Andrea James (She/Her)
Sound travels through the air in waves. And a tone is simply a sound that has a regular wave pattern.

 

Now there's three kinds of patterns that affect your tone. The first one is your pitch, and that's the frequency of the vibration, which is measured in Hertz. The more cycles per second, the higher the pitch. In general, women's voices have a higher pitch and men's voices have a lower pitch.

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The next thing is intensity or loudness, which is measured in decibels. The third one is the biggest variable of three, and that's the quality. It's also called the timbre. Some people call it the resonance. These two identical sort of grayish muscles that stretch across your air passage are your actual vocal cords, and they vibrate when air moves through your trachea.

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Most of the sounds that you can make are caused by using these muscles to change the shape of your larynx and to increase or decrease the tension of your vocal cords. Your voice is basically a musical instrument. Your lungs, your voice box, your mouth. Like the horn of a trumpet.

O Stecina (They/He)
The voice you hear coming through the airwaves is mine. It's always been mine. But it didn't always sound like this.

O's Mom, Lisa
Da-da!

O, age 7 months
*baby babbles*

O Stecina (They/He)
Once I was a baby and all I did was cry like other babies. Then I began to speak. And even though I was verbose, I mostly just sounded like other kids.

O, age 5
Hi! I’m Olivia! And Sophie is standing right by me in front. This is the basement. There’s a great keyboard. You wanna hear the music?

O Stecina (They/He)
When I was in grade five, I started puberty and joined choir. I giggled, hearing the changing voices of the boys on the other side of the risers, the cracks and strained falsettos, the bass notes and belches, the constant rearranging of sections. And I found myself settled in the alto section in Tiger Lily, then Topaz, the “women's choirs.” I led a gaggle of girls in the lowest section, the alto twos.

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Once I got to sing tenor, I had brief dreams of auditioning to be Gomez in our school's production of The Addams Family, but I chickened out.

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I sang at Carnegie Hall. I'm in here somewhere.

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I painted a non-binary flag on my graduation cap and asked people to start calling me O, a nickname my tennis coach had given me. I felt that it fit me a lot better. I shaved my head. I had surgery to masculinize my chest and I sounded like this.

O, age 19
I see a pigeon with only one foot and can't help but smile at it.

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We're in the same boat, buddy. I hope they invent a little pigeon prosthetic shop. And I hope you won't have to take a pigeon exam from a licensed pigeon therapist to make sure you really want one of your legs to match the other.

O Stecina (They/He)
November 2020 I was back living with my parents in Colorado after my attempt to study documentary filmmaking in Chicago was stomped on by COVID.

It had given me some time to think. I knew I wasn't a girl or a boy for that matter. I was “O”. And O wasn't an alto. I was finally ready to start testosterone puberty part two.

O, 1 day on Testosterone
This is me one day on T.

O, 7 days on Testosterone
This is my one week on testosterone update.

O, 14 days on Testosterone
Hello from two weeks on T.

O, 131 days on Testosterone
It is the start of spring break for the rest of my family. I'm not in school right now. It is just another week for me.

O, 413 days on Testosterone
You listen to my old voicemail message. Doesn't sound like me at all anymore. So this is me, four what did I say? 413 days, 13.8 months on T.

O, 730 days on Testosterone
Two years! Two years. It is. Today is the day. Two years on T. Life is so great.

O Stecina (They/He)
When you study sound and you're reluctant to ask your friends to do free labor, you end up needing to listen to yourself on recordings a lot. And it's not a pleasant experience at first. My voice would cut out, crack and falter as my larynx grew and my vocal folds thickened. But over time, I got to see O take shape. I’d start a project, and by the time I was done, I'd have to re-record all of the narration because I sounded entirely different. And it was incredible.

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I taught myself how to sing again, in the car and in the shower, reaching lower and lower notes in Panic! At The Disco songs. I visited home for Christmas and joined my former choir on stage to sing This Christmastide, the song that I had done as an alto for six years, this time as a bass. I'm in here somewhere.

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This is my voice four years on T. I joined a queer choir this year where I'm a baritone. Each week we gather in a circle and sing “We are singing for our lives”, and O is in there somewhere.

Singing Out Choral Singers
“And we are singing, singing for our lives. Bi, trans, queer, and straight together, and we are singing, singing for our lives”

Luna Larocque (She/Her)
Hi. My name is Luna and this is the story of my transition. Today I'm wearing a big sweater to keep me warm against the cold November air, and I'm excited for the pasta my girlfriend and I are going to make later tonight. I'm in my last year of media production at TMU, and I work part time at a bike shop.

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Life is pretty good for me, all things considered. A few years ago, though, I lived my life engulfed in self-loathing. That's because everyone, including myself, thought I was a man. I was constantly feeling an irrational sense of guilt and disgust over who I was. I had this weird thing where I often didn't recognize myself whenever I looked into the mirror.

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This is called dysphoria, and I had a lot of it. Makes sense, because the real me, the me that I embody today, is a total softy. And I was really bad at the whole stoicism thing that I felt masculinity demanded of me. When everyone treats you like a boy, but deep down you're actually a girl, it's really hard to know yourself.

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I stumbled through my childhood, teenage years and the first few years of university completely lost. But in April of 2023, after a lot of internal debate and constant anxiety over maybe possibly wanting to be a girl, I realized that transitioning was the only way I was going to find happiness. One of the strongest feelings I remember having from that time is forgiveness towards myself.

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In June of that same year, I started estrogen first as a little blue pill that I would dissolve under my tongue, and later as a needle that I carefully insert into my own leg once a week. The physical changes were slow, but emotionally and mentally, I could tell almost immediately that I was better at regulating my emotions and thinking things through.

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I felt like I was finally thinking straight for the first time in my life.

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It was around this time that I started thinking about my voice. Hormonal changes to the voice are something of a one way street. Exposure to testosterone will cause the larynx to grow and the vocal cords to thicken, resulting in a deeper sounding and lower pitched voice. Exposure to estrogen does nothing. It doesn't cause any changes on its own, nor does it revert the changes caused by testosterone.

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So at first I sounded like this.

Luna, pre-transition
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has made the last two years difficult for musicians in Toronto. Venues and rehearsal spaces have had to close down while touring musicians have had to cancel upcoming performances over and over again every single time the province reenters another lockdown.

Luna Larocque (She/Her)
Thankfully, the voice is an incredibly flexible tool, and with dedicated practice, it's possible to reshape your voice in order to sound more like how you want it to.

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This is called voice training. I started researching by watching YouTube videos, learning about the various mechanisms and muscles within your throat and the way they each impact the voice. Here's a clip of me from July of 2023, where I'm practicing sustaining a higher and lighter sounding voice.

Luna, 3 months into transition
Okay. Hello? I'm just working on my voice right now. I'm not sure if I.

Okay, so I just figured out a thing. Whereas before I was sounding more like, Hello, hello. Like, I have that that back of the throat kind of eh eh eh sound. I can, I figured out how to shut that off, basically. So now I'm going, like. Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello.

Luna Larocque (She/Her)
I might sound silly and exaggerated in that clip, but the more I practice, the more natural it became to speak in my new voice.

Muscle memory started to kick in, and eventually the voice I was practicing became the voice I speak with every day. The voice you're hearing now is what I sound like today. 19 months into my transition in November of 2024. There's definitely still work to do, but overall I'm happy with where I'm at. Imperfect as it is, it's my voice and I wouldn't trade it for the world.

O Stecina (They/He)
Through each of our experiences changing our voices, Luna and I have met lots of other trans people going through the same things. Some of them have been on hormones for years and have surgically altered their bodies. Others have changed their voices just with constant practice, and some haven't changed theirs at all. We even talk to one of our cisgender friends to ask him what he's listening for.

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What follows is Soundscapes of Self, a tapestry of experiences with voice and gender. Opera singers, voice actors, set builders, vocal coaches, radio hosts, academics, all of them make up our incredible and diverse community, and all they want is to be heard and understood.

Matilda (She/Her)
So I'm Matilda. I'm 26. I worked in film for a bit. I worked in beauty for a bit. Now I work in education. I've bounced around, done a bunch of stuff, throw whatever at me, and I tend to find something to like about it.

Molly (She/They)
My name is Molly. Molly Diamant. I'm 34. Pronouns are she and they. And I spend most of my time right now working.

I work in TV, I build sets.

Everly (Sidhe/Her)
My name is Everly. My pronouns are she/her. Although “she” I spell “S-I-D-H-E”, which is the Gaelic word for elf.

Rowan (He/Him)
I'm Rowan. My pronouns are he/him. For work, I teach paint classes at bars on the weekends. So one of the reasons I agreed to do this interview is because I haven't seen a lot of people with my situation.

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I've been on testosterone since, 2017, 2016? Actually maybe even before that. It's been a while. I don't really keep track. But I've sort of messed around with my dose, and I've gone off and on, and over the years, I found, like, a baseline that works well for me. But I think partly because of that and also just like, who knows, genetics or something like my voice never really dropped. Like the speaking voice

I’m talking in right now is just like my comfortable, regular voice. I can I can also lower my voice completely and talk like this if I want to pass better. And I did voice training, and that was really helpful because I used to have a lot of frustration and like, anger at myself that I wasn't, you know, my voice didn't drop like everyone else's.

Jesse (They/He)
My name is Jesse. My pronouns are they and he. Who am I? That's that's always a question. I'm working on my second degree. I did music for my first one, and I'm now studying English and, sexuality studies. I guess even before I had started, like, medical transition, like, I had worked really hard around the ages of like, 11, 12, 13 that I would do stuff because I've been in choirs, like, all my life as a kid.

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And, you know, I started as a first soprano and eventually I realized, oh, if I just practice, I can sound deeper and everybody else will just think I'm a boy. If I can, like, kind of speak down here or whatever. Didn't sound like that at the time, but.

Ratchel (She/They)
My name is Ratchel Vermington. I am a former talk show host, talk radio host.

I have a pet rabbit. His name is Toby. You'll probably hear him during this because he's very talkative. This will be great. This is good tape. We call this gold. I think you might be able to hear.

Toby
*rabbit noises*

Ratchel (She/They)
Yeah. He's a talkative little guy.

Everly (Sidhe/Her)
Unless you look in a mirror, you don't see yourself. So you can kind of ignore what you look like. But you can't really do that with your voice. It's. You hear yourself all the time.

Ratchel (She/They)
Because of the way that your mouth is shaped, a lot of the voice that you're hearing when you speak is vibrating up through your skull and into your eardrums, without passing through any air at all.

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And so when you speak, you sound a lot bassier and lower pitched to yourself. And when you record yourself back on a microphone, it sort of sounds more tinny and hollow than you're used to because you're not, like, literally right next to the source of the noise, right? That feeling you get when you, like, listen back to a recording of yourself, and it doesn't sound like you.

I would say that I felt like that basically all the time.

Matilda (She/Her)
I did, like six months of transition without voice training at first, and then I ended up in a customer service job and pretty quickly, like it was. It was one thing to, like, be talking to cashiers who I was never going to see again, or like random people on the street.

That was that was fine. I could grin and bear it through that. But once I was seeing the same people every day again, once there was regularity, it was like, ugh, I don't know why, but the regularness makes it feel so much worse to have a voice that wasn't matching. Once I started training and putting a little work in, I realized how quiet I had been for months.

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I had not been talking to people and making friends. I had not been advocating for myself in public situations. I had shut up. I was getting walked over because I didn't want to open my mouth in the middle of Costco when someone to cut me off and be like, “Excuse me.” Like it was, I could feel how “ew” that would be. So I just let myself get walked over.

Flynn (He/Him)
I've never really liked my voice. And then as I kind of came in to my gender and realized that I was transgender, it caused me more dysphoria also, like, I always wish that I had a deeper voice or a more masculine voice. But I also I also like my, you know, animated girly pop voice, too.

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It's just a complicated relationship.

Molly (She/They)
People make so many judgments on you, like, based on how you sound. It's like something you can't really escape. I guess kind of like with, like, gendered appearance generally. It's like people are going to like they're going to read something from how you look or from how you sound. Sometimes you just got to be using that to your advantage I guess.

Amor (She/It)
I am transfeminine, but like, I'm very early in my own, like medical transitioning process. I still do believe that I sound like a gay man, basically a stereotypical gay man and I can imagine I'm often read as, you know, a twink really. Right? Which, yeah, I can't blame them. There's still a part of me that does identify with the with the label of twink, I suppose.

Ratchel (She/They)
I do the whole, like, “Heat from fire, fire from heat. Heat from fire, fire from heat.” I can modulate my pitch and where my voice is in my throat to bring it a little higher. I think it's very easy for me because I'm a little bit of a butch. The allegations are true.

Amor (She/It)
You know, saying “Heat from fire. Fire from heat.” I'm sure some girls will recognize that phrase.

Flynn (He/Him)
I read on the internet somewhere that, like, if you're if you're, like, humming as low as you can for a certain amount of time and you do it, like, repetitively throughout the day, kind of like an exercise like your voice might lower over time. And so that's something that, whether it works or not, I have no idea, but I've been doing, in the meantime, between now and getting on testosterone to, to try to change my voice. Yeah.

Molly (She/They)
I don't know, maybe I can sort of do like the, the internet, like E-Girl voice or whatever. I don't, I don't know if I can maybe if I just talked like this all the time where it's kind of high and breathy, like, I don't know, I would be seen differently?

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I'm pretty tall and I work in the trades, so it's it just felt a little incongruous for me to be like trying to affect that kind of voice. Like I need to have like a loud production at work. Because otherwise I just can't be heard at all.

Jess (She/Her)
I had, like, begun my process of voice training relatively early on, like before I'd even come out.

My voice was not nearly the state where I wanted it to be, but it was at a state where it was starting to pass if I were to try and recreate it, I think this is like close-ish to the voice that I had when I had first come out. It's a lot sharper, a lot harsher. There's a lot more of like a thick presence of stronger vocal weight.

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It almost sounds kind of nasally because of that. It's not actually nasally, but it almost sounds it. And then I just learned to soften it up, and I got it sounding closer and closer to where I actually wanted it to eventually. But I was getting a lot of feedback from other trans people that they really liked that voice, that they were, you know, wanting to learn how to get something similar.

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And so I was like, okay, well, you know, I don't actually know how I did that. And so I just decided to, to start studying voice a little bit on my own time. I started reading papers on, like, the science behind resonance in operatics., you know, and transferring that knowledge into voice. I started learning from people who had already started paving the way, right?

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Zoey Alexandria, Zheanna, all those sorts of people, just adopting as much as I could from them. Also just my prior musical background. So I was just bolstering my own knowledge so that I could then share it with those people who were curious and give them a little bit more advice and information, and then eventually that just led to becoming a teacher.

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So my name is Jess. I have been a voice coach for about like three and a half-ish years now. It's almost been four years since I came out as trans. I'm currently studying to become a speech pathologist, linguistics major Bachelor of Science, and then planning to do a Master's in speech language pathology and audiology after I graduate.

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Voice is a huge, huge part of my life. Aside from teaching privately, I also offer public group sessions with a charity in the States called the Trans Academy. Volunteer wise, I do work with, an aphasia recovery clinic. And I do work at, at a school. I kind of made a deal with myself that I wouldn't actually properly, fully come out unless I could find a way to make my voice pass so, with the amount of work that I did put into it, I was like, well, it would be kind of a shame to keep that all to myself.

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So I'm gonna make it my, my goal in life to try and spread that information as best as I can out into the rest of the world. There's essentially three core components to voice training that one typically would focus on, and that would be, resonance, vocal weight, and pitch. But oftentimes people will tend to overemphasize stuff that they don't necessarily mean to, especially pitch.

Thomas (He/Him)
I feel like pitch is the, the one that tends to get the most attention, despite the fact that it is the one that is typically the least influential in gender perception. There's so many little qualities in a voice that kind of tell you about someone. I think when it comes down to like, is this person, a man, woman or a different, identification?

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I think the like, normal answer would be pitch, but I know guys with high pitched voices, and then I know women with very deep voices. And I think that's typically labeled as masculine, but they're like the funniest, most, in your face people too. So, I don't know, it's almost fun when there's like a mismatch in what we typically think of male, female, woman, man voices.

Everly (Sidhe/Her)
I think a lot of people spend a lot of time at the beginning, and I did to some extent on like trying to change the pitch. It's kind of like an exercise in frustration when that's all you do. There's also intonation. From what I learned, the things that are the most central are resonance and quotient.

Jess (She/Her)
When people talk about resonance in relation to voice gender, there's often this kind of sense that it's just a bit of a like a buzzword, but there is some significant weight to it.

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And it's really important to understand what exactly it is we mean when we talk about resonance. Resonance is a means of defining harmonic intensity in a voice or in a sound, we can hear changes in resonance very clearly when we talk about changes in vowel formants. You can hear that change as it rises up to e.

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That change is possible because as we move the tongue either up or down, front or back in the mouth, we're changing the physical size of the acoustic chamber in the mouth. Differences in these formant frequencies are what allow us to have different qualities of sound. The way the tongue moves up and down for, like, eee to aaa for example, is the tongue is lowering from eee, we’re getting that darker, richer aaa vowel.

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As we rise that tongue up, we get that brighter almost sometimes a little bit thinner sounding e vowel. The same thing happens with voice gender. I've kept the pitch constant that whole time, but I've slowly started descending my larynx. I've started lowering the back of my tongue, and that causes a darker shift in those formants. This is what we refer to as a change in resonance.

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So it’s what allows me to sound like this. While maintaining the same pitch between both of those. We can really hear this change in isolation quite easily when we whisper, because we're taking pitch completely out of the equation. So if I start with this really kind of high tonality whisper, right, almost kind of sounds like a Chihuahua or something panting.

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But as I lower, that tone almost starts to sound more like a Labrador or a Husky. That's a shift in that resonance as it's pertaining to voice gender. If I just kind of hold that out in like one continuous word, right? Let's use the word cat, for example. Yeah, we can really hear that change there this time.

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The vowel and the consonants were all the same every time, but we can hear it brightens as we're raising that resonance higher. That's really what we're trying to do with shifts in resonance. We're just trying to raise or lower that general formant frequency patterning. If we raise it, we're going to wind up with a more feminine quality, this quality of voice just being one that has a higher laryngeal position and a higher degree of what we call oropharyngeal closure or constriction, depending on who you talk to.

Then if we lower it, we're going to wind up with a more masculine quality. Another important quality needed for shifting voice gender perceptions is that of vocal weight. You'll often hear this also be described as vocal fold mass, or even in some cases, closed quotient and open quotient. Really, they're all meaning roughly the same thing perceptually. Vocal weight is the intensity of harmonics within the voice on a broader scale.

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So less specific intensity like resonance, more broad intensity. Vocal fold mass refers to the amount of physical contact of the vocal folds in their phonation stage. So as the vocal folds are concatenating, as they're vibrating across one another, the amount of physical mass present in that contact. And then closed quotient open quotient are referring to the glottal cycling, how long the vocal folds are staying in either an open or a closed position as they cycle. We're usually talking on the realms of milliseconds, both closed quotient and open quotient, and then vocal fold mass contributes to the effect known as vocal weight.

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If someone's in a bright resonance and they have a thin vocal weight. Their voice will sound like this. Similarly, if somebody is in a dark resonance but they have a thin vocal weight, their voice will sound more like this. Now, if someone were to take this kind of voice and start to thicken it up, 123 123, we notice immediately that this takes on a more stereotypically masculine connotation.

This is a thick vocal weight with a dark resonance, and if I start to bring this position higher, just a little bit brighter in the resonance, then what I'm going to wind up with is a voice that has more of this kind of quality to it, and you can hear that there's brightness here. But it does sound a lot thicker.

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It sounds a lot stronger. It almost kind of sounds nasally, right? It’s buzzy, it’s brassy. It's not truly nasal, but it does take on a little bit of that connotation as well. And then if I were to start to, to soften that back out again, then we're winding up once again with this more stereotypically feminine sound. For ways to try and find these tones, you can practice yawning.

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That's going to give you a thin weight more often than it won't, right? If you just take your arms, physically stretch out, and then [yawn] just let a yawn come through, right? Most people will start to yawn in a slightly darker resonance like that, but they'll almost always do it in a thin position. So if you're trying to target thin sounds, that's the best way to do it.

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For those of you trying to find that thicker sound in that sort of position down here, you want to just take your lips, trill them together like so, then you're just going to try and increase the intensity of that sound, hear that buzziness coming through it? If I release that trill, right, we can hear that there's that thickness there, and we can hear immediately that there is that increase in vocal weight.

So it's not just resonance, there are other components to it. And notice how many changes we’re able to get there without even trying to work on pitch at all. Some people will need to work on pitch, but it’s by far one of the lesser important things for most people.

Alice (It/Fae)
My name is Alice. Coming from a non-binary angle, people on the street, mostly getting she/her, but those aren't the pronouns I use, even.

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So it would be great if people could know my pronouns by my voice, but that's not going to happen. So it's nice that I mostly present as femme, and it would be better if I mostly presented as femme to more people, I guess, because it sucks being “sir”ed on the phone.

Dylan (They/Them)
When I talk to people on the phone, I get mistaken for, for my mother. Quite often.

Jane (She/Her)
A lot of us use it as a kind of way of gauging how we're doing with our voice. With trans women, it's usually we feel like if we can pass over the phone, well then we should be able to pass in real life. And then again, we’re back to the visual issues.

Matilda (She/Her)
No matter how good I was looking, no matter how much work I put into my look on a day to day basis, the phones were still going to be happening and no one was going to be able to read the cues for a bunch of my conversations each day.

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So I spent a lot of time on the phone in a very intentional voice anyway. I had to make sure I was being clear. Being heard on the phone regardless of any gender stuff that was going on. So it just started happening that like every time I pick up the phone, “Hi, this is the beauty salon. Matilda speaking, how can help you?”

Rowan (He/Him)
My range is about the same as my brother, who’s cis. What's interesting is I honestly like never, ever know how I'm going to come off to someone, and on the phone I think my voice is feminine to people, which causes some frustration for me.

Everly (Sidhe/Her)
For vocal feminization, if you go below a certain frequency, most people if they don’t see you, you know, like you’re on the phone, let’s say. They’ll often just automatically think that it’s a man that they’re talking to. No matter how, like, you know, feminine you can make the voice in other ways.

O Stecina (They/He)
The experience of being misgendered over the phone is one that's not unique to transgender or genderqueer people, and it's one of the few instances where cisgender people can stumble into that bizarre, frustrating emotion of gender dysphoria. You've probably felt it before, and maybe you weren't quite sure what it was. A weird twinge, maybe over the phone, maybe at the store, maybe even over text online. Unraveling that uncanny feeling that you've been misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misrepresented to the world and even to your reflection is often a major part of the journey of gender exploration and discovery.

Luna Larocque (She/Her)
Okay, so in a few words as possible, could you describe what voice dysphoria feels like to you?

Ratchel (She/They)
Sounds wrong.

Alice (It/Fae)
It just sucks.

Matilda (She/Her)
Rumbly, big, burly.

Molly (She/They)
Loud and frightening.

Everly (Sidhe/Her)
I mean the only thing I think of is just, like, not my voice. That's kind of the simplest three words.

Rowan (He/Him)
Like a failure, a personal failure.

Jesse (They/He)
Agony and longing.

Ember (They/Them)
It feels like somebody is doing ventriloquism on me.

Everly (Sidhe/Her)
Not everybody who's trans experience is dysphoria. Dysphoria is this, you know, you you look in the mirror and you're like, oh, my God, I’m not in the right body. But the thing of it is, is that requires you to actually, like, acknowledge that? A lot of people don't ever feel that until they begin to transition, they force their minds to not consider it.

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For a long time, I walked around like I was a brain in a jar on top of a robot that got me from place to place. So there's a lot of us who have experienced disassociation and never really experience dysphoria until we start making changes. And then when you start making changes, you have to acknowledge that something's wrong, and then you're impatient for that to change. And during that time, you'll experience dysphoria.

Matilda (She/Her)
The amount of discomfort and anxiety and general confusion about the world that was alleviated by transitioning is wild. Like I was definitely primed with messaging going in from very smart trans people who were right to tell me this, that transitioning does not fix your life. Transitioning will not eliminate all of your mental health issues.

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Transitioning will not cure your depression. Absolutely true. But God it fixed most of it. The amount of ease it has given despite the like, you know, worldwide wave of transphobia is incredible. It's like I've been sitting on a bus seat between like two very large people and trying to make myself as small as possible so that I don't have to get in anyone's way.

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And then suddenly, oh, there we go. I can have limbs again.

Ratchel (She/They)
A friend of mine recently got sex reassignment surgery, and she said that it was like there was a persistent buzzing in the background, and that just kind of went away. And I feel very much like that. Like it sounds insignificant, but like when you're dealing with the low buzz for 20 years and then suddenly it turns off, you're like, oh, neat!

Jess (She/Her)
I almost came out when I was like 16.

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I think that was the closest I'd ever come to before I actually did. And I've held off on it. And the reason I'd held off on it was I was like, I'm in a band and I have aspirations of grandeur for this band, and if I come out, I'm not going to be able to sing, because I'm going to need to relearn how to sing.

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Or if I get on HRT, it's going to change my voice. What a fool I was. So I didn't, and then it took me another almost decade to, to actually solidify in my head that this was the right decision to make, that I was trans. And then that was okay.

Jesse (They/He)
There was a point where I, it was kind of complicated because I was a vocalist in a band.

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It was like trying to get this band off the ground, and I'm the lead vocalist, and now I can't sing because my voice is just breaking. I'm not comfortable with where it's sitting, and I ended up having to step back from that project, and I had joined the Gay Men's Choir for a little while, and I felt so bad, and I wasn't in it for too long.

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But the director thought I was wonderful because they're like, “You're the one who can sing the highest.” And I went “I just started T no, I can't.” And he was so crushed, right? Because he was like, “But I need you to sing the high part.” I'm like, “I'm sorry, bro. I can't. Bestie, I can't.” It's like, can't sing. And now it's like I'm a baritone bass, essentially,

Jane (She/Her)
If we choose to, we can be analyzing our voice our whole life long trying to find the right voice, as it were.

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But in terms of the overall quality of my voice, I'm happy with that. I feel like I have, an instrument that I can play better than I was before. I did have the surgery done three years into my transition, so I had a lot of time to just work on my voice, on my own, and with the therapist. They were using a technique that they were one of the pioneers of.

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It's the same idea as singing. You need to learn about how to use your voice and then what they're going to give you with the surgery is simply an alteration of your vocal cords so that you will have a higher pitch. But they understand that that's not the be all and end all of your voice. You have to learn how to modulate it.

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And so that's where the work comes in. That's the therapy. Now you have to vibrate vocal cords that are different from how they were. And you, and you've had many, many years of, of your vocal cords the way that they were. And so, so you have your brain memory, you have your muscle memory. The thing that helped me to decide to have the surgery was that I just wanted to have normal interactions with people, and if I was going to do that, I needed a voice that I felt confident with.

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So I was really, actually kind of hoping for a miracle. And it turned out to be that miracle, I think. But in retrospect, also, there was a lot of work on my part, because of course, the surgery is just simply about the pitch.

Jesse (They/He)
Feeling the change of like, I guess even less in my throat, but where it sits in my chest, I think is the most interesting thing that I can make this thing, like, vibrate now.

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And, and before it was, it doesn't work like that. But yeah, you got slower vibrations going. You're going to feel them longer and lower. This was just an interesting tidbit more than anything else. My voice dropped a second time after top surgery. I, it was so weird. And maybe it was just completely a weird psychosomatic thing, and maybe it was a stress related thing.

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I don't know, maybe from not wearing a binder all the time. Maybe I was just able to breathe better. I can't say what it was, but my voice definitely changed again, which was so wild to me.

Ratchel (She/They)
I don't want to like, give in to like, myths about how, you know, estrogen makes you into a puppy dog and testosterone makes you into a kitty cat.

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But I will say that I do feel my emotions a lot stronger, and I'm a lot more comfortable expressing them, in part through my expressive voice. I guess.

Molly (She/They)
I think I've always been, like, fascinated with voices that seem to, like, escape, like gendered situations. In music history class, I was always way too fascinated with the idea of castrati.

Everly (Sidhe/Her)
Back in the day, women were often not allowed on the stage, and if women were not allowed on the stage, then higher voices were played by boys or men. A boy’s voice would eventually break, and then they couldn't sing the higher range. So then they castrated some people so that later on their voice did not shift. And then they, they grew up with very powerful big voices because the same growth hormones affected their body, but they didn't get affected by the testosterone, so their vocal folds didn't thicken up the same way.

Molly (She/They)
Like, the orchiectomy, like, castration, people have been doing it like to each other and to animals, as far back as written history. A lot of historians wrote about it like it was like violent and degrading, but I've like sort of encountered some historians that are like questioning that. The 19th century British wrote those histories, like of ancient Egypt. They were like, no, this was like a horrible, awful, and degrading thing. But it actually seems like there was like a whole third gender that were basically like, like trans feminine.

There was like a distinct place in society and it like, wasn't even at the bottom of the ladder.

Everly (Sidhe/Her)
That was like sort of the first kind of gender bending thing going on. And then later on, when women were allowed on the stage, you'd have a role that had been played by castrati, that the role itself was a boy or a man.

So now you'd have women playing those roles.

Ari (They/She)
I was always placed in alto. It was always alto because that was the lowest that they would allow an AFAB person to go. This is my first time singing in tenor, and I actually find it's actually much more of a comfortable register for me than the alto part. So it's really great to have joined a choir and be back singing and using my voice in that kind of way.

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I'm Ari, and pronouns are they/them or she/her. When I describe myself to others, I just say non-binary or gender non-conforming or queer. If you're not very clearly androgynous presenting or trans presenting, then they'll just assume that you're cis. So because I'm kind of in the middle twice, I'm like in the middle for gender, in the middle for sexuality as well.

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It's, it's it's complicated tapestry of wonder because of the assumption of straightness and of cisness all the time as the default. I've had to correct people who have known me for a long time, as I've tried to say, you know, no, I want to properly own this part of my identity. And I think if parts of you aren't nourished and fed, then it kind of hurts you overall.

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So I'm kind of trying to nourish that queer side within the context of still being in an opposite gender relationship.

Everly (Sidhe/Her)
There was a period when people were trying to transition where you'd have to go and get a psychological evaluation and they would be like, oh, you didn't know you were trans? So you're not trans. Other things like, oh, you don't like men? Okay. You're not trans. It was generally almost always focused towards trans women because, trans men have generally gone under the radar. There's a prevailing idea that people know when they're really young that they're trans, which I think is actually rarely true. I think it's becoming more true. I think more people are knowing when they're young because they're in environments where they know what trans people are.

Jesse (They/He)
I think I was 14 when it really snapped, like, this is something you had to do. And I was like, I don't know where this is coming from. I kind of know, like, I know I'm uncomfortable in my body, this is just what being a teenager is. That's what everybody tells me. And there was this moment I had this complete breakdown in front of a mirror, and I don't know what happened, but it was like I looked up and I had this strange future vision of like, honestly, not far off of what I look like now.

Alice (It/Fae)
It was late in life. It was a multi stage sort of thing involving a friend coming out as non-binary, and then me realizing that that was a thing you could do, and then progressing from there to okay, I'm non-binary, but kind of a guy, to I'm non-binary and kind of feminine to okay, I feel like a girl mostly.

Ember (They/Them)
Growing up, I was always like, a little bit of a tomboy.

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Preferred wearing like the boy’s clothes because, I didn't really have the vocabulary for it, but I just, that felt like me. And when I was in grade school, I realized I was a lesbian. And then in high school, when I found out that you didn't have to be a boy or a girl, I was like, that's cool, that's me.

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But also, this sucks because I have to come out again.

Ratchel (She/They)
I think the earliest memory I have of thinking, you know, I'd like to be a girl was I met a transgender person, like in the park as a five year old. And, you know, I ask the question that every five year old asks, “Are you a boy or girl?”

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She tells me, “I used to be a boy, but now I'm a girl.” And I said, “Ah, I think I'd like that.” And then I never thought about it for the next, you know, 20 years.

Matilda (She/Her)
The first time I put, like a word onto it was like 2014. But then I just kind of sat in that nebulous space for years, of like, oh I'm like, not like a man, but like, I don't know what else I would be.

Molly (She/They)
Like, singing like jazz arrangements in like, a, like a small, like, chamber ensemble.

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The instructor in that class, actually was, was like asking me some hard question about gender because of the way that I sang. They were basically like, “Yeah, are you sure you're a guy?” And I was like, “I am absolutely a cis man, how dare you” at the time, because I was just a baby and gender felt really threatening.

Dylan (They/Them)
The advice that people need is often just if you feel like it's not right, try to make it right. Taking time to either learn and grow, or learn to be okay with the way that you sound.

Ratchel (She/They)
When I modify my body, it's not really for anyone else. You know, when I take estrogen, it's for me. When I do voice training, it's for me. It's, it's because I have to look at myself in the mirror, every day for the rest of my life. And a lot of the time, that's not super easy.

Ember (They/Them)
I love myself, it's more how people perceive my voice that is the issue. And, at the end of the day, I can't change what other people think. So I want to work on being okay with how I sound.

Jane (She/Her)
Me being out there in the world is, is, is my statement, I suppose. You know, is that I'm alive. I'm, I'm living my life. And I want all people, to just see me as a normal permutation of human being. There's no one kind of person, we've created this normative where we feel that you must be what I call the Holy Trinity, which is to be cisgender, heterosexual, and procreative.

Ari (They/She)
I think I'm just so used to queer people being the ones that have to do all the heavy lifting for their selves and for their community, that it would be nice if others would kind of take up a little bit more initiation and effort to get to know the other types of humans that they're around all the time.

Molly (She/They)
We need solidarity. That's like my message to the people. We need to stick together. And that like especially means sticking together with people that maybe you don't really like, but that are like you.

Everly (Sidhe/Her)
There's a space for us in professional music as a performer, or we're going to make that space, at least. If you're like, “I want to sing in a higher range, and I have a very deep voice.” Well, you might have to do a lot of work to get there, but you can eventually do that.

And the more of us who do it, the more they'll get used to it. And then they'll be like, oh, okay, you're a female bass baritone. And then there'll be a point where people are like, oh, another female bass baritone, what are we going to do? We just get so many of these coming through. And that'll be great.

Jess (She/Her)
It's okay to not be perfect right away. Voice training is a progress, it is failures building to success. It's not something that's for most people going to come immediately. It's okay to stumble, so long as you're kind to yourself and you learn from those mistakes.

Rowan (He/Him)
I guess this is the narrative, is that you start hormones and then you instantly become a beautiful boy or a beautiful girl, and you can post your before and after photos and everyone will love it and find it inspirational.

I have not once taken before and after photos. I don't even really keep track of when I started T or celebrate anniversaries, and I think that the more that you can learn to combine the selves that you have been and the selves that you are and will be, and acknowledge that that's all you, and love every self that you've been.

That's what’s key. I think being trans is about radically accepting and loving every piece of yourself and loving your own ability to change.

O Stecina (They/He)
Luna and I learned so much in speaking to everyone who agreed to be a part of this project, but the real epiphany was that everyone had a completely unique experience to share. With years and sometimes decades of lived experience understanding their changing bodies, the bodies that they live in and experience the world through every day.

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All of us, cis or trans, have rich inner worlds, and the way that we sound when we say our first hellos and our final goodbyes are tinted with the places we've lived, the people we've loved, the pressures we faced, and infinite other drops of color. Oftentimes, documentaries exploring trans experiences can feel exploitative, sensationalist, and at worst, fetishistic. Too often, these stories are overly focused on the before and after, where success is based on integrating into a cis society. In our opinion, these stories miss the mark and we didn't want our project to feel this way.

 

Soundscapes of Self is a love letter to trans expression. Our goal with this project was to explore the intricacies of trans people's experiences and the things that make trans voices unique in a way that emphasized their autonomy, diversity and dignity. The decision to make the project audio only was intentional.

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We didn't want the audience to be focusing on our subjects’ appearances when the point of the project is to explore people's relationships to their voices, and we thank you for listening.

 

We’d like to thank Bree Brisson for their work on the early stages of development for this project, and our crew volunteers Tia Harish and Fipary Moskalenko. Tia, for their journalistic expertise and contributions to the organization of our workflow. And Fipary, for his excellent work on the project's visual elements, including the logo and color palette. We received guidance from a number of professionals for this project through Toronto Metropolitan University's RTA Media Production Program. Our advisor, Felipe Tellez and our course instructor, Karen Sebesta gave us important feedback throughout the development and production process, and we received studio assistance from Finlay Braithwaite and Kevin Konarzevski.

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Additionally, we would like to offer an enormous thanks to each and every one of our interview subjects for providing their voices to this project, and the members of Singing Out who sang for our soundtrack recording sessions. We know that the world is a scary place for queer and trans people right now, and sharing your voice and your story for a documentary is an incredibly daunting and brave thing to do.

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We’ve both learned so much from you all inviting us into your lives, and we hope that we've done your lived experience justice. All that to say, it quite literally would not have been possible to make this project on our own. So thank you.

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Your voice is powerful. It can be used for music, poetry, education, howling laughter, wails of grief, screams of seething rage, human connection.

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How will you choose to use this power? What will you listen for?