Water Resistance Therapy (aka WRT or Water Bubbles) is a voice exercise that involves making sounds through a straw into water. This exercise helps the voice work more efficiently by creating gentle vibrations that research and clinical practice show can produce a massage-like effect on the vocal folds, strengthening and restoring its tissues as well as those along the vocal tract. Research also suggests that WRT can improve how air flows through the voice box and improve how the vocal folds come together during speech. 

Why is this great news for gender affirming voice training? Using WRT significantly reduces strain to make speaking or singing in your goal pitch range feel easier, while contributing to a better laryngeal and vocal economy overall. GAV clients with additional voice considerations, such as smoking and other vocal traumas, will find this curriculum not only gentle, but restorative to the vocal fold tissues overall. My clients rave about this curriculum as the gentlest, most effective, and safest voice curriculum they have ever used to learn, practice, and affirm their voice—with the least risk of strain or injury, at one of the most reasonable rates offered. 

Like Straw Phonation and WRT, the Stanley Method is a technique that emphasizes control of voice and breathing muscles. Clients use panting to engage the breath, moving it up or down, while manipulating the tongue to isolate different parts of the vocal tract and better engage the false vocal folds and aryepiglottic folds that surround the true vocal folds. This allows GAV clients to produce different sounds during connected speech and explore pitch ranges with ease, and little-to-no strain, pain, or irritation. 

Confidential Voice is a speech therapy technique that involves speaking in a soft, breathy voice to reduce strain on the vocal folds. Clients learn to speak in a breathy voice with slightly abducted vocal folds, while engaging the false vocal folds. For GAV clients, this reduces the force of the vocal folds colliding with each other, while controlling and directing the breath to create resonance patterns that support your pitch range and true, overall voice goals.  

Straw Phonation is a type of Semi-Occluded Vocal Tract Exercise (SOVTE). Straw Phonation, like WRT, allows the voice to explore different sounds safely by allowing the client to move sound and breath through the straw. Air pressure resistance is created through the straw, which flows back through the vocal tract, and holds the vocal folds partially open, causing less impact, collision, and stress on the vocal folds, and increasing safety and ease. Similar to WRT, this allows GAV clients to explore their desired pitch range and resonance patterns at the sentence level right away, laying the foundation for a natural sounding conversational voice that aligns with your desired identity, presentation, and expression. 

Conversational voices are socialized and developed based on the perceived gender identity of the speaker, and the dialects and inflections of the speaker's conversational partners. If a speaker was unable to identify authentically when young, they missed out on the opportunity to develop resonance placement and control that supports their desired voice. I teach to the concept that anyone can do anything with their voice via a learned set of behaviors that create an automated process for the vocal mechanism to follow as often as you choose. I teach fully automated voice patterns, as well as flexing of the voice across the pitch and resonance ranges.