Cami mentioned digging up my old clips and doing some comparisons. So that’s what I did.

Unfortunately I don’t have any old-old clips from before I started voice work in November 2006, but I do have some from later in the process. It took me about six months to get something that actually worked, most of the early stuff was terrible and I had to keep trying new things.

So there are four clips here, and you can definitely hear changes among them.

• June 2007 – Male voice. This one has the pitch and resonance of my typical male voice… but it’s tainted because at this point i had been practicing inflection alot and the voice arcs up and down, whereas my “raw” male voice was originally very flat and not often animated.
• June 2007 – Female voice. My first voice clip that I released for anyone else to hear, the first one I wasn’t totally embarrassd about. It’s just a reading of the Lord’s Prayer, and you can hear how some of it sounds stilted, like I’m thinking too hard about how to talk, but you’ll also notice the quality of the resonance and pitch.
• September 2008 – Female voice. I did not start going out and using my voice in public until May 2008, and by September I guess I had been going out most of the time as a woman, buying groceries that way, etc., but otherwise still flipping back and forth for work and whatever else.
• June 2009 – Female voice. My most recent clip I threw up on the website I mod. Just… meh. This was my 3rd or 4th attempt, the first few really sucked, and I feel like my voice has dropped a lot… and I just cannot maintain the pitch i had been able to. My voice is so inconsistent now, in terms of quality and tone.

So maybe you can see why I’m frustrated now… or maybe you can’t, and you think I sound entirely fine regardless. I guess either outcome is helpful. Feel free to leave advice/feedback if you want.

Note: When you get to the voice sample page, there should be a large wide rectangle on the left saying “Click here to start download.” You can click on that link, and you’ll get the option to Open or Save the file… you can just click Open and Windows Media Player should just open the thing. The first female sample is 400K + in size, the rest are much smaller.

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UPDATE 7/7/09: I decided to start practicing my voice again and realized I had gotten rather sloppy in terms of my head focal point. Part of this is due to my sinus issues, the tissues get swollen and I lose reverb in that part… but practicing helps me find the right spot to focus at least even if I can’t feel it. Basically, without the head reverb and if I wasn’t breathing correctly (using the diaphram), I would take the easier route without realizing it and use my throat to change the sound to feel right, which means my resonance would start suffering. Getting everything back in alignment — breathing from diaphram, open throat, and head focal point — really helped matters immensely.

I redid The Lord’s Prayer in the car (listen and compare to the recording I made two years ago), among other clips I made, and I’m much happier with the way everything sounds. Good singers always practice and do warm-ups before singing, and I suppose good orators do as well, so I suppose I should just always keep on top of things rather than letting things slide.

Listening to all the clips again, there’s probably not as much variation as I had felt there was at the time. I really was having a rough week last week, and I’m not sure why emotionally I just sort of fell to pieces.