The biggest changes to your voice will happen during puberty and will usually end by the age of 18. Your adult pitch is then reached 2 or 3 years later. But your voice won't completely stabilise until early adulthood. Your voice can carry on changing through your 20's, and even into your 30's.
Even after the change that happens in your teens, your voice continues to develop. Although the squeaking and cracking stage doesn't last long, most guys' voices don't fully mature until they're in their twenties.
A voice change is one of the secondary sexual characteristics adolescents develop. In boys, this happens between ages 12 and 16; in girls, between ages 10 and 14. The first sign of puberty in girls is breast development, while in boys it's an increase in the size of the testicles.
Men's voices often deepen up to an octave, while women's voices usually move about three tones lower. After puberty and well into older adulthood, some people's voices may change, but not everyone's. Men's voices tend to go up in pitch. Women's voices tend to go down.
In the early 20s, a healthy voice — like the rest of the body — typically shows a thrilling combination of strength and flexibility. Sadly, this peak of range and agility typically declines slightly by the later 20s to early30s, when the voice is considered to be fully mature at a biological level.
Puberphonia (also known as mutational falsetto, functional falsetto, incomplete mutation, adolescent falsetto, or pubescent falsetto) is a functional voice disorder that is characterized by the habitual use of a high-pitched voice after puberty, hence why many refer to the disorder as resulting in a 'falsetto' voice.
The biggest changes to your voice will happen during puberty and will usually end by the age of 18. Your adult pitch is then reached 2 or 3 years later. But your voice won't completely stabilise until early adulthood. Your voice can carry on changing through your 20's, and even into your 30's.
Research confirms that deep voices give men an aura of power and sexual allure. Men with low, resonant voices are more likely to be perceived as attractive, masculine, respectable, and dominant.
Between the ages of 18 and 21, your voice stabilizes because the vocal folds and larynx have reached their full growth. While there can be some changes into your 30s, most people's voices are finished with physical changes due to hormones by the age of 21 or so.
Voice change #1: Your pitch rises.
After about age 30, you start to lose muscle mass all over your body, a phenomenon called sarcopenia. Your vocal folds aren't spared from this shrinkage, Hunter says. As the muscle fibers within the folds become less bulky, your voice sounds higher.
A boy's voice typically begins to change between ages 11 and 14½, usually just after the major growth spurt. Some boys' voices might change gradually, whereas others' might change quickly.
The only permanent and confirmed ways to deepen your voice are hormonal therapy and surgery, and those are a bit over-the-top for people who just want a slightly lower pitch.
voice crack (plural voice cracks) (informal) A sudden, unexpected and unintentional change in the pitch of one's voice when speaking or singing, which often affects boys during puberty.
On the flip side, losing weight may lighten your voice if you're a female and deepen your voice if you're a male. If you're not losing a dramatic amount of weight, likely, you won't notice a difference at all in your voice. If you were severely obese before the weight loss, you might notice more clarity in your tone.
Testosterone will cause a thickening of the vocal chords, which will result in a more male-sounding voice. Not all trans men will experience a full deepening of the pitch of their voice with testosterone, however.
Age clues. People are also surprisingly good at determining a speaker's age just by hearing the person's voice. In a 2010 study detailed in the Journal of Social, Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology, researchers asked 97 people to listen to 100 samples of speakers ages 2 through 67.
Your vocal folds get longer when you sing high. Ligaments in your larynx will be stretching the folds. If those ligaments are not strong enough or if they are pushed too far, your vocal folds will not vibrate properly - making your voice crack.
It used to be thought that voice pitch in mammals relates to body size, but that is no longer believed top be the case. McElligott pointed out that you can have big men with higher-pitched voices, or smaller men with lower-pitched voices, so pitch is not always an indication of body size.
The most obvious difference between male and female voices is pitch -- what we perceive as a high or deep voice. Men, on average, speak almost an octave lower than women. And women (as we learn in the radio story above) tend to say the deeper, the better.
It may not surprise you that genetic factors influence vocal quality. After all, voice qualities are largely determined by the size and shape of your larynx, neck, throat and facial structures all determined by genetics.
What you might be experiencing is called puberphonia, which essentially is the habitual use of a high pitched voice after puberty. Our vocal folds stretch to make pitch higher and contract to make pitch lower.
If you sound like a child, it is most likely that you are not using enough diaphragm support to release your singing voice in a relaxed mode; instead you constrict your throat more, in order to squeeze out your voice.