Earlier this week, we talked about raising or lowering pitch. Today, I'm going to give you an exercise for determining your baseline pitch so that you can get a sense of where you need to go when you're raising and lowering it. For this exercise, you're going to need a tuner. There are plenty of online options but theone I like is at tuner.ninja.

All you're going to say for this exercise is, “I like pie”.

Try saying it in a few different ways. If you say it's sad, it'll be lower. If you say it excited, it'll be higher. Try saying it in an average way as much as possible.

If you look at your tuner while I do this, you'll see there are a lot of different pitches that come up. To get a sense of the range of pitches that you use when you speak, watch the notes that come up as you do this exercise.

Then, when you get to the vowel of "pie" try and hold the first note you land on as I do in the video above.

Depending on how you approach the exercise, that note is likely your "average" speaking pitch.

If you try and aim for a note that is merely a tone lower or higher, you'll see what a dramatic impact that has on the gendered perception of your voice.

The take-home lesson here is that you can get a lot of change in the gendered perception of your voice from very minor adjustments in pitch. Don't aim dramatically higher or lower because your goals are closer than you think.