Finding Your Voice
- ingahspeech
- Oct 24, 2024
- 2 min read
Voice is personal. It’s part of how we express ourselves; it reflects who we are as a person and each voice is distinctive. In my experience as a speech language pathologist, I’ve found that people often begin working with me after they’ve gone down the rabbit hole of online videos (which I’ve done too).
There is a lot of great information and resources out there, but even with my master’s degree and years of vocal training, I find some of it confusing or too technical to implement into real life. How can you think about frequency formants when you just want to not be misgendered over the phone? It’s a lot to think about all at once and can contribute to feelings of gender dysphoria. For many, the fear of talking can prevent them from fully participating in life.
Everyone is different, has different goals, and voice therapy is tailored to fit the individual’s needs.
Some of the things we work on in voice therapy include:
moving resonance to match identify (it’s challenging, but it can be done!)
discovering a comfortable pitch range (many people are surprised at how big a vocal range they actually have)
articulation (thinking about how you produce consonants and vowels)
maintaining your voice in a healthy way (even in loud environments).
Speech therapists provide feedback in a safe setting and help guide clients to their personal goals at their own pace. Changing the voice can feel scary and it requires a lot of bravery even taking that first step. As an SLP, the biggest reward is when a client finds their voice and gets to the point where they don’t have to consciously think about it anymore, because it is intrinsic and authentic to who they are as a person. My goal as a speech therapist is for clients to not need my services anymore.
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