videos on this one. this is primarily about the space inside your mouth and I've found it much easier to isolate and control. I think the exercises here for speaking are primarily practice around consonants (whereas R1 exercises will focus on vowels). if someone has a good suggestion, I'll edit them in here.
  • R3 & R4 - I can link a video of modifying R3 but I'm not sure how useful these really are as they vary so much based on the specific sounds you're producing.
  • false fold constriction - this one is super critical if you feel a ton of tension when you try to speak with your R1 raised. most of the R1 exercises I've found make me really tense up like this and my voice is much easier to maintain for long periods of time as I learned to relax my false folds.

sound production:

  • vocal fold mass - how thick or thin your voice sounds. this is the second most important factor in how your voice gets gendered. if you think your resonance is under control but your voice still gets clocked, try to focus on this axis. thin sound and loud volume is very hard and I lost the ability to shout after thinning my voice out - i.e. I need to learn to thicken my voice when needed, the opposite of feminization.
  • there are a bunch of good exercises around vocal fold closure, airflow, etc. in a workshop that's posted to patreon [backup link] - I need to scrape and upload it some place for y'all(done). these are what finally helped click a bunch of things into place for me and what prompted me to start writing this. I can actually feel and directly control my vocal folds now and sound production with partial obstruction taught me how to modify R1 completely on its own / confirm that I'm actually controlling R1 and not just mucking with pitch!
  • pitch - this is the first thing everyone thinks of when considering vocal sex but it's probably the least important quality. you can sound female or male at virtually any pitch, so the pitch you choose to speak at is more about style than it is about vocal sex. moreover, we speak at a huge range of pitches and trying to merely lop off the bottom of our ranges just leaves us unable to express the range of emotion that normal communication requires. consequently, I think learning to independently control these other factors independently of pitch is critical to voice modification.

habituation:

  • the goal is to get to a point where you're using the voice you'd like to use more often than you are falling back on your old voice. this is true of each and every piece we practice. once we do the right thing half the time, we build inertia around the new way and it will, without active attention, become our dominant behavior. until we get there, we have to correct ourselves consciously each time we slip up. this means that the sooner we start using our voice full time, even before we feel entirely confident with it, the better. there's also a lot of muscle retraining that has to happen, which means that you're going to get tired and slip up a bunch initially, and that's totally okay!

other useful things:

  • glossary
  • formant (resonance) tracking software -- this is super useful! it works best when you hold a single note and try to modify things like pitch and resonance one at a time. just talking into it won't tell you much. the vowel you use for sound production matters a lot so pick a consistent one and stick to it! "ahh" is a popular one.

I hope that helps a few people!