How Voice Training & Voice Therapy Work at Prismatic
Starting voice work can feel like a big step, especially if you’ve had negative experiences with healthcare before. Here’s exactly what happens from your first conversation to your last session, so there are no surprises. Every step happens online by secure video, and you can pause, ask questions, or change your mind at any point.
Your Path, Step by Step
1. Free 30-Minute Consultation
Meet a clinician, ask anything, and decide whether to move forward. If you’re already sure, you can skip straight to an assessment. Book on the booking page. Your clinician will confirm your booking information as soon as they are able.
2. Intake and Scheduling
If you choose to proceed with an assessment, your clinician will send intake forms to your email via our HIPAA-compliant platform, SimplePractice. You are welcome to contact them if you have any questions about the forms.
3. Voice Assessment ($100, 45 minutes)
We review your intake form responses, measure your current voice using standardized and dynamic methods, and get started exploring your voice together. This gives us a baseline to create long- and short-term goals and measure your progress against. Your clinician will write a summary of their findings and tentative goals in a Plan Of Care, which you will review with them during your next session. Standardized tools compare your voice to national norms; dynamic methods capture what numbers can’t, like how your voice feels to you.
4. Training and Treatment Sessions ($100, 45 minutes)
We work on your goals, track your response, and adjust methods to fit how you learn. These typically begin weekly, with decreasing frequency as you become more confident in the work you get in outside of the therapy room. Total number of sessions is difficult to predict, but we aim for clients to move through our work together in approximately 10-12 sessions.
5. Discord Community Support
After their third paid session, clients pursuing gender-affirming voice work with us gain access to our private Discord server, where they can connect with other current and former clients for voice practice, advice, and friendship.
6. Discharge and Free Follow-Up
In a final session, we review your progress, discuss any lingering voice concerns, and go our separate ways. If you consent to it, we like to provide a before/after comparison that you can keep as a memento of your hard work; some of our clients give us permission to post these clips to our website so others can recognize their own potential.
After discharge, you have a free 45-minute follow-up appointment which you can schedule at any time in the future, provided you still live in an area we're licensed to operate in. You can sldosplit this 45 minutes into smaller pieces if you only need a brief check-in and wish to bank your remaining minutes.
Difficulty Scaling to Match Your Progress
Many individuals trying to tackle this work on their own ask too much of their short-term memory by jumping into complex voice modification tasks, such as conversation, before they have built up the muscle memory to support such feats. As your work with your clinician begins, you will feel out what level of complexity provides the appropriate balance of accessibility and challenge, then increase the difficulty as you progress through your training sessions. Speaking broadly, here is the typical hierarchy of complexity we employ, from least complex to most.
1. Isolated vowels
Targeting modification of pitch, resonance, and vocal weight on single vowel sounds, such as /i/ (pronounced "eee") and /a/ (pronounced "aah")
2. Single syllable words
Also known as CVC combinations, or consonant-vowel-consonant sequences.
3. Multisyllabic words
Longer sequences of single words, up to 6 syllables.
4. Single sentences
Beginning with 2-4 word phrases, and graduating to longer material over time. You begin targeting phrases you actually use in your day-to-day life at this stage.
5. Passages
Reading monologues, books, articles, social media posts, the back of shampoo bottles. Any text you can read becomes an opportunity to practice.
6. Client-generated thoughts and observations
Moving from pre-written material to speaking your mind in your target voice, describing objects and expressing your emotions.
7. Conversation
Free-flowing conversation with your clinician, friends, and/or partners.
One Step Beyond: Lecturing, livestreaming, high-intensity voicing
A level of difficulty beyond what most clients need in their day-to-day life, but vital for those who speak for hours at a time with very little opportunity for rest and recalibration.
Have more questions? See our FAQ, review pricing and insurance details, or contact us.