What is voice therapy?

Voice therapy uses vocal cord exercises to prevent or treat voice disorders like hoarseness and laryngitis. Speech-language pathologists, respiratory therapists and voice coaches provide voice therapy. Transgender voice therapy helps transgender individuals control their pitch to achieve higher or lower voices.

Voice therapy helps people with voice disorders change vocal behaviors and heal their vocal cords. The therapy helps your voice sound stronger and more like it did before the voice disorder. Voice therapy can also help prevent a voice disorder. And people who are transgender may benefit from a type of voice therapy called gender-affirming voice therapy.

What are voice disorders?

Voice disorders affect your voice box (larynx), and can cause a consistent or inconsistent change in your voice. The larynx is the area of your throat that contains your vocal cords. It also has the muscles you need to talk, breathe and swallow. Voice disorders can change the quality, pitch or loudness of your
voice. Your voice may sound strained, husky or weak. Sometimes, your voice becomes a whisper or disappears altogether.

What does a Voice Therapist Do?

The goal of voice therapy is to improve or completely eliminate challenges related to the production of vocal sounds (also known as phonation) in the larynx or voice box. Once therapy has been completed, the voice should sound strong and free of any hoarseness. Voice therapy can also be used as a preventive measure, aiming to strengthen and train the voice so as to avoid any such problems completely. Voice therapy can include a variety of customized techniques and exercises that are provided by an experienced and knowledgeable speech therapist.