Emotions, Voice Banking and Laughter

Part of ALS is that my body reacts without my being able to stop it.  If there’s a loud noise, I’ll startle/jump to the extreme.   Our bodies are very good at suppressing the startle reaction – mine isn’t any longer. 

One thing very strange about ALS is that emotions become magnified.  It’s almost like there’s a mind-body connection in that just as my physical reactions are magnified, so are my emotional responses.  I laugh a lot and at weird times and situations (I also get teary and cry more easily, but that’s another story).  My laughter doesn’t come out as just a giggle – this is a full-body-run-out-of-breath-gasp-for-air laugh!  It’s kind of infectious.  Things just strike me as funny and I can’t stop myself.  Word of warning – don’t say anything funny while I’m eating or I’ll either spit what ever I have in my mouth across the table, or aspirate it.  At which point you may have to do the heimlich maneuver on me ;-)

So a few days ago I was talking with Susannah about the “Voice Banking” I’m doing and she asked me “how does voice banking work – that is do you ‘bank’ specific phrases or what?”  

I told her “there are two types of voice banking – one is that you ‘bank’ certain phrases so that later when you’ve lost your voice you can ‘select’ phrases from a list on your computer/device.  The other way is that you record a series of sentences which are used to create an synthetic voice which sounds like your voice.  I’m working on creating a synthetic voice that sounds like me.  Then as I type in words or phrases, the synthetic voice will say whatever I’ve typed.”

I continued, “for example if was doing the first version of voice banking mentioned above, I could pre-record and store the phrase ‘WTF’ (I’ll let you fill in the initials) then when I want to say that I would select it off a list.  In my case I’m working on a synthetic voice.  So that means I’ll have to type in what I want to say; that is the synthetic voice depends on my typing things in – and since I’m a poor typist it would come out as ‘What’…..(I paused for 5 seconds)…. ‘the’ …….. (I again pause for 5 seconds) … “  At this point I never got to the last word because I was laughing so hard – which got Susannah going as well!