Voices

I was talking with my friend Vic at the music school the other day - since he's one of the desk folks, our hangouts are punctuated with him having to answer the phone every so often, and the way he shifts into that...

... masking is a hell of a thing. If I say "customer service voice" you know what I mean, but there's also a particular register that's involved that's actually really complicated for me emotionally, but in ways that I did not actually notice before I was taking voice lessons.

My normal speaking voice resonates in my chest. (I think a lot about Heather Alexander, actually, who had a very deep speaking voice; I spent my twenties or so delighted by a female professional musician who had a deeper voice than I did. Of course, now that person is Alexander James Adams, and I'm me, and the irony runs even deeper. I wonder how much of the depth of preferred voice there has to do with gender.) When I'm relaxed, when I'm comfortable, when I feel safe, it stays there.

As soon as I start masking, I go into customer service voice (lite): my pitch goes up by at least a fifth, the resonance goes from chest to pharynx (full customer service voice gets more into my sinuses), the entire thing becomes artifice. There's some of this tonal shift that is, in my opinion, part of the intrinsic performance expected of people-classed-female; there's a register that we're allowed to use. It's not natural to me, but it's reflex, a policed reaction that has become automatic for safety.

(Other things I ponder sometimes: I was visiting a friend and we were both too crispy to do much more than collapse in the same space and occasionally have brief conversational exchanges that mostly I initiated. But all in natural register. Another friend came home, and he's very outgoing and chatty, and I am pretty sure I swapped into performance/masking mode in order to muster the capacity to engage with that, I think complete with register shift. I am also pretty sure the first friend spotted something happening with the swap; I caught a fascinating expression in there, heh.)

I think most of the heavy masking I do involves this, the register shift up into ladyvoice.

And the thing about that is that aside from the masking, that's a register I hate speaking in. I notice myself cringing when I do it, particularly if I do it at any volume. And the thing that gets in the music lessons part is—

—early on in my voice lessons Rob was trying to get me to get a handle on a particular mixed-voice register and described it as "imagine you're trying to shout 'hey!' to a friend across a field" and I realized oh. I hate that. I don't want my voice to go there. That's the place where my voice sounds wrong to me. (We have done a lot of work on my mixed register, for the record, and I no longer cringe singing it. Still can't abide speaking in it without having the ughs.)

So not only is masking mode exhausting because I have to cosplay a socially competent human being, but the automatic register shift plonks me straight into I Am Simulating A Normal Suburban Female, Please Do Not Report My Deviances To Your Planetary Overlords.

Humaning. It's exhausting.

Vic agrees with me about the dysphoria of customer service voice.


(Interestingly to me, when I'm playing Celyn, I tend to use an even lighter register than that, much more into head range. But that's just how he is, the tenacious hope gremlin. I've noticed that M uses a deeper register for Izgil than his natural speaking voice. Characters is Different.)