Protect Your Rights and Your Voice: Protest Voice Care

Tallulah Breslin, MS, CCC-SLP
Jun 26
3 min read

Tips and Tricks to keep your voice healthy while advocating for our community

For . . . reasons, our team came back Monday with tired voices. It takes preparation and intention for everyone to avoid losing your voice when yelling for extended periods, even voice specialists. We can help protect our voices when yelling + keep our voices gender congruent, but it does take work.

A white transgender women with green and brown hair holding up a trans sign that says trans rights are human rights at a protest

Why can yelling damage my voice?

When we speak at a conversational volume, we have just the right amount of tension to produce a clear, pleasant sound. If we crank up the tension to yell, forcing our vocal folds tightly together and vibrating them at an intense rate while simultaneously significantly increasing air pressure, our voice and delicate vocal tissues can become irritated, hoarse, strained, tired, or we can even lose our voice or develop a voice disorder. That’s no fun! Instead, let’s talk about ways to prevent vocal strain.

Preparing your voice

Like any athlete, our voices perform best when taken care of. The night before, stay hydrated, including avoiding dehydrating liquids such as alcohol and caffeine, and get a good night sleep. Warm or room temp liquids are easier on our voices than cold liquids. In the morning, warm-up your voice (link to youtube video).

A white trans women wearing a grey and white shirt and purple sunglasses holding up a sign that says authority is brittle oppression is the mask of fear at a protest — It's great to see our team speak out!

Come Prepared

Masks keep airborne irritants such as allergens away from our voices, and allow us to choose who sees our faces.

Bring warm or room-temperature water or other non-dairy, non-caffeinated drinks, and take regular breaks to drink them.

It’s not always about how we yell, but also when we don’t. Bring a personal amplifier or bullhorn if you have one. Another way to save our voice for when it can have the most impact is by clapping, rather than cheering.

Use Your Body and Breath to Support Your Voice

Anchoring, good posture, and supportive breath techniques can all help with vocal sustainability, and achieving louder volume.

Torso, head and neck anchoring allow us to use larger muscles to support the much smaller muscles in our voice boxes, thereby reducing strain. Anchored muscles are strong and have controlled direction, but aren’t tense and rigid- think superman ready to stop the bad guy, rather than superman terrified that he’s about to be attacked by kryptonite.

Good posture, such as avoiding slouching, helps our air flow out freely, without narrowing our vocal tracts.

Finally, good breath support techniques, such as abdominal breathing, help us sustain our voices in a healthy way. Take the time to learn actual supportive breathing techniques- people often get confused here.

Use Less Air

The more air in our lungs, the faster the air wants to rush back out. One work around to avoid pushing our voices is belting. If belting is unfamiliar, try breathing out half your air, then tilting your chin up before you get loud.

A black trans women holding a straw in her mouth doing SOVTs with a rainbow in the background — Straw SOVTs for the win!

Keep Your Voice Open and Your Sound Forward

For sound to flow easily, we need to open up our voice boxes by retracting our false vocal folds. Silent laughs or silent sobs help with opening, thereby reducing false vocal fold constriction.

Another helpful way to reduce physical effort is to move our voices forward, using forward-flow resonant voice techniques. Try to feel the vibration in your lips and face, or imagine that your voice starts at your lips.

Monitor Your Voice and Body

We have the capacity to know more about our voices than any professional can, because we experience what it feels like to speak. Use that to your advantage- be self aware of your voice and body throughout. Avoid holding your breath, massage or relax out muscle tension, and notice when your sound quality changes or your voice starts to feel tired or you first start to hear pitch cracks, and do SOVTS right then. Don’t push past your limits- instead, listen to and respect what your body tells you it needs.

Recover

Vocal cool-downs and SOVTs after yelling can help with recovery and return to happy vocal homeostasis. Plus more hydration.

Happy, safe protesting!

-Tallulah Breslin, MS, CCC/SLP

Gender Affirming Voice Training @HarmonicSpeech