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!
