About the creator

I’m Brooke. I’m a trans woman, a web developer, and yes, still very much working on my voice. If you’ve ever recorded yourself, played it back, compared clips from months ago, and thought wait, am I actually getting better? — you already know the vibe.

I tried a bunch of voice-training apps along the way. Some helped! Some didn’t. But I kept circling back to one question: how feminine does my voice sound? And the more I sat with that, the less I trusted a single answer. Two people can hear the same clip and disagree. Pitch, resonance, how you talk, the room, the mic, what the listener expects — it all muddies the water. Boiling that down to one number never felt honest to me.

What I actually wanted was simpler: is anything changing over time? Is my pitch creeping up? Are my formants shifting? Is my voice steadier than last month? Am I moving toward the goals I set? Nothing I found did that cleanly, so I built my own tool in Laravel — it’s the stack I live in as a developer, and I could tweak it every evening after practice without fighting someone else’s product roadmap.

That side project became VoxAccalia. It started as a personal notebook for my voice. Then I realized a lot of us are doing the same lonely loop of record → doubt → guess, and maybe objective numbers could help.

Why progress is so hard to see

Voice work is a long game. Some days you sound great. Some days you want to throw your phone in a lake. Your brain is not a reliable measuring tape — mood, fatigue, and one bad take can convince you nothing has changed, right up until you hear an old recording and go oh.

I wanted something that could say “here’s what moved” even when I didn’t feel it yet.

What VoxAccalia actually tracks

Under the hood it uses Praat — boring name, solid speech-science tool — to pull numbers from your recordings: pitch, formants, how stable or wobbly things are, and how you’re doing against targets you chose yourself.

It’s not here to label your voice. It’s here to log change. I like the bathroom-scale analogy: a scale tells you your weight; a fashion critic tells you their opinion. Useful things, different jobs. VoxAccalia is trying to be the scale.

Formants ≠ pitch (quick version)

Pitch is the note. Formants are the shape of the instrument playing it — your mouth, tongue, jaw, the whole vocal tract. Same pitch, totally different vibe? That’s usually formants doing the work.

Tracking them over time is genuinely useful for training. They’re real acoustic data, not a magic femininity dial. Helpful context, not a verdict.

What it won’t tell you

Worth saying plainly: VoxAccalia does not decide if you “pass.” It does not rate how feminine or masculine you sound to strangers. It cannot replace a human ear — and it doesn’t pretend to.

It measures sound. Perception is a whole other puzzle, and I’m not interested in faking an answer there.

Why I’m still building it

Honestly? I still use it every week for my own practice. That was always the point. But I also think there’s room for a tool that hands you charts and trends without acting like one score can sum up a person.

Voice training is hard enough without gaslighting yourself on bad days. Sometimes the best feedback is boring and good: pitch up a bit, formants shifted, stability improved — keep going. That’s the whole idea.

Six months in I went from guessing to having a paper trail. That mattered more than I expected.