Episode: 3919
Title: HPR3919: How I hacked my voice
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3919/hpr3919.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 17:19:39

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3919 for Thursday, 10 August 2023.
Today's show is entitled, How I Hacked My Voice.
It is the 50th show of Tukutura Oto, and is about 16 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is Tukutura Oto talks about what she is doing to change her voice.
Hi, this is Tula Turto, and you are listening to the Hacker Public Radio.
Today's episode, I'm not talking about the Haskell, surprise, surprise, but rather I'm
talking about how I hacked my voice.
If you have been listening to my episodes, you might have noticed that my voice has changed
a little bit over the years.
This episode will be about how I did that, what kind of things I did to achieve that.
So, for the record, I used something like this, I'm reading out the weekdays in Finnish.
Manantai, Tiistai, Keskiviku, Torstai, Periantai, Lautai, Sundantai.
And nowadays, if I do the same thing, it sounds like Manantai, Tiistai, Keskiviku, Torstai,
Periantai, Lautai, Sundantai.
So, there is a noticeable sense in there.
So, a whole process took, maybe a couple of years, I was doing it every day, but I wasn't
doing exercises every day, but I was working with the voice more or less every day in
some manner.
So the first resource I looked into, like so many other people, because that is a very
recommended resource, is the Transvoice Lessons channel in the YouTube, there will be a link
in the show notes for that.
And there, there's a lot of exercises, a lot of really interesting theory and science
behind the voice, there's tons and tons of videos there.
So I started with that, and basically the first thing, there's a
I think three video series there that talked about very basic things, how to change
your voice.
So I started with figuring out what's the difference between chest voice and head voice.
The problem with voice is that, or rather the challenge with the voice is that when we
speak, we tend to speak very instinctively.
We don't really think how all the muscles in our body are moving and how they produce
the sound.
We just do it.
We learn that as a baby, and then we do it instinctively.
We don't really think about that.
So a lot of the theory was really tricky to get, because if it says that contract this
specific muscle to change your voice like this, you have no idea what that muscle is.
You might see a picture, but if you haven't trained that muscle, it's really hard to do
anything with that muscle.
You cannot just start doing that.
But the exercises they had were easy in a way that they said that try to make sound
like this and then try to make the sound like this, and you start mimicking those sounds.
And from there, you learn to control all those muscles that change the voice, because
the voice is produced by the vocal folds in your throat, and then it is amplified and
shielded by the rest of your head, basically.
So the chest and head voice, the chest voice, it has more, I think, the words are timbre.
You can think, when you speak, you can sort of feel the voice coming from your abdomen
or from your chest, and then you try to switch it to your, to come from your head.
It really doesn't change the location where it comes from, but the feeling helps you to
manage the voice production in a way that it switches to sounding differently.
So instead of producing it in the tip of your body, you can do it like you produce
a bowel and then try to move higher, so you go like, at the end, you add the head voice.
And if you keep continuing to the higher, you end up with the falsetto that sounds very
comical, and might be useful sometimes, but it's not very useful, very useful when speaking.
And at that point, it helps if you are holding your finger on the larynx, and you can feel
how it is moving.
And then I started doing the exercise where I just tried to lift the larynx on my throat
and give it up, because that changes the voice, because it shortens the distance of the
voice, so it goes on the higher, higher sounding, of you mean in sounding.
Because the thing is that while the pitch of your speech or voice has effect, if it's
first served as a male or female, the actually the resonance has even bigger effect on that.
And the transverse lessons talk about this a lot more detail, but basically it's not just
just just a pitch, but also the resonance only. Only your voice that changes how it is perceived.
So I was just trying to hold my larynx up, first with producing a sound and then just trying to
hold it up without producing a sound, and basically just trying to keep it at high as long as
possible and then letting it drop and then lifting it up, basically just like doing a muscle training
with weights, because the muscles that move it weren't used to that, so they got fired very quickly,
so I just had to train them to be stronger and regain control of moving the larynx.
And at this point I switched using, I tried to use the new voice in everyday speech, and I was,
I sounded really pretless and funny when I get it, but I just decided that it's the easiest if I don't
if I don't do it only training 15 minutes a day or some amount of day, but try to keep doing that
all the time, because then my body gets more used to it quicker. And one funny trick was that I was
reading my social media feed aloud, and just reading it aloud, but people were posting and trying
trying different voices for different people and just playing playing playing with the voice,
seeing what works and what notes and what kind of things I can do, and because there was no
releasening that, at least I hope nobody wasn't listening at that point, but it was a very
low pressure and gave me an opportunity to play with the voice and see what I can do and how things
affect to each other. Okay, and the next big improvement I figured I was told was adding a little
bit of twang into my voice, and of course that's again, if somebody comes and says, hey,
I just had better than more twang into your voice and it sounds better. You don't know what that
means unless you have studied that stuff, but I had this coach actually told me that you can
just pretend to be an old croaking witch who is speaking with a funny voice. That just
helped me to realize what the twang is. So if I imitate a witch, it sounds like I am the evil
witch, and that's a creaking is produced by the twang. Of course that point on adding it a lot
more than I'm doing it now. I'm still doing it, but not at that high level, and there's a little
slap in your throat that closes. It's basically a, you can imagine it's a select of it with your
windpipe and with your digestive track. So when you are speaking, you're speaking
from the feedback, but when you are drinking or eating that slap moves and directs the
content into your stomach and you can control that slap. If you close it a lot, you get a creaking
sound, but if you close it just a little bit, you actually get a clearer and more strong sound,
like voice that carries a longer distance, and doing that witch impersonation,
I was doing that and then I was feeding a weekdays, and then I was just doing the vowels, like
yeah, yeah, yeah, just doing the vowels and training to control that little aspect, and
basically, again, strengthening the muscles and learning how to use that. And now that I have some
idea how that works, I can add it just a little bit when I'm speaking normally, and if I'm speaking
in a place where there's a lot of noise, or there's a lot of people so that I have to have a voice
that carries a further away, then I can add it a little more. It still sounds natural. I'm not going
to do it here, because it actually gets quite loud, and might hurt your ears, but anyway,
that having the control of that means that I can move on the scale, like note rang or a lot of
sang, or even a witch impersonation. And another thing, I don't actually know how it works very
effectively, is that the coach said that you can pretend that you are smiling, you don't actually
have to smile, but you just have pretending to think of, like she was talking about inner smile,
it sounds really silly, but it works, you can do it first, you smile very widely, and that changes
again your voice, because of course the smiling changes how your face looks like it changes the
oral cavity, in shape of the oral cavity, and that changes how the, how your voice is filtered and
amplified, and that of course directly affects to how you sound like. So that was the second thing,
or third thing, and these three things basically is what I learned to do, and it changed my voice
quite a bit, as you can hear. Okay, and then I have the problem that my voice gets tired,
eventually, if I talk about, talk a long time, it gets tired, it gets
scratchy and raspy in my throat, so I asked about how to do, what to do about this, and
the coach gave me couple of simple tricks that I can use, first the most important is staying
hydrated, you have to, I have to drink enough over course of the day, because if I
are not drinking enough water, it directly shows how I sound like. The second one is that
using the resonator tube, it's funny, it's about 20 centimeters long metal pipe, or thin tube,
about the size of a pencil basically, that I, the other one end is placed into the water, and I'm
making a oval sound from the other end, and so it's just going up and down the skills,
and the water adds the back pressure, and somehow that calibrates how my voice sounds, it's
it's fascinating, I was quite skeptical, but after trying that out, it noticed that it really,
it really works, and the third one is, because it's hard to carry the cup of water, and the
metal tube with you all the time, is just doing the r sound, and just going up and down on the
scales, like just, and that has the similar effect, it's not as strong, but it's strong enough,
okay, and that's that's basically all the tricks that I have run to change my voice,
in the transport lessons there's a lot more things that you can do, but a lot of those are quite
quite a bit more involving and requiring more practice, and I have to say that I'm too lazy to
do those consistently, or even figure out how those works, maybe I get to pack those at some point,
but currently I'm quite happy how I sound like, so that's how I hacked my voice, so if you have
questions, comments or feedback, leave a comment in there, comment field, comment box whatever,
or even better, record your own episode, you can also email me at www.touradouttouradwalktider.net,
that's all for today,
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