ZHEΔNNA (voice mom) · @iamzheanna
11th Sep 2021 from TwitLonger
the story of "heat from fire"
well, a looong time ago I got hired to do a voice acting gig where I read a poem while slowly altering vocal sex across it. That was part of the poem and every time I said the line, my voice was too feminine and I had to re-record the part. It became my own mantra phrase to encode my proprioceptive muscle feeling to memory to help with forming and recalling my voice. this was so incredibly useful for me because it became an anchor that allowed me to reset my voice. eventually the anchor became so familiar I could silently imagine saying it and then I learned the *feeling* of my fem sound.
It's a pretty nifty phrase too. It starts with an /h/ which is cool for a couple reasons, /i/ is very important to feminize since it has the widest r2 different between masc and fem plus it helps establish a diff oral posture to macro through, then it ends with a glottal stop /ʔ/ (in most voices) which helps work on release. Then we have "from", /f/ is an important fricative which has important co-articulation behavior with other sounds. Then we get into /ɹə/ which is an important sound to work on feminizing R-colors + the schwa followed by an /m/ which means there is no true hard stop, it's just a lip close, then open up to start the next word, really important formant transition here. Then "fire" which is a triphthong (tetraphthong if you count the shadow vowel /ə/ most speakers have), it's SUPER good to practice big moving sounds like that.
So basically it happens to have a lot of very challenging and useful sounds. It's most useful for American and Canadian speakers btw. Lastly, it's a palindrome so the phrase happens again but in a new connected order. <3