Meet The Vocal Coach Helping Trans Chicagoans Find Their Voice

CHICAGO — Kopi Café in Andersonville buzzed with a tone so sharp it could shatter glass. 

It came from Altamira Fulton, as she demonstrated a messa di voce exercise, one of a handful of techniques she uses in voice training, the process by which trans and gender-expansive people change their voice to reflect their gender identity.

“I describe voice training as like a form of self-defense sometimes,” said Fulton. “It’s being able to get onto a bus and to say ‘thank you’ to the bus driver in a voice that is not going to raise any eyebrows when contrasted with your appearance.”  

Since starting her trans-led voice studio, Vocal Team, in 2024, Fulton has helped hundreds of trans and gender-expansive people, and many Chicagoans, find their voice — their “desired” voice, said Fulton, and not their “authentic” one, because there is no inauthentic voice for a trans-person. 

“Most trans people have very healthy voices, and what we are learning is more so a skill,” said Fulton. “I think it’s important to emphasize that there’s nothing wrong with their voice; we are just trying to learn a new voice.”

‘It Gives Me The Confidence To Exist In Public’

Sophie Barry-Hinton, 29, began training with Fulton in March after seeing her videos on Instagram. She had tried vocal training in the past but said she felt frustrated by her experiences with other coaches.

“I was paired with a teacher who I got along well with, but they just didn’t quite seem to get what my long-term voice goals were,” said Barry-Hinton. “I’m not really interested in achieving a conventionally small, whatever, feminine voice.

“Fulton just seemed like it might be a good match, you know, fellow local Chicagoan, fellow trans woman,” said Barry-Hinton.  

Still, voice training has been an emotionally fraught experience, said Barry-Hinton. For her, it has involved becoming self-conscious of something that can often be a source of anxiety and frustration, she said.

“Sometimes I’ve had students who really struggled with self doubt,” said Fulton. “One of the things I would tell them is feminine voices are confident and they are beautiful, and have this vibrance to them that is very, I think, expressive.”

Fulton’s former student Thaleia Minar, 35, began her voice-training journey using YouTube videos. Seeing Fulton allowed her to get instant feedback and ask questions when she felt stuck, Minar said. 

She would have trouble receiving similar tutelage from a cis person, she said. 

“Even if you have worked on your voice, you aren’t starting from the same place that I am, and the fact that Altamira also went through this, I think, was pivotal for me. The importance cannot be overstated,” Minar said.

Fulton’s technique uses vocal exercises to help students change their voice’s size, weight and pitch. For trans feminine students like Minar and Barry-Hinton, this typically means lightening the voice and developing a “rounder tone,” said Fulton, as opposed to the “buzzier tone” traditionally associated with more masculine voices.

In one of their last sessions together, Fulton led Minar through an exercise in which she demonstrated different levels of vocal weight, going from a “full masc” voice to a more feminine one. 

“When she got to the full masc portion, it didn’t sound real, and once she finished I was like, ‘Come on, you can do a better full masc than that,’” said Minar. “And she said, ‘No, actually, I can’t. I lost my full masc voice because I’ve been doing this for so long.’ 

“That blew me away. I had no idea that that was possible going in.” 

Minar’s new voice has changed her life, she said. 

“Knowing that I have feminine voice in my back pocket, that I can whip out anytime I need to … it gives me the confidence to exist in public, a confidence that I haven’t had since really before I came out.”

A Growing Field

Voice training has been used by the trans community in some shape or form since trans people have existed, which is to say, for centuries. 

But over the last 30 years, the ubiquity of the internet has facilitated the sharing of voice training tips and tricks. 

When Altamira first started experimenting with her own voice, she picked up techniques mostly from YouTube and online chat rooms like Discord. Her background in singing helped — she was the music director of her college a cappella group and had been teaching singing lessons for years before she began her DIY voice training in 2022. 

“When I first started, it was very scary and very confusing,” said Fulton. “Voice training is something that has a lot of information about it that you can find online, and some of it’s helpful, some of it’s not.”

It’s important to keep resources on voice training free and accessible since many organizations that offer the service are unable to accept insurance, Fulton said. 

In 2024, Vocal Team launched a scholarship fund to offer voice-training lessons. On June 16, Fulton hosted a free workshop with Brave Space Alliance, Chicago’s South Side, trans-founded, “TLBGQ+” center.

She also offers a free curriculum on Vocal Team’s website and posts tips on vocal training to her audience of over 45,000 on Instagram and TikTok. Vocal Team will be offering free group lessons on Thursdays through July.

“Kind of what my project has been more about with Vocal Team — and especially the online resources that I’ve been making — is to really teach stuff that I have found to be a full curriculum that you can utilize just through the videos that you see online on my page. As opposed to having to piecemeal it from all these different places that might have different pedagogical styles and different levels of experience,” Fulton said.

Organized instruction in gender-affirming voice training was once the purview of cisgender speech language pathologists, said Fulton. But more trans people are making their voices heard, quite literally, by mixing community-earned expertise with more formal training. 

The trans-led Trans Voice Lessons has instructors in Chicago, and in 2020, the Seattle Voice Lab opened. It’s now considered by many to be the gold standard in voice training. 

Fulton met her Vocal Team co-founder, Sean Halladay, at the Seattle Voice Lab while the two were apprenticing at the organization in 2024. Halladay is based in Boston and works with many of the studio’s trans masculine students, although both train people of all genders. 

Their practice continues to grow, said Fulton. As more trans and gender-expansive people come to Chicago seeking safety from more conservative states, she couldn’t be happier to welcome them to Chicago.

“I love the clientele, they’re always so awesome and so nice,” said Fulton. “It’s so much fun to work with every single trans person that I come into contact with. It’s really just awesome to get to work with my people.”

More information is available on the Vocal Team website.