Testosterone is a hormone responsible for the development of our body and many other functions besides that.
In this article, however, we will only overview how testosterone affects voice depth.
Whether testosterone deepens your voice or not depends on a few factors, primarily your age and gender.
Testosterone will deepen male’s voice during puberty, however, it won’t affect an adult male’s voice as much. Although after puberty male’s voice starts to become higher throughout the years due to a natural decrease in testosterone.
On the contrary, females can develop a deeper voice by increasing testosterone levels even after puberty.
Nevertheless, besides increasing testosterone, there are other ways to deepen your voice even for male adults.
What determines the deepness of our voice?
The deepness of our voice is determined by the thickness and length of our vocal cords.
People with deeper voice have thicker and longer vocal cords and vice versa, higher pitch voice owners have thinner, shorter vocal cords.
The thickness of vocal cords affects how they vibrate. Thicker and longer vocal cords will vibrate less frequently, creating a deeper voice. In contrast, thinner and shorter vocal cords vibrate more frequently, generating higher frequencies.
The thickness of our vocal cords is determined during the puberty when our voices suddenly change.
One of the key hormones affecting the thickness of vocal cords is testosterone. High testosterone levels during puberty help vocal cords to thicken, therefore generating a deeper voice.
Since males, in general, produce significantly more testosterone their voice is respectively deeper compared to women.
How to naturally increase your testosterone levels?
I have mentioned that testosterone doesn’t affect the deepness of your voice if you are a male adult.
However, if you are still in your teenage years, your window of opportunity to permanently increase the deepness of your voice is still there.
Here is a list of ways to increase your testosterone levels and deepen your voice:
- Heavy lifting – Testosterone is one of the key hormones in producing higher muscle mass. Regular exercises, especially, heavy lifting will elevate your testosterone levels to help produce more muscle. A deeper voice is a side benefit.
- Good sleep – Testosterone levels gradually decrease when we are awake and replenish when we sleep. A good night’s sleep will help you to increase your testosterone levels.
- Healthy weight – Fat cells convert testosterone to estrogen, a female sex hormone, which means the more fat, the less testosterone. Keep a healthy weight to avoid losing testosterone.
- Vitamin D – vitamin D seems to slightly induce testosterone production in men.
- Zinc supplements – the studies are not clear on how Zinc is related to testosterone levels. However, it seems Zinc may help to increase testosterone concentrations in blood for people with low testosterone levels. For people with normal testosterone levels, zinc doesn’t seem to have an effect.
There is also a way to increase testosterone through medical treatment; it is called TRT and stands for testosterone replacement treatment.
Consuming testosterone has been noticed as an effective method to achieve a significantly deeper voice for some women.
How to develop a deeper voice without testosterone?
Even if it is hard to change the thickness and length of your vocal cords, there are still some ways to make your voice naturally deeper without testosterone treatment.
Here is a list of methods to make your voice deeper:
- Train your upper body muscles – We can achieve deep voice by relaxing our upper body, especially neck muscles. Training your muscles will help muscles to take more strain without causing tightness.
- Stretch and relax – To keep yourself relaxed, try regularly stretching upper body muscles. It is also advised to do stretching right before recording as it will give an immediate effect.
- Breathe from the diaphragm – Breathing from the diaphragm will give you more air to work with. Besides, you should avoid using your shoulder muscles while breathing as that strains your upper body and causes tightness resulting in higher pitch voice.
- Hydrate – Keeping yourself hydrated will help to maintain thicker vocal cords and produce a deeper voice. Water fills in vocal cords and makes them slightly more puffed.
- Vocal exercises – Vocal exercise will help your voice to resonate through more cavities within your body and achieve a deeper voice. You can also practice in a lower pitch voice for additional benefits. Some of the best exercises are humming, yawning and tongue rolls.
- EQ – Equalizer won’t make your voice deeper in real life. Nevertheless, if you don’t perform live, then EQ can help you a ton. If your audio doesn’t have issues with clarity, then try slightly boosting 100Hz-600Hz frequencies by 4dB or less. If you don’t want to compromise your audio clarity, you can also try boosting 100-200Hz range only and cutting a few dB in 2kHz-6kHz range.
Here are some articles where you will find more information on how to attain a deeper voice:
How to Make Your Voice Deeper?
How to Learn Voice Impressions?