A Palette of Transmasculine Voices

Abstract

The growing practice of gender-affirming voice in Speech-Language Pathology often overlooks the voices of transmasculine people. Previous research in this topic focuses primarily on obtaining acoustic information that will help trans folks assimilate to cis-sounding voices. This is a new corpus of voices from a diverse set of 20 masculine-identifying people, including transmasculine men, cisgender men, and transmasculine nonbinary people. The corpus includes recordings of materials commonly used in speech-language pathology (the rainbow passage [Dietsch et al, 2003], the CAPE-V sentences [Kempster et al., 2009]) and a set of 27 sentences created for this project. The corpus contains individual audio files for all of the materials, and Praat TextGrids for the novel sentences. This corpus can be used in clinical services to model different male-sounding voices, and in clinical and preprofessional education in speech-language pathology