needemloox
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◈ VOICEMAXXING FOR DUMMIES ◈
✦ F0, formants, and which one actually moves ✦
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▸ 1. THE TWO NUMBERS✦ F0, formants, and which one actually moves ✦
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your voice has two things that make it sound deep and this forum only ever talks about one of them.
F0 is pitch. how fast your vocal folds vibrate. set by how long and how heavy those folds are. longer + thicker = slower = deeper. average adult male is around 100-130hz depending whose normative data you use.
testostorone at puberty is what lengthened and thickened them. that process is finished. they are the size they are.
so F0 is fixed. humming into your chest doesn't grow vocal folds, there is nothing for the exercise to act on. you cannot train a muscle you don't have into a shape you didn't get. i spent a lot of time confirming this the stupid way.
formants are the other number. resonance. the frequencies your vocal tract amplifies as sound travels from your folds up through your throat and out your mouth. longer tract = lower formants = bigger sounding voice.
formants are set by the LENGTH of your vocal tract, not your folds. and that you can change.
for how much it matters, from the first meta analysis of vocal size cues in humans, 39 samples across 5 continents:
formant-based vocal tract length explained ~10% of a man's height. pitch explained ~2%.
five to one, in favour of the number nobody here trains.
rest of the thread is what to do about that.
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▸ 2. HOW YOU ACTUALLY LENGTHEN A VOCAL TRACT
so the question was never "how do i lower my pitch". you don't. it's "how do i lengthen my vocal tract" and that has a real answer.
pizolato 2013 lowered mean F0 in men right after the exercises, p=0.04.
and what it's doing isn't growing your folds. it's stopping you speaking above your own floor. releasing tension, fixing posture, finding the pitch your anatomy already supports.
that part is real and it's section 4. it is just not what the youtube guys mean when they say "deepen your voice".
❖ you can already do it, right now
pisanski et al 2016 recorded 167 people speaking normally, then imitating a big body and a small body.
with zero coaching people spontaneously lowered their larynx to lengthen the vocal tract when imitating big, and reversed it for small. every single person already had the motor program.
so do you. do a comedy giant voice. fee-fi-fo-fum. feel your adams apple drop.
that drop IS your larynx descending and your vocal tract getting longer. that is the entire mechanism. you've been doing it as a joke your whole life.
❖ and it's been measured
buckley et al 2019. a clinician manually repositioned someone's larynx lower.
estimated vocal tract length went 17.0cm → 19.4cm. pitch dropped. listeners rated that version as the most masculine.
longer tract, lower formants, more masculine perception. measured, not theorised.
n=1 and it was a clinician doing it with their hands, not a home protocol. weight it accordingly. but it's a direct demonstration that the lever is real.
two levers, straight out of the size exaggeration literature: lower the larynx, or protrude the lips. both lengthen the tract and drag formants down.
the work is not learning the move. you have it. the work is doing a subtle sustainable version all day without sounding like a cartoon.
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▸ 3. THE PROTOCOL
❖ 1. find your floor first
loads of guys habitually speak ABOVE their natural pitch out of tension or plain habit and never notice, because it's been that way since school.
habitual pitch and optimal pitch are two different things and the gap is free.
say "uh-huh" like you're lazily agreeing with someone. relaxed, no effort, no thought.
that mm-hm sits close to your natural relaxed pitch. now compare it to how you actually talk.
if you're up above it you're leaving depth on the table for nothing, and the fix isn't training. it's stopping.
❖ 2. drop the larynx. the yawn trick. THIS IS THE MAIN EVENT.
start a yawn. at the point where your throat feels widest open, sigh out on a vowel.
that open spacious feeling is your larynx sitting low and your throat open. that's the position you want.
open and unhurried. not shoved down and clamped, that's how you strain something.
then dial it back to about 10-20% and talk from there. full send sounds ridiculous. a slight sustained version sounds like a guy with a bigger chest than you have.
this is the formant lever. everything else in this section is support for it.
every link in the chain is sourced. formants beat pitch for apparent size, larynx position sets formants, people can move their larynx volitionally, a clinician doing it produced the effect.
❖ 3. support from underneath
breathe from the diaphragm not the upper chest. hand on your stomach, it should move, shoulders shouldn't.
shallow chest breathing makes your throat do the work. that tension rides your larynx UP and takes your formants with it.
it's also exactly why your voice goes thin and high when you're nervous. you stopped breathing properly and your larynx climbed into your neck.
❖ 4. slow the fuck down
free, instant, outperforms any youtube tutorial.
talking fast is what tension sounds like. slower speech with real pauses reads unhurried, and unhurried reads as a man who doesn't need your approval.
the pause is most of it. most guys fill every silence because silence is uncomfortable. learning to sit in it changes how you land more than most stuff ever will.
❖ 5. get out of your own way
tension undoes everything above. tight jaw, tight neck, hiked shoulders. all of it lifts the larynx and thins your resonance.
so the boring answer to "how do i sound dominant" is largely be less tense, and tension isn't really a voice problem. different thread.
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▸ 4. WHAT ACTIVELY MAKES IT WORSE
this is the section i actually wrote the thread for. some of the advice that gets posted here doesn't just fail, it takes your voice the opposite direction.
❖ forcing your pitch below your floor
most common mistake on this forum and it's a recognised route to an actual voice problem, not my opinion.
clinical guidance on muscle tension dysphonia flags speaking at a pitch too high or too low, outside your comfortable range, as a contributing factor. cleveland clinic lists "speaking at an uncomfortable pitch (too high or low) for too long" under causes.
push your voice under where your anatomy sits and hold it there and you get vocal hyperfunction. strain, fatigue, and a voice that gets less stable over time.
unstable pitch is one of the listed symptoms. so the exact thing people tell you to do is on the clinical list for the disorder that ruins your voice.
to be precise: MTD is a functional disorder, not structural damage, the folds usually look fine on scope. but a knackered effortful unreliable voice is still the exact opposite of what you wanted.
❖ screaming / "damaging" your way deeper
people recommend this here a lot. rough the folds up so they come back thicker.
what you get is nodules and polyps. and a damaged voice sounds hoarse, breathy, rough, weak, no pitch control, effortful.
not deep. damaged. you lose range, power and projection and most of it doesn't come back.
do only at your own risk.
❖ smoking for the smoker's voice
this one has real mechanism behind it which is exactly why it needs killing properly.
smoking causes reinke's edema, fluid pooling in the superficial layer of the vocal folds. per weill cornell it occurs almost exclusively in smokers.
fluid adds mass, mass slows vibration, pitch genuinely drops. it works.
here's the voice you actually bought: hoarse, rough, no pitch control, effortful, can't hit higher notes, and in worse cases shortness of breath, because your airway is partly obstructed by your own swollen vocal folds.
severe cases need surgery. that's all before you get to the cancer.
you're not buying a deep voice. you're buying a diseased one that happens to sit lower, and trading your airway for it.
it's also more noticeable in women and frequently overlooked in men, so you might not even get credited for it. brutal trade.
❖ permanent forced vocal fry
fry gets more hate than it deserves. brief natural fry at the end of a phrase is not inherently damaging. the folds vibrate at low tension and low air pressure, so forces are actually lower than in loud speech, and there's no good evidence tying normal fry to nodules.
the problem is forced fry held constantly as a costume. effortful, pairs with shallow breathing and no support, and sustained overuse especially with loud or aggressive speaking is where the injury risk shows up.
also it sounds like exactly what it is. a guy doing a voice.
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▸ 5. TLDR
DO
- find your floor say "uh-huh" relaxed, that's near your natural pitch. if you talk above it, stop. free depth, zero training
- yawn-sigh finds low larynx + open throat, dial to 10-20%, talk from there. THE formant lever. main event
- breathe low diaphragm not chest. stomach moves, shoulders don't
- slow down free, instant, beats every drill. use pauses
- loosen up jaw, neck, shoulders. tension raises the larynx and undoes the rest
DON'T
- force pitch down listed clinically as contributing to muscle tension dysphonia. you get instability not depth
- scream / damage nodules. hoarse breathy weak no control. opposite of the goal
- smoke for it reinke's edema. works, and gives you a rough obstructed voice plus the obvious
- forced fry 24/7 brief natural fry is fine, held permanently it's effortful and audibly fake
if you do one thing: the yawn-sigh dialed back to a subtle sustained version. formants carry apparent size better than pitch does and you already know the move, you do it every time you put on a big silly voice.
set expectations or you'll quit in a fortnight. you are not getting a new voice. you're getting your voice used properly instead of tensely, which for most guys is a bit deeper and a lot more solid, for free.
give the resonance stuff a few weeks of real attention before deciding it does nothing. the hard part isn't the technique, it's remembering to do it while you're actually talking to a human.
and unironically the two biggest wins in here are slow down and stop being tense. neither is a voice hack. both beat almost every drill.
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◈ END OF GUIDE ◈
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took ages to write, pls rep if it helped.◈ END OF GUIDE ◈
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