The Human Voice

The Human Voice

Transcript for The Human Voice (Full Episode)

Charlie Mintz: [00:00:00] So it's the summer of 2010. I've just graduated from college and I'm pursuing my dream of working for NPR, which is every bookish suburban kid's dream, right? So I've got an internship at KALW. It's the local public radio station in San Francisco, and part of my job is typical administrative stuff. I'm making calendars and filling out paperwork and answering phones, but I also get to research and report and do my own stories.

And so I am looking around the internet one day for a story and find one that just it, it just gives you like goosebumps.

It's early spring of 2010 and this Vietnamese pop star named Dam Vinh Hung is giving a concert in Santa Clara and he's kind of this crooner, it's very cheesy pop music, I think karaoke bar kind of music. And at one point during his concert, this old woman overwhelmed with affection, comes to the stage to give him a flower, and he bends down to take the flower and the woman, um, I.

She pepper sprays him in the face. Um, but it, it gets, it gets much weirder because this woman is, is not actually an old woman. She is the anti-communist action hero, Ly Tong in disguise. And you, you should really just read the Wikipedia page about Ly Tong. But basically he is known for doing things like hijacking planes and flying them over communist countries and forcing the pilot to drop leaflets out the window, and then he [00:02:00] jumps out with his parachute. Uh, he spent 10 years in a Thai prison once for, uh, landing on the wrong side of a border. And he, this is just what he does with his life. Uh, so by 2010, when I heard about him, he was pepper spraying pop stars, who he said were the face of the communist regime. And this was gonna be my story.

And I pitched the story to my editors and they said, great, do it. So I, I interviewed Ly Tong, I drove to San Jose and I talked to him, and it was great. He said things like, I am a freedom fighter and I do not care if I spend my whole life in jail. And I, uh, went around to malls interviewing Vietnamese people to ask what they thought about him.

And I talked to some experts about, uh, Vietnam. And I came home and I sat down and wrote a script and I showed it to my editors and they liked it. And. I was gonna come in and record my narration, so I was gonna be one of those voices on NPR, one of those disembodied voices with perfect cadence and elocution and interesting pauses, and this indefinable charisma that you just wanna listen to.

But that's actually, that's where the problems began, uh, because Crosscurrents, the show that I was gonna be on came on right before Marketplace, and Marketplace is hosted by Kai Ryssdal who has, what I think is, one of the best radio voices of all time.

Kai Ryssdal: This is Marketplace. From a PM, American Public Media, I'm Kai Ryssdal. Imagine if you can a place where the labor market is fairly [00:04:00] humming along where the un,

Charlie Mintz: and I don't know if, if that's an excuse. Or an explanation or if that makes it any better, but as soon as I got into the studio and got in front of a mic with my glass of water. I, I started to talk like this. Hi Tim.

How are you? Come on in. Nice to meet you. I'm recording inside the home office of San Jose, attorney Tam Wynn immediately to just making hero.

It's just, just, it's just so bad. It just like I give myself away in the very, in the very beginning, it's like I'm supposed to be an undercover cop, and my badge is like making a little imprint under my, like waiter's uniform or something.

I know it's, it's not a big deal. It's just the story on the radio. Everyone makes mistakes, blah, blah, blah. It takes a long time to find your radio voice, and that's true. But at the same time, it's just like hearing that my generic deep voiced, authoritative radio person impersonation, it just made me feel like I was so far from where I needed to be and that I was just, just a total beginner 'cause it's not, it's not complicated. What makes a good radio voice? A good radio voice sounds real. There's a person behind it. There's not some inflated dummy behind it. And I kind of betrayed myself because I was, I was saying that my voice, my, my definitely not deep voice, the voice I speak with was somehow not enough, and that was just kind of embarrassing to have that, to have that out there. Well, [00:06:00] I'm gonna atone for it. I'm gonna make up for it today with the show, and I'm actually doing that right now with the way I'm recording this narration. I am not reading off a script. I am flying by the seat of my pants without a safety net, except for all the edits that I'm gonna do on this.

But that's the beginning of it, because when you read off a piece of paper, you don't sound real. But when you walk around Stanford campus with planes flying overhead every five minutes, and bicycles whizzing by and sound of your footsteps, scuffing along, you just feel like a real person. And that's what we're trying to do today to remind you of the real person behind the voice.

Our first story is about someone who decides to give up his native language English entirely for a different one, and what he discovers about the way the language he speaks determines who he is. A little bit of context. So at Stanford, uh, when you go abroad, you sign this thing called the language pledge, which basically says you'll only speak the language of the place you go to while you're there.

Uh, if you go to Berlin, you speak German. If you go to Moscow, you speak Russian, uh, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, no one really follows this because it's hard, except for this guy.

Rob Ryan: My name is Rob. This story is about. The time that I went to Spain, abroad in my junior year and I signed, um, linguistic oath that you won't speak English while you're abroad.

There's a formal signing ceremony. Ours went into effect on the 29th of September. We were having a dinner in like a fake mission. On our first retreat from Madrid, they told us that like now is the time the year oath begins and spoke to us only in Spanish in that point onward.[00:08:00] 

But over time, I think the social center of gravity went to English and that meant. If you want to talk to anybody who is anything like you, who knows where Hoover Tower is, who can laugh about, you know, uh, Stephen Colbert, you're gonna have to speak to them in English. You absolutely cannot make jokes.

You can't socialize, you can't be friends with anybody in Spanish because everyone's switched to English. And so it became really, really hard going on trips with them. Going out with them at night. I mean, imagine it's one in the morning and you're like five drinks in and your friend passes you a shot and asks you to say cheers.

Like, why would you not say cheers? And so you have to force yourself each time to say, Salu. It's ridiculous 'cause you don't like lisping, you don't like speaking in Spanish, but you swear you would. And so you do.

I don't actually ever remember deciding why I should go to Spain. And then when I had to pack, I was like, shit, I'm gonna Spain, like why am I going to Spain? Like thinking this was very odd and like all of a sudden being worried about my four year plan and like, do I actually know this is fine?

There was definitely an element of casting myself out for a little bit on purpose because I could tell that things there was something wrong in Denmark. Uh, with my academic life, I'd been pre-med, I'd been anthropology, I'd been English, and I didn't yet know what it was I wanted to do. And I had this theory that if I just perturbed everything really hard, if I sort of shook myself, um, maybe I would settle in a, in a better or a new configuration.[00:10:00] 

And then once you're there, I think you're offered such a perfectly clean way to reconstruct yourself.

You're forced to switch accents. You're forced to learn new words. And in the course of learning new words in a language, you have to pick who you are. You have to make these choices like, um, I hit you on the knee. Do you say, fuck God, ouch, or, I like all of those are acceptable responses in English, but you have to pick which kind of per kind of person you are. You have to pick which kind of response you give. And so I made a lot of these choices over and over and over because I had to get to the point where I was, I blended in, like I had to be idiomatic. I had to, um, completely submerge myself or I felt like I wouldn't survive. And that meant that I had to kill English Rob.

Before I went to Spain. I was a straight A student from Stanford. I came here two years ahead of most people. I, um, was like a complete tool. I was the I am kid English Rob had all these characteristics of the American and of the Stanford student, which is to say, you know, wonderfully concerned with how to get through life without thinking about it at all.

Spanish Rob was kind of rebellious.

And he smoked a lot and drank like four or five nights a week. Like went out really aggressively from like 1130 at night to like three in the morning. I would have dinner with my, my host mom at like 11 and at like midnight, she'd always say like, oh, like you're going out tonight. Like, you're young. You should live it up.

And I'd be like, fuck yeah, live it up. Like that's what Spanish Rob does.[00:12:00] 

So I would like put on my like paramilitary jacket and like a Palestinian scarf and my like super tight jeans. And like, uh, ripped Converses and I would take the elevator down to, it was called Athens Park in Spanish, um, where there would be all these like high schoolers and college kids, um, who do this thing called, which means big bottle, where you sort of like get a two liter bottle and you fill out like half with alcohol, half with some other substance.

You like shake it and like you pass it around and we go to the gay district, it's called Chueca. And we'd go to this bar called Tigre, and then we'd go dance from like three until six in the morning, and then we'd get the train back home and I'd sleep for an hour. Then go to class. I did that like four or five nights a week.

I'd spoken Spanish a little bit before that, I was like competent. I could ask where the train was going and how much it was to reserve a room. But nothing like fluency, nothing like idiomatic Spanish. And I remember the beginning I was negotiating for my, my phone contract and I was speaking in super broken Spanish, was basically saying like, fun, rob.

Need fun. Phone then moves phone without wire. They're like, yeah, no, we understand Mr. Ryan. We'll, we'd love to give you the phone. Can you fill out the form please? Like no form one phone.

When my host mom's wifi broke, I'm a techie, like I'm a Symsys major, and I felt as though I could fix it, but I needed the admin password for the connection, and so I called the, like the telephone hotline, and because I'd sworn that I wouldn't use the English hotline. Went to the Spanish hotline and just had like the most befuddling conversation with an engineer.

So I wanna say things like, you know, multicasting, which is a word in English that means, you know, there are many antennas doing a thing and like maybe that [00:14:00] is the issue. But I did know how to say in Spanish. So I'd say things like. The wire that throws the signal off them, or like the wire that throws the signal from multiple directions.

And he was like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, why, why did you call the Spanish language hotline if you don't speak Spanish? This is the worst thing ever. Like, call the English language hotline and I have to be like, no, I'm sorry. I can't do that. I, I swear I speak only Spanish. I'm like, that is stupid.

You were having a problem. Go fix it. They're like, no, I'm sorry. I, I can't do that. I swore that I would speak all Spanish. She's like, you're not speaking Spanish. You're doing a really poor job. I'm like, I know, but you have to, we have to get through this.

I had a friend, um, Robert, not another personality, uh, but a friend Robert, while we were there, we would have a really weird relationship where he'd be like, Hey, Rob, like, did you, do you still have the map? And I'd be like, Si, yo lo tengo. And he'd be like, okay, that's funny. Like, but it's just us. You can speak to me in English.

I'd be like, no, like I've already sworn that I, I won't speak, uh, in English. And he was like, Rob, I have known you for a really long time, and this is like, this is starting to be ridiculous. Like this has been a month and a half of you not responding to my questions, like a reasonable way or like, why, why is this so important to you?

Should just drop it. And I was like, like I, I know this, but I, I can't, I can't switch back. Like it would be really weird for me to switch back and I want this, like, I really want to keep going. I don't know why. Like, I, I can't. Because this is who I am now. Don't make me switch. Um, and so I lost a lot of friends that way.

It always sounds melodramatic because, because I have no other way to say it. Um. I had put myself on this weird, stupid quest, and so when someone would like, interfere with a quest, um, [00:16:00] as arbitrary and juvenile as that sounds, I would be like, I cannot, like, no. This is the only thing important in my life right now.

I can't succeed at class, at Stanford. Like I'm realizing now that I don't know what my major is and I don't know what I wanna do with my life. And I'm 18 and I'm in Europe and like everything is suddenly very loose. But there's one thing I can hold onto and that one thing is like I am currently learning Spanish and you know, I didn't know if I were straight or gay or black or white, or fuzzy or techy. It was like, no, I'm learning Spanish right now. Don't, I'll forget everything else.

Um, the 12th of December when they lifted the oath afterward, we'd taken the train home. And my friend James said, man, it's been a long time. And I was like, you're right, it has. And I was like, oh God. Like it, it is actually coming back. And from that moment on, I didn't speak very much Spanish.

Um, and when the people on that, like, were getting out and were going to a plaza out of the art museum to botte to drink together and then go out one last time. They're like, Rob, like I've never, I feel like I've never spoken to you before. Like, this is great. I think we could be friends now.

Doing a Spanish language pledge for more than a hundred days, you know, losing yourself or a hundred days in a foreign land alone with a family who speaks nonsense like Ratta tat at you every morning and like rat tat tat at you every night. That's worth it because it means that you can do almost anything for a hundred days.

And afterward when I came back to Stanford, I knew that some things I was ready to do and some things I was not. Um, and the things that I was ready to do could be hard, but it was very surmountable. It couldn't [00:18:00] be harder than spending a quarter setting like an idiot in Spanish.

Rob Ryan is a master's student at Stanford University.

Charlie Mintz: Now we're gonna look a little closer at the connection between voice and identity. Cliff Nass is a professor at Stanford University. Uh, one of his areas of interest is artificial voices, voices made by robots. He and I talked about what it will mean when you aren't. The only thing that sounds like you.

So how, how close are we to a computer that can just sound like a human?

Cliff Nass: I would say five to 10 years we will, it will be undetectable and probably 10 to 15 years. Your voice, we could take Charlie, and create a voice of Charlie that sounds literally identical to Charlie and have Charlie say things he never actually said that would be indistinguishable from you.

Charlie Mintz: And that sounds, I mean, what, what's the future gonna like? That's incredible. Like that's gonna change.

Cliff Nass: Yes. It's incredible and it's gonna change things.

Charlie Mintz: So does that scare you? I mean, would you, would you try to like. Fight against that if that were happening.

Cliff Nass: You know, I tend not to fight against technological change, which isn't to say it would make me happy. Um, I think it would be sort of icky if someone had a voice, you know, something that sounded just like me that could make believe they would be, that sounds icky. Your voice will seem less yours. But whenever humans lose something, that was one special, you know, unique and special, seems sad to lose. It definitely seems sad to lose it.

Charlie Mintz: So how, how do you think people will compensate?

Cliff Nass: I don't know. I [00:20:00] think it will be an important societal change. I think, um, you know, it could strike at the very foundations of what is an identity to the extent my identity's wrapped up, not just with my face, which it is, but my voice. Yeah. There have some really important effects.

Charlie Mintz: How do you relate to your own voice?

Cliff Nass: I, uh, I like my voice. Um, many people don't, uh, many people feel their voice doesn't reflect them very well. In fact, I was talking with someone who's talking about oral plastic surgery. The idea that if you don't like your voice, maybe if you don't like your face, there's something called plastic surgery.

Right? I could. And what if you had a high voice, right? It was sort of, you know, undermining you in some way so we could do oral plastic surgery and make your voice deeper.

Charlie Mintz: And so I'm really curious when you talked about in the future where voices can be reproduced and manipulated, you know, that's what it's like to be a radio producer. I'm gonna take your words and cut up your sentences and take out your pauses and make you say like. How does that make you feel?

Cliff Nass: You know, it's very funny you say that because I love listening to myself on media. I like never miss it, and people laugh at me. They're like, after all these years you've been on like a billion, you know, things. I go, no, I wanna hear me. I, I like hearing me, you know? And I make my son hear me.

Charlie Mintz: Why is that?

Cliff Nass: Because I just think it's cool. It's like cool that someone wants to hear what you said. I remember the first time I lectured, the first time I ever lectured. I was, I was in, it was communication class, communication 106 research methods, and I was lecturing, it was my first day as a professor here at Stanford and I said, this is important.

And all of a sudden, every pencil, this was in the days of pencils, shockingly enough, every pencil lifts up. And I go, that's amazing. Holy smoke. Yeah, I'm gonna. Then like I talked a little bit and then, you know, . I said, yeah, and this [00:22:00] is really important . I said, nah, it's not all that important pencil said, dad.

He went, what? Like, this is just cool. Yeah. So I'm still amazed by that. I'm still, I still to this day, I mean, I've been, I've been a professor for 25 years. 25 years, yeah. And the thought that, like, I can say like, this is important. I can make people lift their pens like that. Like, is. Unbelievable.

Charlie Mintz: Cliff Nass is the Thomas M. Stork professor at Stanford University. Among his many appointments, he's founder and director of the Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab here at Stanford.

Creepy as it might be to think of robots replicating our voices. We can find examples right in the here and now of non-human entities stealing our speech. I'm talking about birds, parrots, cockatiels, parakeets, and a few other species with that weird ability to talk. Those dumb imitators mocking us, turning speech meaningless.

They speak, and yet they know not what they say, and that's why it's so confusing and weird and uncomfortable. When your pet parakeet starts speaking like your grandmother, who you loved and who's dead, how do you deal with it? Well, that's what happened to Claire. Here's her story.

Claire Woodard: So my grandma lived in an apartment by herself, and she was totally self-sufficient, and we didn't worry about her, but I thought that maybe my grandma was lonely at times and she loved animals. So we thought we should get her a, a pet.[00:24:00] 

But you know, it's, it's hard to have a dog in a small apartment. So I thought that my grandma might be interested in a bird.

So my, one of my friends had a, a bunch of parakeets and they were breeding and they had this huge like menagerie of parakeets and parakeet nesting boxes. And she told me if I wanted a parakeet I could come over and pick one out. And I was like, well, I'm gonna get my grandma a parakeet.

I think at first my grandma was confused, not confused. She was just, she wasn't sure why we gave her a bird and she wasn't sure she needed a companion. And so we told her, you know, just take her for a couple weeks and see if you like her and if not, you know, we'll take her back and, and we could take care of her.

And she agreed. And then I think pretty much right away they, they fell in love. How do you know they fell in love? So she would listen to music all the time, and then she would, she would play music and then she realized that, you know, when she was gone, she, maybe she should play music for the bird. Kind of just basically taking care of the bird like it was her child.

Charlie Mintz: So, um, the bird came to live with your family.

Claire Woodard: My grandma passed away in April of 2008 and we weren't gonna give Esbert away. That was pretty much out of the question 'cause it was, it was like a, such a big part of my grandmother's life. So we didn't, you know, we didn't quite know what to do and so we semi -reluctantly welcomed Bert into our [00:26:00] house.

Charlie Mintz: So he's just kind of doing his chirps, and then eventually you hear something that's not at all like his chirping.

Claire Woodard: Right. So, you know, he'd get into these fits of chirping and so he was doing that and then suddenly he just started talking exactly like my grandmother in my grandmother's voice.

And when I say talking, you know, he wasn't saying sentences, but he was just, you know, like, that's good. Okay. And, and something like that. Um, and other things like Esbert.

And, you know, no one had ever heard him speak. We didn't know he spoke. Um, my grandmother, as far as we know, didn't know he spoke and it was, it was kind of amazing.

Charlie Mintz: What was that like? Had you had, had you heard her voice in any other way?

Claire Woodard: Well, I mean, you know, our house has a long history with my grandmother's voice because she used to call daily, at least daily, often multiple times. And, uh, we have one of those old answering machines that talks, you know, that message is out loud.

So we'd hear her voice all the time in our house. You know, she, she always started her messages with Helloe. Um. It was I, I don't know where she got that.

And then she would just say something like, you know, I made some corn fritters and you should come get some. And so her voice was frequently in our house.

Charlie Mintz: And how did your parents feel about that, and [00:28:00] especially your mom?

Claire Woodard: It was really hard for her. You know, I have distinct memories of us all sitting around and reading at night in the living room, and Bert would start chirping and then I think my dad and I would both sort of be secretly hoping that he wouldn't start speaking and then he would start speaking and we would kind of look over our books at each other, my dad and I, and, and then look over at my mom and, and pretty soon she'd start tearing up and it was really painful for her.

I think my mom just, it was too soon for her to have this a, the reminder of this adorable and tender relationship my grandmother had with Esbert and B, the very obvious reminder of. Her mother or my grandmother via Esbert of vocalizations and his speaking.

And then something changed her mind, I guess they were at a Christmas party and she started talking with this man who had, had a lot of experience with birds and raised birds and all kinds of birds. And she said, well, I, you know, I have this, this parakeet and, and there's, I kind of have a problem because he speaks exactly like my mother and it's painful for me and I just, I sometimes think I don't want him around anymore, and the man said, you know, well, that's wonderful.

I think he changed it for her from this constant reminder, constant, you know, bringing back grief to [00:30:00] sort of a living memory.

It's funny 'cause I didn't know that story, um, but I did notice that my mother went from really talking about how she wanted to get rid of Esbert and sort of being really disturbed by his vocalizations, um, to enjoying them and enjoying Esbert and talking to Esbert. All of us talked to Bert, but she, you know, she's, she stopped feeling sad and feeling almost angry at Esbert like she did before, and started really enjoying his presence.

You know, hearing her, it's a whole different emotion as opposed to looking at a picture. Looking at a picture, you know, kind of makes you sad. It's, it's more of a melancholy experience of remembering her and hearing Esbert speak in her voice is more of a joyful way of remembering her because the, you know, he says phrases like, okay. That's good. And it's less me reflecting from life upon my grandmother being dead and more just me thinking about my grandmother and there's less of this separation of life and death.

Charlie Mintz: Is there anything else you wanna say?

Claire Woodard: I remember I used to try to get him to, to do it. So he'd start chirping and then I would kind of sit next to him and, and say things like Esbert and say the things that he says in my grandmother's voice and. And I, it never worked. He would usually stop and kind of stare at me and he has these like, you know, beady bird eyes that are really intense, and he would just look at me kind of like, what are you doing?[00:32:00] 

Claire Woodard is a senior at Stanford. Esbert is a bird named after a character in a JD Salinger story.

Charlie Mintz: We've been taking the human voice apart this hour. We looked at what happened when you robbed the voice of its native language. Then we took the human voice out of the human and put it in a computer and a bird. Now we're taking language outta the voice altogether. Because the human voice does so much more than just speak words, it can make all kinds of sounds in its effort to help us communicate.

Most of those are voluntary grunts, hums, growls, TKs, sighs, but some are involuntary, and that can create problems. Next step, you get to eavesdrop on a conversation between me and my friend Will Rogers. He was worried about a certain antisocial sound he made with his voice.

Will Rogers: Hello, Charlie.

Charlie Mintz: Hey Will. What's up?

Will Rogers: Oh, um, do you, do you have a few minutes?

Charlie Mintz: Yeah, sure. What's going on?

Will Rogers: Um. Um, so I kind of need your advice about, about something and it, it's, um, it's, I mean, I'm pretty comfortable with it at this point, but, but I, I think it'd be still good for me to kind of check in with you about it.

Charlie Mintz: Yeah. Lay it on me.

Will Rogers: Okay. Uh, the short story is that the upper back part of my throat and mouth. It becomes irritated whenever I have an allergic reaction to anything, especially during spring and winter. So right now it's been coming on pretty hard. The, the roof of my mouth can itch very badly, and then I, I scratch it by doing this thing that I call the noise.

Charlie Mintz: The [00:34:00] noise. Um, okay. Um, so you want. You want me to help you stop making this noise?

Will Rogers: Well, the thing is, I've kind of resigned. I, I've tried to stop doing the noise about a million times. Wow. Okay. But it persists. And, and this is the, the point where, where I'm pretty much ready to live with the noise mm-hmm.

For the rest of my life. But I, I want some reassurance, I guess, to know that, that this isn't gonna get between my relationships with with friends.

Charlie Mintz: Uh huh. So you make this, this noise to scratch your mouth and you think it's gonna hurt your ability to make friends.

Will Rogers: Well, that's why I'm calling you. I, I wanna kind of make sure that it's not gonna be the, the sort of thing that like, is gonna limit my ability to have real friends, you know?

Charlie Mintz: Yeah. Uh, and the people you're living with now, they're acquaintances of yours or they?

Will Rogers: Right now I'm living with people that I know pretty well. I'll do the noise in my room when I know that they can hear it, but I'm not gonna do the noise in the same room as them.

Charlie Mintz: Uhhuh. And people have said things to you about this noise before, is that kind of,

Will Rogers: uh, you know, they, they actually, they actually haven't.

Charlie Mintz: Hmm.

Will Rogers: And I'm, I, so, I, I mean, I figured I'd just ask you straight up because it's an easier conversation. I think if it's a conversation that I start, because it's hard. I think if you, if you hear a noise coming from your housemate's room, it's hard to be like, Hey, I, I heard a weird noise coming from your room.

You know, it just doesn. It doesn't work that way. One time, in fact, I, I could hear one of my housemates hearing me and thinking that it was an animal outside making, making the noise. You, you heard her? How, how, yeah, I could, I could hear her talking to someone else. She was talking on the phone actually, and she heard [00:36:00] me make the noise and told this other person on the phone.

I think I just heard an animal outside.

Charlie Mintz: So you're kind of incognito.

Will Rogers: So I, I'm not sure that they even know that it's, that it's me at this point. Um. And I'm, I'm kind of okay with that, but I also kind of do it. I'm interested in, you know, establishing closer relationships with people. I've just got this weird, I mean, it's something that I don't really like about myself, it's just something that I've got to deal with, you know?

Charlie Mintz: Yeah. Uh, what, what kind of animal, what, what does it sound like?

Will Rogers: Um, I mean, kind of like, um. Kind of like the kind of noise that you would imagine an alligator making if, if an alligator was to really, you know, snarl at somebody.

Charlie Mintz: Yeah. And you don't wanna be that weird guy who makes the snarling alligator noise in the house, but won't talk about it with anyone.

Will Rogers: Yeah. I, I, that's kind of the, the last thing that I want.

Charlie Mintz: Well, uh, I, you seem like the kind of guy who would, um. You seem, you seem like a guy who, who would write a letter about this actually. You're not, I don't, I don't wanna say passive aggressive, but just 'cause you're not, but just, just sort of someone who, who'd get his thoughts out best in a, in a letter.

Will Rogers: Good, good thinking. Yeah. You do, you know me pretty well, Charlie. I I could send him, I could send him a letter or something, I suppose.

Charlie Mintz: Mm-hmm. Well, uh, I'm, I'm glad, uh, I'm glad you liked that idea. Do, do you wanna try to try to write that letter with me now? Okay.

Will Rogers: Yeah. I mean, hey, I make this weird noise. Accept it. I mean, that's kind of what the, what the letter says, right? Or ex or I guess I don't what, yeah, what do you think of that letter? Huh?

Charlie Mintz: It sounds, uh, it sounds kinda harsh. Yeah. You know? Yeah, that's true. It sounds kind of like, like ultimatum me.

Will Rogers: Yeah.

Charlie Mintz: Um, well think about it like this. What, what do you want?

Will Rogers: What's your ideal outcome from this? The ideal outcome would be, [00:38:00] you know, my housemates saying, you know, Hey, you've got your quirks. I've got mine. You know, let's, let's do the best we can. What we've got.

Charlie Mintz: I feel like, I feel like it would help me to know what the noise is. Would you, would you make it for me?

Will Rogers: I don't know, Charlie, it's, I mean, I guess, I mean, if you're one to know like how, how big of a cork it really is or something like that, then I, I guess it would be kind of relevant.

Charlie Mintz: So you'll do it.

Will Rogers: I, yeah. Okay. I'm, I'm gonna just sort of lean away from the phone real quick so I won't get anything into it.

Oh yeah. Uh, did you get that?

Charlie Mintz: Yeah. Um, wow. Uh, I mean, I, I can see why that would be tough to live with.

Will Rogers: Uh, I, I, Charlie, I gotta, I gotta do it again.

Charlie Mintz: Um, yeah, that's, that's not, that's not pleasant. I mean, you went over the phone, that's, that, that's bad. I, I, I don't know. I mean, is is there some way you could sort of position it as, as, as maybe like an opportunity or, or a helpful thing?

Will Rogers: Yeah. Uh, I mean, to be honest, I think it's helped. People, uh, be closer to me knowing, not perfect, knowing that I am way imperfect, you know? Um, and it's helped me certainly be closer to myself, not not feeling the pressure to be perfect, to have everything put together.

Charlie Mintz: Yeah. It's, it's kind of a humbling thing and I, I imagine it kind of also something that'll, that'll make you sort of more interesting to these people, won't it?

Will Rogers: Oh, something that'll make me more [00:40:00] interesting.

Charlie Mintz: Yeah. I, I kind of feel like that.

Will Rogers: So, so I just put it out front and say, Hey, this, this is me, this is who I am. And I don't wanna do it in like a, like a take it or leave it, you know, this is me in your face. But I can say like, you know, if, if I come from a point of vulnerability, you know, which I, I is kind of difficult for me sometimes I, I want to just like come out with a, a confidence like, Hey, this is me, you know? But really, if I just come out and say, Hey, this is something that I just, I, I don't really like it either. And it, if you wanna get closer to me, this is one, one way, and then maybe other people will, will open up too. Maybe people will tell me about their quirks too, you know?

Charlie Mintz: Yeah, totally. I mean, it's like, love me, love my noise. Show me your noise.

Will Rogers: Love me. Love my noise. Will you show me your noise? Yeah. Love me. Love my noise. Will you show me your noise?

Will Rogers is a graduate of Stanford University.

Charlie Mintz: If you've been with us this whole hour, you've heard stories of the human voice in a foreign language, human voice synthesis, the human voice reconstructed by a pet bird and the human voice when it sounds like a snarling alligator. Last, we take the final step in deconstructing the human voice, separating it from sound entirely.

Our next piece answers the question, what's left in the human voice when you remove the voice.

Rachel Kolb: Lip reading, or what to [00:42:00] do when the speed of sound exceeds the speed of light by Rachel Kolb. Lesson one, introductions. Look your companion in the eye and lay out the ground rules. Slow down, look at me. Speak clearly.

Stop covering your mouth with your hands. Say these things while trying not to feel embarrassed that your mode of communication is so different. Realize how often you have neglected saying them at all. Silently, wish you could establish more rules within the parameters of politeness. Shave your facial hair. Make your lips less like sphincters or sausages. Stop lisping. Stop rambling. Be expressive. Make yourself totally unmistakably clear.

Realize that if your companion is unaccustomed to talking with the deaf person, he or she will be likely to do one of two things. Nod as scent and then proceed to forget these guidelines completely or take them a bit too seriously. Symptoms of the latter include wide buggy eyes, a stilted air and over annunciation resists the temptation to snort and remark that if your companion says, okay, is this any better?

It does not help. It only makes him look like a clown.

Remember, in seventh grade, a teacher who did not understand these things, who patted you on the back and pointed and looked anxious and stretched his lips almost to bursting? All in efforts to make you understand, recall how this teacher's antics made you uncomfortable before finally, they made you laugh.

One day surfaces in your memory, a class field trip to the river to collect bugs when he slosh up and warned you not to drink the water, despite the fact that you were 13 years old and intelligent and this wasn't water, it was mud. You stared after him in astonishment for a moment, suspended in doubt before your inner self spoke up and saw the absurdity of it, and you and your best friend [00:44:00] tumbled into giggles.

Watch your companion as he begins to speak. Evaluate how much you like his face. Decide how challenging this is going to be. Often such judgements take only a moment, but define how comfortable you feel. If more than a dozen words wisp by like smoke, save that you can sense their particular rhythm, like a train clacking over metal rails.

Take a deep breath and refocus your eyes. Estimate how essential it is for you to understand. Think about your surroundings.

Lesson two: logistics. Let's start with the cocktail party effect. First described by Colin Cherry in 1953. This selective hearing skill allows people to converse in noisy places by focusing their auditory attention on a single speaker or sound with an excessive amount of background noise. You do not have this skill since your cochlear implant magnifies all environmental sounds sometimes to the brink of physical nausea.

But stop thinking about that. Try to get your companion somewhere quiet. Since you find the white noise of overlapping conversations horribly distracting. Resist the temptation to finger spell your name or sign certain things. If your companion doesn't understand you, you're trying to have a normal conversation, remember?

Inevitably, you will think about how much easier this would be in sign, but recall the instances where you've gone out with other deaf people who did not lip read as well as you do, even for minor things like ordering food at a restaurant and how you felt astonished at your ability to shift between two languages and two worlds simply because you could scrutinize a hearing person's face.

The first time you realized this, [00:46:00] you were 12 years old in an ice cream shop at a summer camp for the deaf. Now, as you did then recall the immense power that you possess to bridge gaps with your eyes.

Speaking of eyes, be sure to take care of them. They're your most valuable tools. Give them a rest from time to time. Recognize when the muscles wear out and the edge dulls from the ocular nerves ceaselessly firing action potentials to your brain. Pay attention to the lighting in your environment. Good lighting is essential.

Without it, your eyes flounder and you feel swept out to sea. Glaring indoor fluorescence are bright enough, but leave you staggering in near blindness. Romantic dinner restaurants with low light may have good food and ambiance, but the conversation often takes a nose dive. Spotlights or lamps are helpful, but shroud the far side of a person's face in shadow.

You hate it when the sun dips and glares into your face reducing everything to silhouette. But soft or muted, outdoor light on the contrary is perfect.

Start settling into your companion's, distinctive spoken nuances, hope in advance that she or he doesn't have a foreign accent, or it's all over. People from other countries or even other parts of the United States don't just sound different. They move their mouths differently. Your brain will do headstands if you find yourself conversing with someone from say, Singapore.

You never felt completely comfortable conversing with the international students in your college freshman dorm, except for that one perceptive guy who typed to you in his smartphone. You remember, despairing over the accents while studying abroad in the UK or even asking for eggs at the store could be an ordeal.

If faced with an accent, prepare to assess, reassess, adjust second guess, and finally run with what you think you saw. Even if that resembles a crypto quip, cipher puzzle.[00:48:00] 

Try to avoid certain situations like driving when you wish you could tear one eye out to watch the road while the other strains to blink at the passenger seat, all while visualizing a crash with an oncoming semi-truck. Recall how afraid you were to start driving for this reason. How frustrated you got when your passenger tried to give you directions.

But for conversational purposes, even worse is sitting in the backseat when you can just feel the dialogue floating to the front of the car away from you as if you've been shut in a box even after years. This kind of isolation is something you cannot stand.

Lesson three: strategy. Smile courteously at the questions your companion asks about lip reading. Once he realizes that's what you're doing, you learned through practice because you had to. More vocabulary, the McGirk effect: a 1970s experiment in which participants viewed a video of human lips pronouncing the sound G.

At the same time as they heard the sound B yet reported, not hearing either G or B, but the intermediate sound, duh. Rub your eyes when they start to blur. Look away for a moment. When you do get tired of asking your companion to repeat a question resort to your usual cop out response of, oh, I dunno.

Recall one moment in first grade when you answered a classmates' question in this way After she asked you what your name was. Remember how mortified you felt afterwards. And think of how frightening in comprehension is for a child without a grounded sense of self pretended. Ignorance has its dangers, but ignorance is a line that you must tow.

If your companion tells a joke and you miss the punchline as you inevitably will, because it'll snap by too fast for you to see [00:50:00] paste on a smile and chuckle appreciatively. Even if you despise small talk rest, knowing that this predetermined category will help the conversation flow better, will help keep you from second guessing yourself.

An open set in which anything is possible, frightens, as well as fascinates you with the unpredictability of other people's minds. If there is something you must do at all costs, it is this. Keep the conversation one-on-one. Avoid interactions with a larger group because that's where your ability to converse breaks down.

Anticipate how it will be at first, like watching a ball volley across a net, but more and more like attempting to grasp every detail of a world championship ping pong match involving 10 people and a dozen balls in which you stagger away feeling nauseous and obliged to acknowledge that in this case, the speed of sound does exceed the speed of light.

In such situations, you gape and detach and end up walking away. You hate this, but it is not a matter of being fickle, shy or snobbish. It is a matter of knowing yourself, and it has taken you years to realize this.

One last thing, when your internal batteries start to wear down, when your companion seems more and more unintelligible. Resort to guesswork in the end. That's what lip reading is. You've read a statistic that says Even the most skilled lip readers across a range of people and situations only understand 30% of what is being said.

You believe this figure to be accurate as you piece together the array of minute facial motions, never quite catching, everything puzzling over routine dilemmas like identical looking consonants, B and P and t and D, which is it? Fill in a missing word or a missing phrase based on context gauge, calculate, follow your instincts. Make split second [00:52:00] decisions and backtrack when they come out wrong. Plow your way through. Engage in the quick step. Take a gamble and inhale and exhilaration when you succeed. Attempt to relax even when you know that you're clinging to communication. While flirting with meaninglessness.

Marvel at what a delicate thing human understanding is. Sigh and relief. When a familiar face appears before you recognize the way its planes move, the shapes its lips. Make stop strategizing, talk, smile, and let the words flow over you.