Voicemaxxing

Guide
"Here’s How I Got a Deeper Voice (the 5 Best Techniques)​

If you came here from Google, you’ve probably already

been through a heap of articles on how to get a deeper
voice. The problem with these is, none of them seem to
be written by people who are actually speaking from
experience. With each point, you have no idea whether
you’re getting tried and tested advice or just guesswork
they’ve plucked from the internet.

As someone who has actually deepened his voice (from

about average to low), I wanted to take a different tack and
discuss the methods that worked for me, alongside a few
others. Most of these I’ve tried, but not all of them, so where
I don’t have first-hand knowledge I’ll link to discussion
boards to show you real people talking about these
techniques and how they worked for them.
Just to get it out of the way, none of this is medical advice. I
trust you to follow these tips without giving yourself an
injury – and if you feel in any way like you might, you should
stop immediately. Right, here we go.
1. Strengthen your Neck Muscles​
I’ve seen a lot of talk about this online, so I wanted to start
by confirming here: this truly does work. Actually, it’s my
favourite method of all of them.
If you put your hand on your throat, you’ll feel two long
muscles which run down from behind your ear to your
collarbone. These are your sternocleidomastoids, and
when they get tense they tug on your vocal chords,
resulting in a higher note. Relax these and, logically
enough, your voice gets lower.
One recommended way of doing this is by making the neck
muscles stronger. Stronger muscles are better at meeting their
daily demands and therefore less likely to tighten up
throughout the day. I was interested in this idea, so I thought
I’d test it out.
Every day, at 2 o’clock and in the same room, I recorded a
sample of my voice and wrote down the figures. I chose 2pm
because I wanted the ‘morning effect’ of my voice to have
worn off and I knew I wouldn’t have been drinking alcohol
around that time. After the recording, every other day, I’d do 3
sets of 20 reps of crunches, where I lay on my bench and
slowly nodded my head from horizontal to vertical, tucking in
my chin – like doing sit-ups with your neck.

And it worked. Here’s a chart I made with Vocular.

As you can see, by all four metrics, my voice did deepen
over time. My matches completely changed too.
More compellingly, my voice actually got higher before
it got lower. It starts at about 105Hz, then shoots up to
113Hz and stays high for a week, before it gradually
deepened month after month to the current pitch of
89Hz. That’s like going from Edward Norton, to Justin
Bieber, to Jon Hamm.
This fits the idea that strong neck muscles give you a
deeper voice. The exercises first made my neck weaker,
like any muscle when you start training it. So my voice
got higher. Then, as I continued with the exercises, it got
used to the strain and became stronger, and my pitch
dropped.
I should add that I also stretch my neck to relieve any
tension that might build up with the exercises. So if
you’re thinking of doing this, that’s something to keep
an eye on. In fact, this guy on Reddit seems to have a
routine which worked really well for him and seems to
focus more on stretching.
2. Breathe from the Diaphragm​
Ever noticed how your shoulders bob up and down as
you breathe in and out?
If you’re have, you’re doing it wrong. This is a thing
called ‘shallow breathing’ and it’s something most
people are guilty of. While it seems as good as any
method, this kind of breath shifts effort to the upper
half of the torso, putting tension on the neck and vocal
chords.
Instead, breathe with the muscle that’s designed to do
it: the diaphragm. As you inhale, try to shift the effort
downward so your stomach flexes out while your
shoulders remain completely still. Feel as though the air
is being summoned by your abs.
I know it’s quite hard to follow in writing, so Eric
Arceneaux does a very good job of explaining this.
This one correction had the greatest impact on my voice
depth – but, like any bad habit, it requires a conscious effort
to overcome it. You may want to try something to remind
yourself when you’re creeping back to your old ways. One
vocal coach has created the Singing-Belt to do this,
although it’s expensive so using kinesiology tape or a tight T-
shirt might work better.
It’s tough to get used to, but mastering diaphragmatic
breathing will also give you a richer, more resonant voice,
which is probably more important than having a deep
voice. It also has a host of other benefits, such a reducing
stress and improving athletic performance, since it’s just a
more efficient way to breathe.​

3. Aspirate​
You can try this one for yourself and immediately see its
effect. Open Vocular and enable the Pitch Tracker in
Settings, then speak to the microphone in your normal voice
and see what numbers come up.
Now try talking in a breathier, more aspirated kind of way,
as if you’re speaking through a sigh. If you need someone to
copy, Tom Hiddleston’s a pretty good example.
You should see your numbers drop as soon as you take on
this breathier kind of tone. And not only does this make
your voice deeper, it makes it more attractive too. A 2014
study found that the most attractive male voices were
also the breathiest – and this was so pronounced that
women preferred a high-pitched but breathy voice over a
deep, non-breathy one.​
4. Drink More Water​
Please don’t skip over this section, because it’s a lot more
important than you might think. You know how the depth of
your voice is partly caused by the size of your vocal chords?
Well, dehydration literally shrinks your vocal chords. The loss
of water equates to a loss of mass, leaving you with thinner,
squeakier vocal chords.
And, strikingly, most people are dehydrated. A recent study
found that 75% of Americans fell far below the
recommended daily intake, which, again, gives us a majority
of people speaking with higher voices than they ought to be.
The solution is to make things easier for yourself. If you
work at a desk, get a jug (one that can hold 3-4 litres) and
fill it every morning. Not only will this encourage you to
drink more because it’s there, it’ll bring the water to room
temperature which stops the throat contracting from the
cold.
If you’re sceptical about the impact of this, see for
yourself. My hydrated voice is often so much deeper that
it shares almost no overlap with my dehydrated one – the
similarity comes out at about 10-20%. In fact, I now make
a point of drinking a litre of water an hour before going on
a date or to an important meeting.​
5. Be More Monotone​
I’ve noticed a few names that come up time and time
again when discussing voice depth. One of these names is
Clint Eastwood. But the weird thing here is that, in terms
of pitch, Eastwood doesn’t have a deep voice. It’s about
average.

However, one thing Eastwood has in spades in monotony. This

is a very manly trait – in fact, a recent study found that men
with monotone voices tend to have more sexual partners than
those who don’t. So it may be that the masculinity of a
monotone voice tricks people into thinking that voice is deep
as well.
This is backed up by a paper on vocal attractiveness, which
found that the voices which varied less in pitch were the most
likely to be considered deep. In fact, pitch variation was almost
as important as actual pitch in deciding whether a voice was
deep or not. "
How to Tell if You Have Vocal Fry (and why does it matter)​

Vocular now does vocal fry, so I wanted to answer a few

questions about that today – what is it, what does it mean,
how can you tell how much you speak with, etc. Here we
go.​

What is vocal fry?​

That’s that low-pitched, creaky,
pulsating sound you hear most
famously in the voices of women like
Kim Kardashian and Zooey
Deschanel.

How can you tell how much vocal

fry you speak with?​
Just like anything else, all you have
to do is open the app, hit the record
button and speak for about 30
seconds. The algorithm then
analyses your voice to tell you how
much vocal fry it finds. Anything
over 15% is a lot, and anything
under 6% is very little – although the
app explains all this anyway. Check
it out here
Just as a note, this doesn’t really work if you’re a guy with a
deep voice. That kind of vocal fry is too low to detect well,
although we should be able to do this in the future once we
can analyse the smoothness of voices.)​

Why is vocal fry important?​

In theory, vocal fry should be a good thing. Deep voices are
rated as being more authoritative. People are more easily
persuaded by speakers who lower their pitch whilst
making a point. Even CEO salaries rise as their pitch falls.
So talking in vocal fry, the lowest register of the human
voice, should be a good thing.
But studies tell us a very different story. Recent research
looked at attitudes towards vocal fry using pairs of voices
– both made by the same speaker – one with fry and the
other without. The main finding: listeners were several
times more likely to rate the fry voice as less trustworthy,
less educated and less competent. They also claimed to
be significantly more likely to hire the other voice.
And this wasn’t just about old people hating new ways of
speaking. Every demographic shared the same prejudice
against vocal fryers, although old women showed the
greatest aversion to them.​
How do you stop speaking with vocal fry?​
You just do, really. Vocal fry is like any other bad habit, so
unless you’ve got some rare vocal chord condition, you
should be able to consciously keep your voice from falling
into that lower register. Then it’s just a case of practising
until it become second nature to you.
Vocular can help you with this by giving you a clearer idea
of how much fry is in your voice. Breathing deeply and
diaphragmatically should also make it easier to keep your
voice up in the modal register.​
Why do people find vocal fry so annoying?​
Well, there are some people who seem to want to put all
this down to misogyny, like vocal fry is actually just a
conduit for criticising women’s freedom of speech. Even a
recent episode of Things You Should Know went down this
route.​
lot of people are trying to dance around this or prove that
it’s sexist – it’s like no, on its face, this is a sexist argument
that’s going on right now.​
This might be true for a few weirdos who write in to these
shows, but it ignores basic differences in the way men and
women speak. Female voices tend to be roughly twice as
high as male voices, so it’s far more jarring when they keep
dropping into registers down in Morgan Freeman territory.
Some men, on the other hand, have voices deep enough
that it’s really difficult to separate from their vocal fry.
Even I have trouble doing this with myself.
Also, it’s not as though all female presenters are being
chastised for their voices on the internet. Kirsty Young
hosts Desert Island Discs, a show with an audience
probably similar to something from NPR, and Twitter is
awash with people announcing how much they love her
voice. The difference? She has almost no vocal fry at all in
her voice. She actually has the least of any woman in our
database
The anti-fry reaction isn’t limited to female voices either.
The study I mentioned before found that vocal fry was
equally disapproved of in male voices as it was in female
ones.
There are other reasons why fry might generally be
something people don’t like to listen to. I’ve said it a few
times before, but the most attractive voices are usually
the breathiest, huskiest or smoothest ones. Vocal fry
tends to be the opposite of that. Actually, you need only
look at a spectrogram to see what a harsh kind of sound it
is.
It also sounds weak, in my opinion. A croaking, creaky
voice isn’t something you naturally associate with a high
level of fitness – it can be caused by bad breathing
technique or vocal fold pathology. So it may also be that
the most attractive voices tend to sound the healthiest.​
So what’s the bottom line?​
Bottom line is that vocal fry seems only to carry negative
connotations, so it would be a smart move to learn to
speak without it. Aiming for 0% is unrealistic, since some
level of fry is natural and unavoidable, but keeping to the
single figures should give you a stronger, more
authoritative and more attractive voice.

Morgan Freeman tells you how to get a deeper voice​

Morgan Freeman didn’t always have that voice. He had

to work at it. In fact, he recently stated that the first
major step he made towards becoming an actor was
learning to lower the pitch of his voice.
The voice started when I was in college, when my first
efforts were in officially learning the business of acting.
That’s not really what you should be trying to learn, you
should be trying to get your instrument honed, and part of
that instrument is your voice. And I had an instructor, a
man named Robert Whitton at LACC, who nailed
elocution, diction, breath control, into his students. You
made a record at the beginning of his class and at the end
so you could hear the difference. The first thing he does is
he teaches you that your voice is too high – most people
speak with a tense throat and it’s too high – so he gives
you techniques on how to relax that. And your voice, it
deepens.​
But how did he do it? Well, although details have always
been a bit sketchy, he did divulge this tip.
In a word, yawn. Yawn a lot.
His explanation: yawning relaxes the muscles of the throat,
which relieves your vocal chords of tension and allows them
to loosen up – just like slackening a guitar string for a lower
note.
And he’s right. The pitch of your voice effectively comes
down to three factors: the length, thickness, and tension of
your vocal chords. The first two are typically seen as outside
of your control (although that’s not true; staying hydrated
makes your vocal chords bigger and therefore lower-
pitched). But the third is something that you can master.
And yawning is just one method for doing that.
I found this comment from a guy who’d heeded Freeman’s
advice.
It’s working buddy but you have to be persistent I yawn at
least 40 times per day every day for more than three
months. It’s been 4 months since I started doing it, and I see
results, my friends have noticed it also, and the best part is
when I record myself I don’t sound like a damn girl anymore
🙂
I’m a legit man now ​
And another, who thought the advice was along the right
lines but that there were better exercises out there.​
I’m not sure if yawning is the best exercise, but limbering up
the vocal cords is the first step to reaching your potential.
I’ve been called the White Morgan Freeman a solid dozen or
more times by complete strangers lol.​