Find a quiet room and hold your phone about a hand’s width from your mouth.

Leave a clear two-second pause between the parts so each one can be found.

On iPhone, record in Voice Memos, then tap Share and Save to Files so you can pick it here.

Each row shows the earlier check first and the later one second. Where your goal has a target range, the change is marked as closer to or further from it.

Small differences can come from the room, the microphone or the day, so look for changes that hold across several checks. Recording in the same quiet place each time makes checks easier to compare.

1. Take a comfortable breath, not a huge one.
2. Hold a soft, steady “ah” for as long as it stays easy.
3. Stop before you have to squeeze. Do it three times; your best counts.

What it should feel like: Steady and soft, with no squeeze at the end.

This is maximum phonation time, a standard voice check. Many adults can hold an “ah” for about 15 to 20 seconds (Goy et al. 2013, via the Sydney Voice Lab). It isn’t a gender measure; it shows how steadily your breath supports your voice, and tracking it over time shows change.

Pitch is how high or low your voice sounds. It’s measured in hertz (Hz): how many times your vocal folds vibrate each second.

Typical speaking pitch is about 90 to 155 Hz for men and 165 to 255 Hz for women. Between 145 and 165 Hz is described as an overlap zone, where listeners could hear either.

Resonance is the size of the space your voice rings in above the vocal folds. A smaller space sounds brighter; a larger one sounds darker.

Voice Compass measures it from the first three formants of your held “ee” and “ah”, then places you on a scale where 0 is the typical men’s average and 100 the typical women’s.

Listeners rely on resonance heavily: a 2021 study of 379 speakers found it mattered more than earlier research suggested, and another found some evidence that listeners used F2 alongside pitch when rating femininity (Houle and Levi 2021).

Voice Compass also estimates resonance from all the vowels in your reading, which is closer to what people hear day to day. It uses a fixed analysis setting, so raising your pitch doesn’t move it on its own: in tests, synthetic voices with a typical men’s vocal tract stayed near 0 whether they spoke at 115 or 210 Hz.

Your range is the span from the lowest to the highest comfortable note in your siren. It’s shown in hertz and in semitones; 12 semitones make an octave.

Melody, or intonation, is how your pitch moves through a phrase: rising, falling or staying level. Voice Compass measures how far your pitch travels each second, how wide your phrases are, and whether each phrase ends rising, falling or level.

In a 2025 study that included trans speakers, more pitch movement and fewer flat phrases went with higher femininity ratings, and flatter phrases with more masculine ratings. Earlier studies had mixed results, so treat melody as one ingredient among several (Papeleu et al. 2025).

Pace is how many syllables you say per second. Voice Compass finds syllables from peaks in loudness, following de Jong and Wempe (2009), and the reading passage has 60 syllables. Pauses are silences of at least 0.3 seconds.

Pace isn’t a dependable gender cue: a study of audiobook narrators found no difference between men and women (Stolarski 2019). It’s shown so you can see how you read.

Steadiness is how much your pitch wobbles while you hold a vowel, in cents; 100 cents make a semitone. Lower is steadier.

Clarity is the harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR): how much of the sound is clear tone rather than breath or noise. A reference sheet from the Sydney Voice Lab lists 20 dB and above as typical of voices without a disorder (Warhurst et al. 2012). Phone microphones and room noise pull it down, so use it as a rough guide.

The same sheet notes that adults typically hold an “ah” for about 15 to 20 seconds (Goy et al. 2013), which the Long “ah” exercise measures.

Keep sessions short and easy, and stop if your throat hurts or your voice goes hoarse. Warm up first and finish with an easy hum.

ASHA, the US professional body for speech and language therapists, warns that changing your voice without guidance can lead to strain, and that pitch-tuning apps aren’t designed for voice work and can encourage strained practice. If you can, use tools like this alongside a therapist.

The NHS advises seeing a GP if hoarseness hasn’t improved after 2 weeks.

A speech and language therapist who works in gender-affirming voice care can assess you in person and tailor the work to your goals.

In Ireland, the HSE National Gender Service has speech and language therapists on its team.

ASHA suggests practising in realistic situations, such as phone and video calls or ordering in a café, so a new voice carries over into everyday life.

The Hum into words and Everyday phrases exercises are a step toward that: they start from a sound where your target is easy to find and move it into real speech.

• Straw slides are a semi-occluded vocal tract exercise: partly closing the mouth changes the air pressure above the vocal folds in a way that helps them vibrate easily (Titze 2006). ASHA lists them for gender-affirming voice work.
• Easy hum comes from resonant voice therapy, which a systematic review found has a moderate level of evidence for easier, clearer voicing (Yiu et al. 2017).
• Pitch ladder moves pitch in small steps. ASHA describes using vocal function exercises to safely shift the pitch range, and a systematic review found those exercises effective across normal and disordered voices (Angadi et al. 2019).
• Resonance meter and Dark and bright practise vowel modification and formant shifting, which ASHA lists as resonance techniques.
• Melody match practises the intonation patterns described under What is melody.
• Long “ah” measures maximum phonation time, a standard voice check (Goy et al. 2013).

Live scoring uses the same measurements as the voice check, updated several times a second, so treat it as a guide rather than a verdict.

Pitch is measured with the YIN method. Resonance comes from the first three formants of your held vowels, compared with the averages of 45 men and 48 women. Tested on those recordings, Voice Compass put 89 of the 93 speakers on the expected side of the resonance scale.

Resonance in speech averages the formants of every vowel in your reading at a fixed 5000 Hz analysis setting; on the same speakers it put 91 of 93 on the expected side. Background noise and clipping push it toward the middle, so it’s only shown when the recording is clean enough.

Melody comes from the pitch track, split into phrases at pauses of a quarter second. Pace follows de Jong and Wempe (2009). Clarity uses the harmonics-to-noise method of Boersma (1993), the one Praat uses, and Voice Compass’s values were checked against Praat’s. Siren breaks are sudden steps of 3 semitones or more, or dropouts, in the middle of the slide.

Accents shift some vowels, so your own trend over time matters more than any single score.

Your audio is analysed on this device and never uploaded. This is a practice aid, not a medical assessment.

Every source is a peer-reviewed paper, a clinical textbook or a professional body. Links go to the original publication.

1. Baken RJ, Orlikoff RF. Clinical Measurement of Speech and Voice, 2nd edition. Singular, 2000. Typical speaking pitch for men and women.
2. Speech therapy for transgender women: an updated systematic review and meta-analysis. Systematic Reviews, 2023. The 145 to 165 Hz overlap zone, and average pitch gains after therapy and after surgery. doi:10.1186/s13643-023-02267-5
3. Gelfer MP, Schofield KJ. Journal of Voice, 2000: trans women heard as women spoke at about 164 to 199 Hz. As cited in Acoustic measures of Brazilian transgender women’s voices, Frontiers in Psychology, 2021. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.622526
4. American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Gender-affirming voice and communication, Practice Portal. Individual and gender-neutral goals, about 145 to 175 Hz as an androgynous pitch, techniques, what testosterone changes, and cautions about practising without guidance. asha.org
5. Leung Y, Oates J, Chan SP. Voice, articulation, and prosody contribute to listener perceptions of speaker gender: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 61(2):266-297, 2018. doi:10.1044/2017_JSLHR-S-17-0067
6. Leung Y, Oates J, Chan SP, Papp V. Associations between speaking fundamental frequency, vowel formant frequencies, and listener perceptions of speaker gender and vocal femininity-masculinity. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 2021. doi:10.1044/2021_JSLHR-20-00747
7. Hillenbrand J, Getty LA, Clark MJ, Wheeler K. Acoustic characteristics of American English vowels. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 97(5):3099-3111, 1995. doi:10.1121/1.411872
8. Glottoplasty for vocal feminization in transgender women: position paper of the Brazilian Academy of Laryngology and Voice. Brazilian Journal of Otorhinolaryngology. scielo.br
9. Effect of Wendler glottoplasty on voice and quality of life of transgender women. Brazilian Journal of Otorhinolaryngology, 2023. Hormone treatment has no influence on the voice of trans women. PMC9874341
10. Hodges-Simeon CR, Grail GPO, Albert G, Groll MD, Stepp CE, Carré JM, Arnocky SA. Testosterone therapy masculinizes speech and gender presentation in transgender men. Scientific Reports 11:3494, 2021. doi:10.1038/s41598-021-82134-2
11. Vendramini BDV, Campos LMS, de Moraes BT, de Vasconcelos SJ, Aires MM. Type III thyroplasty for patients with high-pitched voice disorders: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery 172(6):1847-1855, 2025. doi:10.1002/ohn.1185
12. de Cheveigné A, Kawahara H. YIN, a fundamental frequency estimator for speech and music. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 111(4):1917-1930, 2002. doi:10.1121/1.1458024
13. Irish Association of Speech and Language Therapists, Equality special interest group: speech and language therapy at the HSE National Gender Service. iaslt.ie
14. Papeleu T, Leyns C, Tomassen P, T’Sjoen G, Van Lierde KM, D’haeseleer E. Intonation parameters in gender diverse people. Journal of Voice 39(3):845.e23-845.e38, 2025. Also summarises Wolfe et al. (1990) and Hancock et al. (2014). doi:10.1016/j.jvoice.2022.12.020
15. Houle N, Levi SV. Effect of phonation on perception of femininity/masculinity in transgender and cisgender speakers. Journal of Voice 35(3):497.e23-497.e37, 2021. doi:10.1016/j.jvoice.2019.10.011
16. Titze IR. Voice training and therapy with a semi-occluded vocal tract: rationale and scientific underpinnings. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 49(2):448-459, 2006. doi:10.1044/1092-4388(2006/035)
17. Yiu EML, Lo MCM, Barrett EA. A systematic review of resonant voice therapy. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 19(1):17-29, 2017. doi:10.1080/17549507.2016.1226953
18. Angadi V, Croake D, et al. Effects of vocal function exercises: a systematic review. Journal of Voice 33(1):124.e13-124.e34, 2019. ASHA Evidence Map summary
19. de Jong NH, Wempe T. Praat script to detect syllable nuclei and measure speech rate automatically. Behavior Research Methods 41(2):385-390, 2009. doi:10.3758/BRM.41.2.385
20. Stolarski Ł. Lack of effects of gender on the reading rate of long texts. Sociolinguistic Studies 12(3-4):461-479, 2019. journal.equinoxpub.com
21. Boersma P. Accurate short-term analysis of the fundamental frequency and the harmonics-to-noise ratio of a sampled sound. Proceedings of the Institute of Phonetic Sciences 17:97-110, 1993. fon.hum.uva.nl
22. Sydney Voice Lab, University of Sydney. Acoustic analysis normative data reference sheet, April 2025. Typical maximum phonation time (Goy et al. 2013), harmonics-to-noise reference (Warhurst et al. 2012) and average speaking pitch (Leung et al. 2022). sydney.edu.au
23. NHS. Laryngitis: when to see a GP. nhs.uk