u/null_not

And I'm not a robot even if I could fail the verbal equivalent to a captcha test.

I inherited this mug from a relative and it might be the perfect mug. I'm pretty sure it's soda fired on a high iron groggy clay body (RIP to the potters fingers...)

Something about the shape of the handle and the cup makes it perfect to hold. I don't know, what makes a mug perfect in your eyes?

I'm working on addressing a monotone speaking habit and a sort of general muting of my emotional expression in speech (long story, don't want to go into it... I'm not a robot I promise.. beep boop 😭).

I just wanted to share that yawning seems to be helping me figure out pitch flexibility. Specifically making noise while exhaling. Might have something to with muscle relaxation while pitching up in a yawn, I don't know. Tension in my neck and vocal tract (probably my jaw too) is a big issue for me.

I guess I also have a sort of flat way of speaking (shallow contour?) that contributes to my sounding monotone (some people have called it a more masculine way of speaking, but I think it comes from being in jobs and living situations that require calm but assertive speech). I've been doing this purposeful pronunciation of each syllable like how Claire with SVL recommends, and have been combining it with vowel elongation and it seems to be helping.

What are some things others have done to address monotone speech?

I've been working on vocal clarity because I have this problem where there's this roughness that adds depth and masculinity to my voice that I hate. It seems like a learned speech pattern. Like a growl being added in. May be false fold engagement, I don't know. I figured I'd share what this looks like on a spectrogram though in case anyone was curious.

What's shown is just humming (hmmmmm hmmmm hmmm) and I held the roughness in the last part so that it was more clear on the read out. It is something that I can sort of control and if I do it without any speech or making a tone it just looks like white noise across the spectrogram.

You can see that when it happens it causes massive pitch drops even though the main harmonic(?) hasn't changed, and acts like a secondary resonance on each. Happens most commonly on vowels. So in uncorrected speech shows up maybe 10-20% of the time, but causes the average pitch to read lower than it actually is.