Ideas about feminizing voice recordings

Special Interest Groups Audio Processing
1

I am a transgender woman, who has started making hypnosis recordings. I do not have a sexy female voice. I have a passable female voice that most people still gender as male when they hear it on the phone, or in recordings. I’m hitting the right pitch for a female voice, but I think the timbre is wrong. It’s like an oboe playing the same note as a violin - you still know it’s an oboe.

The best thing I have been able to do to improve the femaleness of the sound is to change the pitch between seven and nine percent higher. Anybody else have any ideas on things to try?

I used the equalizer to boost the 200 range to max, and cut everything else all the way down. It may have sounded a little more female, but it didn’t sound good in general.

2

Changing a voice into Something Else is rough as you’re finding. It’s a cousin to the problem of changing the varnish on a violin and you can tell it’s a different violin. Your face and throat construction are just off for the application.

There isn’t a lot of hope past the slight shift you can get with the Pitch tools. The problem there is not all the sounds you make should shift. Everybody makes sssss sound the same, but an actual spoken voice can be very different. Change > Pitch affects everything.

That’s not to say you can’t do it, but you probably can’t do it with the Audacity tools.

Koz

3

Thanks! I feel a lot less stupider now. ; ]