Re: Change Your Voice
Hilke Mcnally
By using custom keybinds with the Voicemod soundboard, you can always play the perfect sound effect at just the right moment. Enjoy the sound effects included with Voicemod with the Soundboard for Discord, or load up your own MP3 or WAV files. These are perfect for livening up your next game of Halo Infinite, Apex Legends, Rocket League, Valheim, Sea of Thieves, Call of Duty, League of Legends, Back 4 Blood, or Valorant. You can also set up the soundboard and voice changer for PS4 and PS5 and Xbox. New themed sound effects are added every month, so check back in regularly! U have a metavoice!
Dr. Debra Sullivan is a nurse educator with over 20 years of teaching experience. Her expertise includes cardiology, psoriasis and dermatology, pediatrics, complementary medicine, and workplace burnout syndrome. She has held many leadership roles in her nursing career.
Dr. Jill Seladi-Schulman is currently a freelance medical writer and was previously a project setup manager for clinical trials. She specializes in microbiology and infectious disease, having written her dissertation on influenza virus morphology. Dr. Seladi-Schulman has publications in peer-reviewed journals. She also has had her work featured on the cover of the Journal of Virology.
Steph Coelho is a writer, editor, and ACE-certified personal trainer with intimate knowledge of living with a mental health condition and chronic illness. She has bylines with Healthline, Everyday Health, Medical News Today, and more. You can find her on Twitter.
The way you sound is just as important as the words you say. While not everyone who wants to change their voice can become a Grammy Award-winning singer, there are steps you can take to improve the overall sound, tone, texture, and quality of your voice.
Hormones and their impact on weight can also affect how you sound. Men with obesity produce an overabundance of estrogen, causing their voices to raise. On the other hand, women with obesity produce an overabundance of testosterone, which may deepen their voices.
Being overweight may also affect breath control, making the voice sound raspy or breathless. Being underweight, in reverse, may also affect your voice by reducing your endurance and making your vocal cords more prone to injury.
If you have a speech disorder, working with a speech therapist will help. Speech disorders can include difficulties with articulation, such as lisping, or difficulties with fluency, such as stuttering.
The sound your voice makes is transmitted into your eardrums via air, where it vibrates three tiny bones: the malleus, incus, and stapes. It then travels to your cochlea and, ultimately, to your brain.
The air flows between your vocal cords, making them vibrate. Your voice, like all sound, is energy made by vibrating air particles. Your pitch is determined by the number of vibrations your vocal cords make. This is referred to as frequency. Fewer vibrations generate a lower pitch. More vibrations generate a higher pitch.
The vibrations propel the particles of air to continue traveling to your mouth and sinuses, where your voice acquires resonance, tone, and the uniqueness of your own particular sound. If your sinuses are clogged, your voice may acquire a nasal tone at this point in the process.
The larynx, which is located in the throat at the top of the trachea (pronounced: TRAY-kee-uh) or windpipe, is like a hollow tube about 2 inches (5 centimeters) high. The larynx is responsible for creating the sound of your voice.
Stretched across your larynx are two muscles, your vocal cords, which are kind of like rubber bands. When you breathe, your vocal cords relax against the walls of the larynx and completely open to allow air to get in and out of your lungs. When you speak, though, your vocal cords close together by stretching across the larynx. Air from your lungs is then forced out between your vocal cords, causing them to vibrate and produce the tone of your voice.
When you lower your voice, your vocal cords are relaxed and more floppy. When you make your voice higher, your vocal cords tighten. (You can notice this difference in how they feel as you adjust your speech.)
As your larynx grows, your vocal cords grow longer and thicker. Also, your facial bones begin to grow. Cavities in the sinuses, the nose, and the back of the throat grow bigger, creating more space in the face that gives your voice more room to echo. All of these factors cause your voice to get deeper.
Think of a guitar. When a thin string is plucked, it vibrates and produces a high-sounding tone. When a thicker string is plucked, it sounds much deeper when it vibrates. That's kind of what happens to your voice. Before your growth spurt, your larynx is relatively small and your vocal cords are relatively thin. So your voice is high and kid-like. But as bones, cartilage, and vocal cords grow, your voice starts to sound like an adult's.
Along with all the other changes in your body, you might notice that your throat area looks a little different. For guys, when the larynx grows bigger, it tilts to a different angle and you can see a bump in the front of the throat called the Adam's apple. For girls, the larynx also grows bigger but not as much as a guy's. That's why girls don't have Adam's apples.
While your body is getting used to these changes, your voice can be difficult to control. A guy's voice "cracks" or "breaks" because his body is getting used to the changing size of his larynx. Fortunately, the cracking and breaking is only temporary. It usually lasts no longer than a few months. And even during that time, your voice won't crack every time you speak.
You may have noticed that some of your friends have cracking and breaking voices, some might already have deep voices, and some still have the same voice they've always had. Everyone's timetable is different, so some voices might start to change earlier and some might start a little later.
Once your larynx has grown, your voice will be more stable and easier to control. But even then your voice hasn't finished developing! Even after the change that happens in your teens, your voice continues to develop. Although the squeaking and cracking stage doesn't last long, most guys' voices don't fully mature until they're in their twenties.
Note: This week, I move from the University of California, San Francisco to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, and this change is solely for personal (non-work) reasons. I look forward to joining the team at USC, where I will continue the combination of caring for patients and performing research to advance the field of sleep surgery. I am excited about the challenges and opportunities that the move will bring.
This was the first study to consider voice changes after sleep apnea surgery performed on the tongue. Overall, the results were similar to previous research: changes occurred but were fairly subtle in both groups. There were no changes in the key features of voice (fundamental frequency, jitter, shimmer, maximal phonation time, and noise-to-harmonic ratio). There were changes in some of the formants, reflecting changes in the resonance of the throat. There was a change in an overall measure of voice in the group that underwent both procedures, but in only 1 (out of 25) patients was the change what would be considered meaningful to typical voice users.
There may be changes in voice after these procedures, but the changes are unlikely to be noticed for most patients. Based on previous studies, I have always told my patients that professional voice users (like me) will likely not notice much of a difference in their voice. However, vocational and professional singers may notice these subtle differences because of the greater demands they place on their voice. I have never had a patient report a noticeable change in their speaking or singing voice after soft palate surgery or any tongue surgery except the most-aggressive approach (midline glossectomy) where I physically have to remove a substantial part of their tongue. However, the risk exists and is something to consider, especially for singers.
Eric, have there been any studies to see if singers or people who have to speak more than an average person have lower chances of developing sleep apnea? It would seem possible that using the tongue more could help make it stronger (just like any other muscle in our body) and thus less likely to relax and fall back during sleep.
There has been work done in Brazil on oropharyngeal exercises, and the limited (but encouraging) results for the didgeridoo suggest that there may be a role for muscle-strengthening exercises. However, one study looked at musicians who play reed instruments and found no effect on the risk of OSA. Speaking would not be expected to do much, although singing potentially would. I am not aware of any studies of singers.
Hi,Eric:
I am Steven from Taiwan and glad to hear you move to USC. Interesting, I just experienced one patient had grade lV tonsils and I performed U3P for her snore. After U3P, her muffled voice got changed to soft and tender!
Steven, this is a great point. Patients with very large tonsils can have all sorts of voice changes, including muffling. Removing these very large tonsils can result in these types of changes, but I would say that studies suggest these major changes in voice are related to tonsillectomy rather than what was done to the soft palate.
also, I found a study recently that I think was published in 2012, that did show that double reed instrument players had less OSA than non wind instrument players. I started my 7 yr old daughter on oboe lessons, and within 4 months her chronic cough was gone, her dental decay stopped, she stopped snoring and mouth breathing at night and said she felt better during the day. we had trouble with myofunctional therapy but I found that oboe practice was a better substitute and the final key to getting a handle on her sleep breathing. this is after T&A, maxillary expansion, and mandibular advancement with Biobloc. love that oboe!
d3342ee215