Since there’s an overlap in size of male and female vocal chords, is it possible for a man or woman to train his or her vocal cords in order to sound androgynous or mimic being someone of the oppsite sex?
And finally, a more general question: what is it-- size aside-- that causes the differences between male and female voices? In most cases it’s pretty easy to tell whether a plain ‘aah’ is being sung by a male or female, and maybe even which part of the person’s range is being used. Why?
Apologies if this has been answered before. I did come across some very interesting answers (precisely none of which I can now find) during my search, but none of them were to this particular question.
I know a little about that (I’ve heard of ‘the mask’, and my head vibrates sometimes when I’m singing comfortably), but isn’t the larynx the most important part, being the first thing that modifies the air coming out of the lungs?
And I’m at a loss to understand how your legs can affect your voice. Is it something to do with stance, which tilts the hips, which affects the position of the guts below the diaphragm?
Right, so the larynx plays a relatively small part, despite it being the most important thing. That makes sense.
Is it still possible for someone to train their voice in order to sound like someone of the opposite sex, or is there some difference in male and female bodies which would prevent that? I can’t think of anything off-hand.
And is GrannySmith really banned, or is this some new custom title fad?
I remember on some late night talk show, an actress was talking about playing someone who provided phone sex services. She trained with an actual phone sex performer, who was actually a guy. She made the comment that most guys who call phone sex lines realize it’s not the beautiful model that they pretend to be, but most of them at least think it’s a girl on the other end :eek:
So yeah, a guy can definately make his voice sound like a woman’s. I don’t know how much genetics and training come into play.
The thyroid cartilage (to which much of the “works” of your larynx are attached) tends to be larger and more prominent in males than females - it’s your “Adam’s apple”, and it has a noticeable effect on the sound frequencies produced by the vocal folds.
IIRC, (it’s been a while, I’m cudgelling my brain for vague memories of W. J. Hardcastle’s Physiology of Speech Production here), the larger sized thyroid in males means longer (and therefore heavier) vocal folds, which therefore vibrate at a slower rate, producing a deeper tone. Or, to put it simply, men’s voices tend to be deeper than women’s.
In addition, there’s a difference in the formants … um. Your vocal tract produces a wide range of frequencies, above its fundamental frequency (governed by the rate at which your vocal folds vibrate). Depending on the configuration of the vocal tract (i.e. where you put your tongue, your lips, and your velum), some frequencies have more energy than others - these peaks of energy are called formants, and the different formant patterns are how we identify different vowel sounds. (Different formant patterns for different vowel sounds, might give you some idea what I’m talking about.) Because the male and female vocal tracts are shaped somewhat differently, due to the thyroid cartilage, male and female formant values differ - IIRC, the first and second formants are further apart for one sex than the other (I don’t remember which, please don’t hurt me). So, even if the fundamental frequency is the same for a male and a female voice (they both have the same pitch), there will still be a perceptible difference in the vowel sounds. (In general. I guess you could fake it consistently, given a lot of practice. Or natural variation could give a man a shallow-ish thyroid, or a woman a deep-ish thyroid, which would blure the distinction. But, in general, it is there.)
Any linguisticians out there read Hardcastle more recently than I have?