In true voice: Working with young transgender singers

I have been lucky enough in my teaching practice to work with a number of people who identify with a different gender from their birth sex. I have encountered a number of trans students through delivering BTEC musical theatre, adult musical theatre classes, and in my work as a vocal coach. While music and performing arts are generally ahead of the curve in accepting gender fluidity, these performers encounter a number of practical issues that go beyond the usual concerns of ‘reading’ as your chosen gender.

Before we go any further, it might be useful to define some terminology. Sex is a biological state. Regardless of my outward appearance, my chromosomes are the earliest marker for who I am in society. For those people who disagree with the definition handed down by nature, they may identify as a different gender. Most commonly, and easiest for the outside world to understand, males identify as female, and females as males. Some people choose not to fit into this binary and identify as gender-fluid, gender-neutral, pan-gender, or as many labels as there are people.

When transitioning from one gender to another, there are a number of obvious markers that identify the individual as masculine or feminine – dress sense, hair style and mannerisms spring to mind – but the role of the voice as a gender marker is often overlooked. This can prove problematic for performers, who otherwise read convincingly as their chosen gender but are pigeon-holed by the sound of their singing voices.

Pitch

Take the case of a young trans female who I was fortunate to coach through a recent musical theatre course. Her transition was accomplished with a grace which is both a credit to her indominable spirit and the open mindedness of her peer group. The problem came with assigning her roles within a pre-set curriculum. The first issue to bite was the obvious one of pitch. Whatever her future plans, at the point I encountered her, her transition was achieved without any medical assistance. This is a fairly regular occurrence, and for younger trans people it is often the most common stage of their journey, either by choice or due to legal, social and economic restrictions.

The issue of pitch is surprisingly easy to overcome. A large number of roles – certainly within the musical theatre sphere and also across the rock, pop and jazz catalogue – inhabit the crossover territory of low mezzo-high tenor. As a high tenor myself, I can deliver a surprising number of female roles without transposition (and frequently do in the shower, although the less said about that, the better!). So it's obvious that pitch is not the central issue – and certainly not with a pianist who is happy to make some subtle transpositions.

Timbre

The issue of why the voice, and particularly the singing voice, is such a clear gender marker is much more to do with tone quality than pitch. This brings us back to my wonderful student, picking out the roles in the syllabus for which she could ‘hit the right notes’. With non-gendered roles – think Lion King, Little Shop of Horrors or any suitably anthropomorphic role – some judicious transposition or rearranging the extremities of the tessitura could help her deliver a distinction-winning reading of the role. The problems came with those shows which are unavoidably gendered – Chicago, Grease and so on – and for which archaic mark schemes penalise performers who are not ‘authentic’ in the role. How, then, to approach making a voice ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’?

Much has been written on the sociology of transitioning voices, but there is yet to be much practical research into the technical aspects of finding your new voice. The little research that there is suggests that the gender of a voice is defined more by the profile of its overtones than any specific tessitura. The ‘female’ voice has a highly pronounced fifth harmonic, whereas the ‘male’ voice sits closer to the seventh harmonic in the overtone series. This dataset is taken from a limited sample, across a specific genre of singing (musical theatre), which does lead to some issues with validity, so this is clearly a developing area of study.

What does this mean for those of us working with transitioning voices? There are a number of software packages on the market that come with spectral analysers. Logic, Cubase and Garage band all contain spectral analysis plugins. For those new to music technology, Sing&See (www.singandsee.com) is a great place to start. This approach works reliably well for coaches and teachers happy to incorporate a laptop into their practice, and for students happy with this approach. For those of us more comfortable relying on our ears, a more subtle approach is called for.

‘Formant’ is a word all too familiar to singing teachers and coaches, although most of us are reluctant to delve into the murky waters of how formant and resonance relate to the harmonic profile of the voice. The basic formant, or vowel sound, fundamentally governs the harmonic resonance of the voice and is central to defining the timbre. While many singers work hard at unifying the resonance profile of their voice across the vowel spectrum, there is still some variance between an open (‘a’) and closed (‘u’) sounds. The closed vowel is frequently the most difficult to define on a gender spectrum. While there is obviously more to changing the gender profile of a voice than some simple vowel tweaks, this is a useful starting point in building a new vocal profile.

Articulation

A further point to consider is the role of the ‘attack transient’ in defining a singer's vocal timbre. That first peak in a sound wave is often key to how we ‘read’ a sound. Chop the attack off of a clarinet or violin and the sounds become much more difficult to distinguish. Likewise, chopping the attack from a female and male voice in the same register makes the voices almost impossible to gender. Attack transients are largely dependent on breath placement. Although we don't like to admit that men and women breathe differently in singing technique, the obvious anatomical differences, together with the general sharper attack transients in ‘masculine’ voices, make this another useful springboard to finding the right vocal approach. Again, this is an area that can be supported by technology, rendering a visual representation of the transient profile of each formant.

While this article does not claim to answer the question of how to change a voice's gender, I hope it is a useful starting point for those of us tasked with supporting transitioning singers. A more inclusive curriculum with a broader spectrum of roles is the obvious starting point, but we should not neglect the technical, and technological, support we can offer our singers. To do so would be to do them a disservice.