Speech Therapy - Part Two

Well I have been for a few sessions now and it seems to be going quite well. Today was the fourth session and seemed to go really well.

I think the thing that surprises me most is how sore and tired your voice gets. When you think about it you are getting a set of muscles to do something different. If it happened in the gym you wouldn't think twice about it but when it comes to voice I've been a bit surprised.

I'd read in many places about not damaging the voice. I thought this meant getting hoarse and if you weren't careful developing nodules. However, this is different. It is a genuine tiredness of the muscles.

I've been practicing reading small phrases and when I tried to do more natural phrases my pitch would gradually lower as I paused to think between sentences. The way around this was to extend words like 'and' between the actual sentences. This allows me to keep the pitch so that when I start to speak again the pitch is roughly the same.

My homework for the next week is to try phrases that are natural to me (rather than read out) and I think it is time to try them on people. Of all the things that I've done as my transition continues, this, for me has definitely been the most fun.