I just released Version 2.1.0 of “Free Voice Training”, the privacy-focused voice-training software I’m developing.

You can try it out on the current flag-ship instance.

As with every previous version, it will never contact any webserver except to download the source-files and it is intentionally possible to download the html-file (that contains all necessary resources) and open it as a file on your device without internet.

If you don’t want to go that far, but still have offline-use you can install it as a progressive web-app, and enable caching in the settings-menu. (If you have done so already, go there, press the “Attempt Update”-button and reload to get the latest version.)

Those things aside, here are some of the new features:

Most importantly, you can now save recordings. Just enable the “Store settings” and “Store data”-checkboxes in the settings menu and all recordings will be stored until you manually delete them.

Be warned that unchecking the “Store data”-checkbox won’t delete old data, it will just stop new data from being stored! If you want to delete old recordings you can either use the delete-buttons in the results-table or delete all local data (but not settings) with the “Delete Stored Data”-button.


The second big new feature is that you can now add your own texts: Press the “”-button below the text-box and you will get a dialog in which you can select the language, the name and the contents of the new text. Once you’ve done that, you can add it to the text-storage with the “”-button of the dialog. If you have data-storage enabled, this will be stored in the same database as your recordings and persist after reloads.

If you want to add a text in a language that is not yet in the system, you can use the “”-button of the language selector to add a new one. You have to give a name (e.g. “Malti” for Maltese) and a language Code (e.g. “mt”) and confirm. This will both be used to sort your text in the text-display and to mark it in HTML as having that language so please use standard codes.

That said: If you have good public domain texts, especially in languages that are not yet listed, PLEASE submit a feature-request to add them on the project-page on gitlab. And this does not just apply to extremely widely used languages like Spanish and Polish, but also to smaller languages like Catalan or Danish! (Looking at various people here. )

If you want to delete a custom text directly, you can select it in the display-section and press the “”-button. This does not work with default-texts though.

If you want to delete a custom language, the only way is currently to delete the entire database of custom data; That’s not ideal, and I hope to change that in a future version, but for now just don’t create too many languages that you want to get rid of afterwards.

There is now an easy-way to provide site-specific legal information regarding data-protection, which can be found in the legal-dialog (“”-button).

If you want to run a mirror (PLEASE do!), I’m happy to provide you with assistance in setting that up.

With that we get into the smaller features:

Starting and stopping a recording will now draw a vertical line on the spectrogram, just like playing back an old recording does.

The target-frequency-selector now displays the musical note and “gender” of the chosen frequency.

The results table stores date and time of the recording.

And several minor improvements to eye-candy.

Please share and do your voice-training! (if you want to. )

#trans #transfem #transVoiceTraining #FreeTransVoiceTraining #VoiceTraining #transition #floss #foss #FreeSoftware

Hey folks

We've actually done a #TransVoiceFriday recording for the first time in ages

Please note, however, that the topic of our recording is voice dysphoria, so please don't listen to it if doing so well cause you anxiety or stress

It ended up a bit longer than our typical ones, so we can't put the transcript in the alt text, due to the stupid alt text limit that not even Glitch-SOC will let us increase

As such, we've added the full transcript below within this post

#TransVoice #VoiceTraining #VoiceFeminisation #VoiceDysphoria #trans #transgender #TransFem #TransWoman #transition #queer #LGBTQ+ #LGBTQIA+

Transcript

Hey lovelies. It's just about still Friday, so we thought we'd try to do a Trans Voice Friday recording for the first time in... so long that we literally have no idea when we last recorded one! Honestly don't even remember if we've even done one this year! We're recording from our phone, rather than our desktop microphone, so apologies if the quality is shitty. Please note that any perceived poor quality might just be our shitty voice.

Okay, so for anyone who doesn't already know, our voice has been and sadly continues to be a constant source of gender dysphoria for us. Our voice dysphoria negatively impacts us perhaps a level of magnitude more than facial dysphoria, which in turn is noticeably above genital dysphoria for us. And sadly it's been getting worse for us over time.

Back when we first started voice training in December 2021, we were cautiously optimistic that maybe, just maybe, over time we'd manage to achieve a voice that sounded at least tolerable to us, and which didn't constantly get us misgendered. For a while, it felt like we were even making progress. However, we've been increasingly misgendered not just on the phone but in person, and honestly we're really struggling with it. It's not like we can afford voice feminisation surgery like endoscopic modified Wendler Glottoplasty, and despite multiple requests and complaints, our shitty NHS gender clinic won't even meet with us to let us plead our case for them to request funding for it. Even if they agreed to submit an Individual Funding Request for us, which they refuse to do, it would still ultimately be up to our local Integrated Care Board to review and make a decision on whether to fund it or not, and their answer would almost certainly be "no".

We're trying to find a way forward, but honestly we're kind of just holding on right now. Please, please kindly don't tell us that we'll get there in time, that we just need to work harder, or that our voice sounds fine to you. We've worked as hard as we can for over 3 and a half years, and we've not only plateaued, but seemingly gone backwards, based on the increased frequency of misgenderings. We currently don't know where to go from here, but it won't be something that we can easily or quickly achieve. Voices are instruments, and not everyone has a good one, nor the ability to achieve a voice that makes them happy and gets them correctly gendered at least most of the time.

The only joy we have had with our voice at all recently was making our electrologist laugh by dropping our voice down to approximate how we used to sound. It was genuinely lovely to hear her say that she can't believe we used to sound like that, and how it doesn't sound to her like it's us speaking. For those of you who want to hear that voice, {drops voice} it roughly sounds like this. It's not exactly how we used to sound, as we don't ever use our pre-transition voice except as a gimmick to make people laugh, but it's about as close as we can get now, and it highlights the progress we have made, even though it's not enough for us to feel content or get consistently gendered correctly. {restores voice}

Please be mindful of survivorship bias in online voice training videos, as well as the culture of toxic positivity that is sometimes associated with it. We don't want people to give up, but it's really important to have realistic goals and know that not everyone will succeed by voice training alone.

But anyway, we've talked far too long, and that's more than enough voice dysphoria discussion for a while. Take care of yourselves folks.