I guess different verbs may be used. For example, I sometimes say that my voice “проседает на пару полутонов” ~ “settles a few semi-tones down". It’s just my own expression. As I am not a singer, I only read about the voice in articles. The expression itself is a metaphorical extension of “sitting down” to the concept of voice being lost. Such things are hard to describe as right or worng, because in the end the only criterion is how the combination sounds. If it sounds natural and rolls of the tongue, it works. Again, I read articles about singing, pronunciation, about how the voice works, so this use immediately struck me as a deviation. On the other hand, noone really uses “голос просел", but I made it up to desribe exactly that I had been talking loud for too long, so that my voice became significantly lower by the end of the day.

By the way, I missed one more strange usage:

“На прошлой неделе Витя так упорно болел за Спартака, что у него осел голос.”
–> Here “Spartak” is a team, not a person (unless the sentence is about the Ancient Rome), so it is inanimate. You can easily spot how the Accusative changes for some words that can have different meanings.

Don responds: Thanks for the note about «за спартак». I’ve updated the text. I suspect you are right that sometimes people might say за спартака. I’ve also noticed sometimes people treat белый карлик as animate when talking about the class of stars.

For example лицо-face (inanimate) vs. лицо-person (animate). Or карлик-dwarf (animate) vs. белый карлик- white dwarf (inanimate, because it is a star):

Я увидел лица знакомых. (I saw the faces of my pals)
Милиция задержала лиц в чёрной одежде. (The police detained the black-clothed persons)

Я представил карлика. (I introduced the midget/ I imagined the midget )
Недалеко от этой звезды обнаружили белый карлик. ([They] found a white dwarf near that star)

Probably “Болеть за Спартака” may be used in colloquial speech, but a quick search in Google showed that such use is rare (maybe because it is a famous team, so there are many articles on the net written by professionals).
Unfortunately, I have no interest in football, so I’ve never heard the expression in real life.

Are you sure that оседать/осесть are used? I have never used them applied to the voice. We rather use сесть/садиться ("Было очень шумно, и к вечеру у меня сел голос” ~ “It was really noisy, so I lost my voice by the evening").

Оседать/осесть is “to settle” or “to accumulate (at the bottom)” (for example, when there are some particles in the water that slowly settle to the bottm)

Don responds: It was a native speaker of Russian that gave me the example with оседать/осесть, so I’m confident that this is used in the speech of at least one native speaker. Yours is the first objection in the 6+ months since this entry was posted, so I’m guessing that many native speakers are okay with it. You are correct, though, that the use of садиться/сесть in this context is much more common.

Your comment, though, brings to mind what I call “the native speaker conundrum”: native speakers of a language sometimes disagree whether a particular example is normal for their language. I’ll have to blog about that sometime.