The day my voice broke
theguardian.com
The day my voice broke
1–10 of 33 posts
Re: The day my voice broke
#2People who liked this article might find Scott Adams vocal issues interesting (for a long time he couldn't speak in a normal tone in conversations but in other contexts like singing or public speaking he could).
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/16360/scott-adams-and-sp...
Re: The day my voice broke
#3Consequently, 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 my voice, but at a cost. It was robbing me of the natural variation in pitch and volume that people use to give colour, animation, expression and personality to their utterances – what linguists call prosody, the melody of everyday speech.
...
“You’re behaving through a veil of monotone,” he went on. “When you talk, you can’t express emotion properly. You can’t change pitch, can’t get loud, can’t do the normal things that a voice does to express how you feel.”
The first example that jumped to mind when I read this section was Jonathan Banks (Mike Ehrmantraut from Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul).
Anyone know how accurate my armchair diagnosis is?
Re: The day my voice broke
#4People who liked this article might find Scott Adams vocal issues interesting (for a long time he couldn't speak in a normal tone in conversations but in other contexts like singing or public speaking he could). https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/16360/scott-adams-and-sp...
Sad, how far off the deep end he went.
Re: The day my voice broke
#5From personal experience: If your voice does not restore in a week or so, go see ENT. There might be multiple reasons for the acute chronic laryngitis and you want to exclude most dangerous ones: malignant tumor on larynx or in upper chest (pressing on one of the two nerves leading up to larynx - they loop down and up). In my case that was not a growth (malignant or benign) anywhere - confirmed by CT scans, but my right vocal fold was paralyzed and doctor could not find the reason other than offering hypothesis that the nerve was damaged by inflammation caused by a viral infection. The mobility and voice restored over the course of a week two months after the onset but it was a scary experience.
Re: The day my voice broke
#6I 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.
Re: The day my voice broke
#7I 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 ?
Re: The day my voice broke
#8A 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), but those words at face value are demonstrably false. All you have to do to prove it is look at any family of birds. Penguins are able to recognize their offspring's cries in a sea of cries on a crowded beach. Birds (and all creatures to an extent, who haven't yet gone extinct) have an amazing ability to recognize the sounds that their offspring produce, even when the final audial profile of that very specific sound is tainted by so many other competing profiles. If you've ever worked in sound design then you understand what an amazing accomplishment this is.
From a physical perspective, when two equal waveforms come together in a controlled space the resulting sound is doubled. By "resulting sound" I mean the final waveform produced by all sound producers in a space (a sound environment, in which each individual's perception of the environment is entirely dependent upon their position within that environment). And so imagine many birds sharing the same frequency as your child (we're birds now, for the rest of this argument), and those frequencies are overlapping - multiplying those particular portions of the resulting sound wave, and yet you are still able to find your kid. Animals can definitely make "the link between a specific vocal sound and an object that exists in the world."
Re: The day my voice broke
#9Almost 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 call.
Maybe I'm making it up? Anyone having a similar experience?
Re: The day my voice broke
#10Almost 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…
No- I definitely agree. I've on occasion made a call with someone who could hear me, and they point out I am not talking like normal.
And to your broader points, I find myself wiped out after any significant Zoom calls. Even a stand up that runs a little long leads to me feeling wiped out