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The day my voice broke

theguardian.com

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Re: The day my voice broke

#21

Post by lepton »

dumpsterdiver wrote: post #8

A fine arcticle, articulated aptly. I do take issue with this one sentence though: > We are the only animal that can perform the miraculous feat of making the link between a specific vocal sound and an object that exists in the world. I assume the author intended a more specific meaning (perhaps the assumption was that other animals communicate via a discernable "expressed emotional state" as opposed to actual words)…

What if, by "object", we mean not a specific instance of an object, but rather the whole category of objects? Do penguins or other animals link a specific vocal sound to "shell" or "children" or "nest"?

Re: The day my voice broke

#22

Post by munificent »

sambroner wrote: post #9

Almost definitely unrelated, but I find myself much more fatigued than expected after Zoom/Teams calls. Besides the emotional weirdness of digital only, no eye contact, etc, I can't help but feel that my voice is unexpectedly tired after calls as well. I have started to think that I'm speaking too loudly to compensate for the lack of physical closeness and I'm "over modulating" my voice to "project" emotion into the…

I find Zoom calls and even voice calls on cell phones fatiguing and frustrating. My hypothesis is that it's the latency. We humans are very sensitive to the cadence of a conversation. We wait for lulls to know when to speak.

Calls over the Internet add enough latency that it really fucks up that natural process. So I find I end up being hypervigilent to try to guess ahead when the speaker is about to pause so that if I start talking now it will flow naturally. Otherwise, if I wait for them to pause, they won't hear me start for a while and will end up resuming.

So it's just super draining trying to anticipate the conversational flow and make it go smoothly. I hate it.

Re: The day my voice broke

#23

Post by mito88 »

jrimbault wrote: post #7
throwawayboise wrote: post #6

I wonder if it's possible to have effects from disuse, as opposed to overuse? Since WFH I can go for days without uttering a word. When I'm in a situation where I can talk to someone, my voice seems thin and cracks a lot. If I "warm up" my voice occasionally, singing along to music, etc. this goes away and my "normal" voice returns.

Since vocalization is the outcome of many muscles and tendons working together (as pointed out in the linked piece), I'd expect that like any muscles they could degrade when not used enough ?

could a neurological disorder be affecting his voice?

Re: The day my voice broke

#24

Post by crooked-v »

dumpsterdiver wrote: post #8

A fine arcticle, articulated aptly. I do take issue with this one sentence though: > We are the only animal that can perform the miraculous feat of making the link between a specific vocal sound and an object that exists in the world. I assume the author intended a more specific meaning (perhaps the assumption was that other animals communicate via a discernable "expressed emotional state" as opposed to actual words)…

Also see the 'smartest dog', who memorized the names of 1,022 individual toys and could make connections like 'ball' meaning any unfamiliar round object.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaser_(dog)

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/11/24/smart-...

Re: The day my voice broke

#25

Post by crooked-v »

lepton wrote: post #21
dumpsterdiver wrote: post #8

A fine arcticle, articulated aptly. I do take issue with this one sentence though: > We are the only animal that can perform the miraculous feat of making the link between a specific vocal sound and an object that exists in the world. I assume the author intended a more specific meaning (perhaps the assumption was that other animals communicate via a discernable "expressed emotional state" as opposed to actual words)…

What if, by "object", we mean not a specific instance of an object, but rather the whole category of objects? Do penguins or other animals link a specific vocal sound to "shell" or "children" or "nest"?

Dogs can definitely do that: teach a dog the meaning of 'ball' and some will then apply that to any round object that behaves more or less like the balls they're used to.

Re: The day my voice broke

#26

Post by crooked-v »

kleer001 wrote: post #14
thereare5lights wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sad, how far off the deep end he went.

very very deep end, all for clicks and publicity, which I think is the worst part like, people loved Dilbert, why gild the lily? Jim Davis, is great. He drew Garfield, collected his check, and went home

Adams has been gradually going off the deep end for a long term. See his books from the 90s arguing that mental affirmations will somehow make reality behave like you want it to, for example.

Re: The day my voice broke

#27

Post by croissants »

avalys wrote: post #3

Consequently, he said, I had done what many people with my injury do: I had developed strategies for, as he put it, “speaking around the problem” – retraining my recurrent laryngeal nerve (the nerve that, among other things, controls the tension on the vocal cords) to drop the pitch of my voice, slackening my freighted vocal membrane so that the 3 or 4% that was still pliable would vibrate. This reduced the rattle in…

Jonathan Banks' everyday voice is a lot friendlier and varied than Mike Ehrmantraut's. See for example this random Community interview: https://youtu.be/FzMrU4L1E7s

Re: The day my voice broke

#28

Post by mynegation »

deathanatos wrote: post #12

I've also had the displeasure of having a polyp on my vocal chords. I lost my voice for a few days during an otherwise "normal" cold … and it never really came back. The ability to talk came back, but the ability to sing didn't, not fully. (I could hear , in my voice, that something wasn't right, but beyond that it was hard to describe. Also, I think that was the first & only time I've ever lost my voice. I … didn't…

Sorry about your experience, I can relate (commented elsewhere here, though the underlying reason was not a polyp).

Regarding association of whispering with throat pain - it comes from (much more common) experience with viral infections that inflame the throat and chronic laryngitis is nothing like that. In my case, I had a ticklish sensation for couple of days and then nothing at all, no pain, but the voice disappeared.

Also, it turns out that whispering was even harder than vocalizing because - paradoxically - whispering requires more control and effort from vocal cords than vocalizing.

Re: The day my voice broke

#29

Post by milesvp »

munificent wrote: post #22
sambroner wrote: post #9

Almost definitely unrelated, but I find myself much more fatigued than expected after Zoom/Teams calls. Besides the emotional weirdness of digital only, no eye contact, etc, I can't help but feel that my voice is unexpectedly tired after calls as well. I have started to think that I'm speaking too loudly to compensate for the lack of physical closeness and I'm "over modulating" my voice to "project" emotion into the…

I find Zoom calls and even voice calls on cell phones fatiguing and frustrating. My hypothesis is that it's the latency. We humans are very sensitive to the cadence of a conversation. We wait for lulls to know when to speak. Calls over the Internet add enough latency that it really fucks up that natural process. So I find I end up being hypervigilent to try to guess ahead when the speaker is about to pause so that if…

If you use your phone for calls, I highly recommend a good headset that can handle full duplex audio. For years I couldn’t figure out why I hated talking to people on my cell phone when I loved talking over land lines. I finally realized that whenever I talked and the other person cut out, it wasn’t them stopping talking, it was the phone not sending audio to my ear. A friend of mine who used to work in telco verified that cell phones will often use half duplex for various reasons, like saving bandwidth , saving battery, even things like noise calcellation and ducking can reduce the quality of a call. He said that often blue tooth headsets will often bypass some of the software involved. My personal experience is that things arent’t as bad as they were 5 years ago, but I’ll still prefer the audio with a decent headset.

Re: The day my voice broke

#30

Post by me_me_me »

crooked-v wrote: post #24
dumpsterdiver wrote: post #8

A fine arcticle, articulated aptly. I do take issue with this one sentence though: > We are the only animal that can perform the miraculous feat of making the link between a specific vocal sound and an object that exists in the world. I assume the author intended a more specific meaning (perhaps the assumption was that other animals communicate via a discernable "expressed emotional state" as opposed to actual words)…

Also see the 'smartest dog', who memorized the names of 1,022 individual toys and could make connections like 'ball' meaning any unfamiliar round object. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaser_(dog) https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/11/24/smart-...

i have seen some videos of dogs pushing on voice activated buttons to 'talk'.

There was always possibility that dog was thought to press sequence of buttons to indicate something. A pavlovan reaction trained to look like dog is building a crude sentence.

But the Chaser studies are quite convincing that dogs are capable of linking speech to abstract general ideas. Its absolutely amazing.

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