Put a finger down if you hate listening to recordings of yourself and everyone is telling you that you have to make regular voice recordings in order to track practice

Hi, I’m Renée, I’m a gender-affirming voice teacher and if you also put a finger down, I hear you! My students HATE listening to recordings of themselves. It’s totally normal.

So, with this in mind, I’ve been racking my brain to come with a method of tracking progress that doesn’t rely on listening to your own voice.

And I think I’ve done it!

I call it the Trans Voice Emotion Evaluator and it’s very simple.

Once a week, at the end of the day, you ask yourself the question,

“How did I feel about my voice today?”

and rate that feeling on a scale of -5 to +5 where -5 is extremely negative, +5 is extremely positive, and 0 is neutral.

You plot your rating on a graph that you can download for free on my website right now, and over time you should get a sense of the trends of your emotions with respect to your voice.

I like this system because it doesn’t force you to judge whether your voice is adequately feminine or masculine or whatever, and it doesn’t connect your voice success on the reactions of strangers you encounter. Although this scale also doesn’t ignore the real impact that episodes of misgendering can have. If someone misgenders you because of your voice, that can be reflected on this scale, but since those moments may only be one data point in a larger trend, you can see if it’s an outlier and weigh it accordingly.

I’m pretty proud of this system! I think it’s elegant and easy to use, but I would love to know your thoughts so please go ahead and download it and give it a try and let me know!

And I really really hope this helps!

Download the Trans Voice Emotions Evaluator here!