How to Make Your Voice Deeper

You can make your voice sound deeper by speaking at a relaxed, conversational volume, releasing tension in your throat and neck, and letting your voice settle where it naturally wants to sit. You cannot change the size of your vocal folds or the length of your vocal tract, which set most of your pitch and resonance. Anyone promising a fixed Hz drop by a set date is guessing.

This guide separates the two, explains what to keep and what to skip from voicemaxxing videos, and shows how to track any change honestly with a pitch test.

What sets how deep your voice is

Two separate things make a voice sound deep.

Pitch is how fast your vocal folds vibrate, measured in Hz. Longer, thicker folds vibrate more slowly and sound lower. During male puberty, rising testosterone makes the vocal folds longer and thicker, and by adulthood men's folds are about 60% longer than women's. That is why the average adult man speaks at about 115 Hz and the average adult woman at about 199 Hz.

Resonance is how the sound is shaped as it travels up through your throat, mouth and nose. Its peaks are called formants. A longer vocal tract gives lower, more tightly spaced formants, and a review of the research notes that vocal tract length is largely limited by the bones around it: the length of your neck and the size of your skull. Formants carry more information about body size than pitch does, which is why two men at the same Hz can sound very different.

Hormones affect these two things differently. A 2024 study of 30 men found that testosterone was associated with average pitch but not with formants. Resonance is mostly anatomy.

How to make your voice deeper: what training can change

Volume and energy

The easiest change is also the most overlooked. Louder speech is higher pitched. In a German study of 2,472 adults, men averaged about 112 Hz in normal conversation, about 130 Hz in a raised "classroom" voice and 176 Hz when shouting. If you habitually talk over noise, speak with a lot of push, or raise your voice when you are nervous, your everyday pitch will sit higher than it needs to. Speaking at a calm, conversational volume lets it settle.

Tension

Tension pushes the voice up and makes it sound smaller. In a review of voicemaxxing videos, speech-language pathologist Rory Jack summed up the goal as to "decrease tension, not build muscle". He recommended stretching over strengthening, and called neck-strengthening advice "the opposite of what you'd want".

Practical ways to work on this:

• Notice your neck, jaw and shoulders while you talk. If they are tight, let them go before you speak.
• Gentle stretches for the neck and shoulders, not crunches or weighted exercises.
• Do not hold your mouth wide open to "open the throat". The same reviewer said that would likely increase tension.

Breath and posture

Speaking on a steady, relaxed breath helps your voice sit comfortably instead of being squeezed out. Voice teacher Renée Yoxon finds diaphragmatic breathing useful, though she notes that videos often explain it vaguely. Posture matters for the same reason as tension: if you are hunched or braced, your neck and throat are working harder than they need to.

Resonance, with guidance

Some techniques change where the larynx sits, which changes resonance. Yoxon describes a silent gasp she calls "frog breath" that drops the larynx, which she uses with transmasculine clients. Rory Jack notes that holding a lowered larynx all day is something to avoid, though it becomes much less effortful with practice. This is the kind of work that is best learned from a voice teacher or speech-language pathologist, who can hear whether you are doing it with or without strain.

Delivery

How you speak changes how deep you come across. A study by Hodges-Simeon, Gaulin and Puts found that low pitch variation predicted how physically dominant a man was judged to be, so a calm, steady delivery can come across as more authoritative. That is a finding about listeners' impressions, not a reason to speak in a flat monotone. A related study found that a breathier voice quality raised attractiveness ratings for male voices as well as female ones, which suggests pressing harder is the wrong direction.

What training cannot change

• The size of your vocal folds. As Rory Jack put it, drinking water "cannot change the size or shape of your vocal folds".
• The length of your vocal tract. It is set largely by your skeleton.
• Your formants, through hormones. Testosterone was linked with pitch, not formants, in the 2024 study above.
• Your voice, through affirmations. Deep-voice affirmation videos have drawn huge audiences, with one near a million views, but Yoxon and her co-reviewers said plainly that subliminal affirmations "do not work".

No one can tell you in advance how much your speaking pitch will move. Claims like "lower your voice by X Hz in 30 days" are not backed by any evidence we found.

Voicemaxxing: what to keep and what to skip

Voicemaxxing is the voice branch of looksmaxxing, part of the wider "maxxing" trend that Dictionary.com named its 2026 Word of the Year. Yoxon describes voicemaxxing as aimed mainly at men who want to sound deeper, more authoritative and more masculine. Her verdict on the videos she reviewed was that "there are genuine kernels of useful information" mixed with ideology and pseudoscience.

Rory Jack's broader advice is worth keeping too: discover what your voice naturally wants to do instead of chasing a prescribed pitch target.

Stay safe

Yoxon is direct about the main risk: "forcing your voice too low can cause vocal fatigue and strain". A few rules follow from that.

• Never push your voice down to a pitch you cannot reach comfortably.
• If your voice tires quickly, feels scratchy or hurts, stop and rest it.
• If hoarseness, pain or a change in your voice does not go away, see an ENT doctor or a speech-language pathologist. Persistent problems need a professional, not more practice.
• If you are trans or nonbinary and training your voice, a gender-affirming voice teacher or speech-language pathologist can guide you safely.

Track your progress with the test

A pitch test is a good way to keep yourself honest, as long as you measure the same way each time.

1. Take the voice Hz test or the deep voice test before you start, two or three times, and note your typical median pitch and comfortable range.
2. Test under the same conditions each time: same room, same microphone at the same distance, same volume, and a similar time of day. The test gives you the same reading passage, so that part is already fixed.
3. Check weekly, not every hour. Small differences between takes are normal and do not mean anything on their own.
4. Watch your intonation score too. Getting lower by going flat is not the goal.
5. Only count a reading you got in your normal speaking voice. If you had to strain for it, it does not reflect how you actually talk.

For context on what your numbers mean, see average voice pitch. If you are coming from the meme, the voicecel test shows your result on the 2023 scale with friendlier labels, and is the voicecel test accurate explains why the 130 Hz line says little about you. About one adult man in four speaks above it.