Project Voice Attractiveness

I believe the importance of how my voice sounds is underestimated in how others perceive me, not just in dating. It is also important in how I perceive myself, with a feedback loop on my self-confidence.

A deep, vibrating, documentary-narrator voice has soothing properties, even if listeners cannot consciously tell that they are being influenced. Many podcast hosts do voice training for exactly this reason.

For a long time, my voice has not been as deep and resonant as I would like. Particularly when I was very lean (sub 10% body fat), I severely disliked the sound of my voice, and it was a big insecurity.

I found that whenever I gained some fat, my voice got somewhat better. And whenever I started taking molecules that cause water retention (creatine, fludrocortisone, or desmopressin), my voice got much better overnight. Jitter improved, shimmer improved (two measures of vocal quality), and my fundamental frequency dropped by about 10 to 15 Hz.

Unfortunately, these changes only held up for a limited amount of time (days to a couple of weeks). I tried SOVT (semi-occluded vocal tract) exercises and even took singing lessons, but these helped only very little. Many hours wasted.

I sucked on countless hyaluronic acid lozenges while humming, hoping that the swallowed hyaluronic acid coating the vocal folds would be absorbed into the underlying tissue to some extent.

I experimented with pilocarpine to increase the activity of my salivary glands, so that my vocal folds would be coated with more moisture. Both to no avail.

I found that both the resonance and the frequency of my voice seem to be related to vocal fold mass. Whenever I lost fat, neck fat mass declined as well, and my vocal cords were less able to touch during phonation, presumably because the glottic fat pads decreased in size.

Most importantly, whenever I was dehydrated, my voice became shit. Conversely, whenever I was artificially hyperhydrated (e.g., desmopressin), my voice was night and day better.

Similarly, whenever I went low-carb (insulin leads to water retention), my voice reacted quite negatively. Like the strings of a guitar: the bigger and longer the string, the deeper the note.

The only way "string length" can be affected is by growth hormone or androgens during puberty. Anecdotally, some bodybuilders claim their voices had gotten deeper as they started doing AAS cycles, but there is no way to tell whether that is due to water retention. There is probably temporary water retention as well as permanent structural remodeling.

Try listen to Leyla Hormozi (wife of Alex Hormozi) on YouTube. She probably tried androgens for bodybuilding purposes, which lowered her voice pitch permanently. Something that is therapeutically used in FTM transgender individuals as well.

In middle school, one of my classmates was always super small and weak. He got bullied hard. As we had class reunion 6 years later (now 19 years old), he was jacked as hell. He also had the deepest voice I had ever heard. Even though he claimed “natural”, he probably did some anabolic steroids in high school (and presumably quite a lot). In puberty, the body is quite plastic and can remodel. His facial structure got very masculine, his penis size (probably) quite big (as penis size is driven by DHT), and his voice unnaturally deep. This is what Clavicular calls “pubertymaxxing”. It works.

Anyway, about a year ago, I decided to have filler injected into my vocal cords experimentally by a good ENT doctor. I opted for a crosslinked hyaluronic acid, the stuff women inject into their face and lips to plump them up. I had 0.15ml injected bilaterally next to the outer lateral part of my vocal fold to increase their mass, which should lower pitch and make my voice more resonant temporarily (until the hyaluronic acid is metabolized).

To numb the gag reflex, a lot of xylocaine was used, sprayed down my throat. This was the hardest and most uncomfortable part. It felt like I was suffocating for 20 minutes, as my vocal folds could barely move. After my "voice lift", I had to rest my voice for 48 hours. The best part was accepting phone calls, where I was growling like a dying lion.

After 3 to 4 days, it started to sound completely natural and I loved the result. I went from 120 Hz fundamental frequency (75th percentile of the male spectrum) to 105 Hz, basically going from Elijah Wood to Bruce Willis. I just sounded like I normally do, but deeper and more resonant.

Here is a clip of me about a week after my voice lift (Link). Unfortunately, the result only lasted for about a month, presumably because the ENT doctor only injected a very low amount.

The experiment was fun, though I decided against repeating it, mostly because I hated taking a near complete voice rest for 2 days.

If I did this more often, some fibrosis would presumably occur, potentially lowering my pitch permanently. Even better, autologous fat transplantation into my vocal cords would be an alternative, with the effects in many people being permanent.

It is basically a transplantation of abdominal fat (which contains more adipocyte progenitor cells than fat from, say, the buttocks region) into the vocal folds to plump them up. Because fat is supple, the vibrating capacity of the vocal folds is not affected. Nor is there a prolonged inflammatory reaction, since the tissue is non-foreign.

Two months after my hyaluronic acid experiment, I ran an experiment to gain 1kg per month (gaining 7 to 8kg total). My voice quality improved automatically over time.

Similarly, on my TRT-lite protocol, my estradiol is about double what it was before, which causes water retention. Furthermore, estradiol has a trophic effect on the vocal fold lamina propria (the mucosal lining of the vocal folds), which is responsible for holding moisture. On it, my voice equilibrium is a tad better.

At the moment, my voice is around 115 Hz and is fairly more resonant than before. However, particularly leanness seems to screw up my voice more than it does seem to screw up the voice of other people.

At the moment, I take hydrating electrolytes in the morning, which helps my body hold a little more water. I also take 10g of creatine a day. This increases intracellular water content and therefore plumps up my vocal muscle a bit. Whenever I stop the creatine, my voice starts to sound worse. However, I do both of these interventions for other reasons and their effects on the voice is just a nice add-on.

The only thing I currently do specifically for my voice is neck exercises a couple of times per week. Particularly training the sternocleidomastoid muscles (the long muscles on the outside of the neck) relaxes the vocal cords, as baseline muscle tone decreases as the muscle gets stronger. At first I thought this was a broscience thing, but after trying it myself, I could see that it worked a little bit. I use 2x 5kg exercise sandbags instead of a neck harness. It also adds a bit of neck mass, which affects vocal depth and resonance.

When my voice is particularly bad, I sometimes take 15mcg of desmopressin sublingually or 0.05mg of fludrocortisone a couple of hours before an important event, such as when giving a talk or having an “important” date. This makes my voice vibrate better. I would rather not do this but the voice cards I had been dealt are quite bad, probably my worst feature I´d say.

The only thing that I found to consistently work for my voice is not beeing too lean. On my last DEXA-scan my body fat was 8.9%, considerably leaner than what would be optimal for my physiology. This is thanks to metreleptin, which keeps my sub-10% body fat physiology functioning as it had 20%.

At the low-body fat end of the spectrum, leptin is much more powerful than GLP-1 agonists (my experience here), which do not remove the other adaptations to starvation (e.g., energy, mood, libido, etc.) in a way leptin agonists do. For the time being I decided to trade a resonant voice for a chiseled face. But life consists of tradeoffs, unfortunately.