This page opens with the Higher voice preset tuned for a male-to-female change: pitch +5 semitones, formants +2.5. Record a sentence or upload a clip and it plays back straight away.
Pitch and formants move by different amounts
Two things make a voice sound male or female. The pitch is the note the vocal folds vibrate at; typical adult male speech sits around 100 to 130 Hz, female speech around 190 to 220 Hz. The formants, the resonances of the throat and mouth, depend on the length of the vocal tract, which is on average about 15 percent shorter in women, so their formants are a little higher.
That difference is why this page moves the formants half as far as the pitch. Five semitones raise the pitch by about a third: a 130 Hz voice goes to about 174 Hz, into the range where male and female voices overlap; +7 would reach about 195 Hz, the typical female range. 2.5 semitones raise the formants by about 15 percent, matching a shorter vocal tract. Raising both by the same amount, which a simple speed-up does, sounds like a child or a cartoon instead.
Tuning it to your voice
Voices differ, so use Fine-tune:
- A deep voice (low 100s of Hz) may need pitch +7. Keep the formant around +3.
- If the result sounds hollow or nasal, lower the formant by half a step.
- If it sounds like a child, the formant is too high relative to the pitch.
Speaking for the effect
The effect changes the sound, not the delivery. Female speech in many languages uses more pitch movement, so let your intonation rise and fall a little more than usual. Speak at normal volume close to the microphone: whispering or shouting shifts badly. For the reverse direction, see the female to male page.
The settings on this page
pitch +5 · formant +2.5. Every setting can be changed under Fine-tune; the page only chooses where it starts.