[AE.Personal] Voicing My Concerns
A big part of my plans for boosting NiNoBilMa as we go into and through 2022 is holding virtual events, like group write-ins or writing streams. This idea was appealing to me in the abstract, but as I started planning them out, I found myself very anxious and insecure about the idea of speaking on mic.
As I picked apart that anxiety, I came to realize how much of the trajectory of my adult life has been towards the minimizing of spoken conversation. I stopped working outside the home. Changing life circumstances have drastically decreased the amount of time I spend each year in the company of my siblings and extended family. I can go weeks without saying a word to anybody beyond the two people and two cats I live with, and I don't seek out conversation very often because... well, at this point, I kind of thing it's just that I don't seek out conversation very often because I haven't been seeking out conversation very often. Counter to a lot of similarly-online people's pandemic experiences, I haven't spent much time on Zoom or Skype or whatever, and even before the pandemic I didn't feel in any way like I was well-practiced at speaking with people.
There are multiple vicious cycles at play here in terms of things like anxiety, confidence, habit, physicality, etc. By not talking to people, I've trained myself not to talk to people, and I think this has spillover effects outside the area of oral communication. I'm less conversational and communicative in social media, where I feel more comfortable talking to the void and hoping someone might find it interesting or useful than I do carrying on dialogue. I find myself inhibited and self-conscious when I set out to write a newsletter or a piece of fiction. If I have something to say, it takes me longer to spin up the necessary engines to put it into words and communicate it. And when I do speak out loud, the quality and clarity of my speech is reduced, which only further diminishes my confidence.
As I contemplated all of this, I decided that having identified the problem, I should try doing something about it. That's the kind of clarity that ADHD meds have given me. I came up with a few different solutions.
The one that sprang to mind immediately was that I could simply spend more time talking to the people who are around me. I decided to raise the subject with my partner Jack and let him know that I would like it if we could spend more time each day just talking as an activity, rather than as something that happens incidentally while we're doing other things. Three days later, after I had successfully communicated this desire to him via email, he agreed. My existence as a silent phantom haunting her own house has always been a matter of my choices and habits, not his preferences or needs.
My second idea was to see what I could find on the internet in the area of vocal training or speech coaching. I had read a lot of material about voice training with a trans femme focus... oh, geez, decades ago. Years before YouTube was a thing. As much as I have a general preference for reading instructions than watching videos that purport to tell or show how something is done, this is one area in particular where being able to see and hear what someone is doing works better for me than reading them trying to describe it.
I found a number of different videos from different channels, some that take a wide angle approach to generally improving one's speaking ability and some that have a gendered bent. In any case, I sampled primarily by finding their "very basic" and "beginner" videos, since that was where I would be starting.
The ones that I found both the most interesting and the most useful were the ones that focused as much on the physical mechanics of voice and the pedagogy of practice (learning how to learn, basically) as they did on "here are things you can do to improve your voice". After I started focusing on these channels, I feel like even in under a week I have a much greater understanding of my voice as an instrument and how I can control it, even if I haven't gained much ability yet in terms of that control.
Without those extra layers, a lot of the voice training stuff I have found both recently and in my previous, text-based forays into this area felt like those cliché art guides that Tumblr makes fun of, where it's like
How To Draw A Horse
Step 1: Draw an oval.
Step 2: Draw another oval.
Step 3: Horse!
and the finished picture is an elaborately detailed representation of a horse, where you can see where the two ovals form part of the basis for it but the "how-to" guide doesn't give you any guidance in how to get from the ovals to the horse.
And of course, without a ton of practice, the most detailed instructions in the world would not let an untrained artist go from ovals to horses... but practice only makes perfect if you know what to practice, and how, and why.
There are two channels in particular that, in my mind, have avoided that and so have become the foundation of my self-guided vocal training. Now, as a word of caution, I have been focusing on a small number of very short or very introductory videos that I have been watching and working with over and over again, so I cannot vouch for these channels or the people behind them in any kind of broad, universal sense. I might get three more videos in and find out one of them also pioneered the Cruella Challenge or something.
With that caveat, here's what I've been using:
The channel I have been using the most is Trans Voice Lessons (https://www.youtube.com/TransVoiceLessons). The comments on her videos include trans women who are working on improving their vocal presentation/lowering their vocal dysphoria, but also cis women who want to learn how to control their voices better, and cis men trying to improve their voice acting skills for roleplay or other forms of improv. Her videos go deep into the mechanical and physiological mechanisms behind voice as well as what actually goes into the art of practice. Her video on "How To Master Anything" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fylIX28mlyY) relates each of the 7 guidelines she uses to her style of voice training, but as the title suggests, the principles are broadly applicable to any subject of mastery.
The other, more general-purpose channel is Improve Your Voice (https://www.youtube.com/ImproveYourVoice). This one honestly vibes more with my personal goals than one that is focused specifically on voice feminization, but I have been using it less often mainly because the other channel is better organized for someone seeking a from-the-ground-up approach to firming up their vocal control or making over their vocal presentation. One thing I do like about Improve Your Voice's organization is that it is results oriented. If there's a specific thing you'd like to know how to do with your voice, there's probably a video for it on the channel, somewhere.
Anyway, as I said above, I can't point to much change in how I speak. I have learned how to do a few things with my vocal apparatus that I can see the use of, as I learn how to do them more reliably and more easily, but being able to make wider ranges of sounds isn't the same as being better at speaking.
I have been conflicted about writing and sharing this post because of the lack of anything I could point to that I have done with this stuff, but... well, what aren't I conflicted about writing and sharing? That's kind of the rub here. And not talking about something because I can't produce original ~*content*~ that stems from it is just giving into the fallacy that everything has to be monetized to be worthwhile.
But as I outlined this post, it occurred to me that even if I can't hear a difference, it would still be useful to record how my voice sounds now, if only to give myself a basis for comparison as I make progress.
So tomorrow and in the following weeks, I will be looking at my shorter works and public domain texts to find some things I can make test recordings of. I don't think all of them will necessarily be released to the internet as consumable content, but I would be surprised if none of them do.
Even if I don't think I sound that great, I am increasingly convinced that anything I can do to lower the temper on my inhibitions can only help me write better, more easily, and more often.