SHE LAUGHED

That day, I walked past the aged dormitory building at my university – it had been converted about five years prior into a classroom, office and “clinic” building for the Speech and Hearing Center - I knew the person just stepping out of the clinic office door on the West side. My path was along the curb, and on the far side of the parking lot that served the Center building. My colleague took a few steps down the concrete ramp from that door, leaned over the railing at the edge and yelled at me: “HEY B______!” She was a classmate in my master’s level cohort, a little older than me but as driven by success as we all were. I yelled back, “Hey F____! “I even waved. I could tell that, even over the one hundred feet distance between us, she was perplexed by how I responded to her. “I SAID HEYYYYYYYYYY?!?!,” was my retort. What happened next was extremely embarrassing.

F____ and I had both been in a class about treating voice disorders. Usually, we heard in lectures, a speech clinic would get referrals from local doctors for voice evaluations. The people who came to evaluation clinic complained of sore throats, or dry throats, and drastic changes to their voices: tightness where before the voice had been full and resonant; or weak and barely heard when there was any noise in the room; or even a hole in the throat where the voice box had resided. With the evaluation, student speech therapists at our university would gather diagnostic information on how much control the client had over the pitches, the loudness, and the ability to use his/her voice in normal conversation and thereby meet daily needs. I had none of those typical voice problems, F____ had told me, when she led me into an evaluation room to do my own evaluation! She had gotten an order from my doctor for an evaluation!

Yes, F___ told me that she had heard, that day when we called out to each other, that I had poor breath control for my speech. She explained that, when I called out her name, I had so little energy from breath control ready that she could not hear the first word. I got out her name well, but I had to really push out the sound by straining my vocal cords. The sound of my voice, F____ said, was raspy at the end. “You should pronounce my name better than that, B____!” she said before a raucous laugh. Then F____ turned on her voice computer to start the analysis of my own voice quality.

The spectral analysis of my voice was marvelous for its time – the mid 1970’s. Everything is written in code now, with the analysis of a voice done in the Cloud. On that day we had to rely on hardware capability of the device connected to a desktop computer. We finally got an acceptable tracing of my saying the sentence, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” “What do you know?” said F____. “There’s your problem, B____. We have evidence you don’t have enough breath support until you get to the word ‘brown’! How about that!” She smiled broadly, then chortled a bit as she noticed my face – usually milk white – was now tomato red. “B___! Don’t do that!” she said, noticing my embarrassment. “Let’s fix this, OK?” She went on, her smile now soft and reassuring. I agreed, making the semblance of a muffled “OK.”

We started, F____ and I, to retrain my respiratory system so that I could adjust my airflow to every speaking situation I confronted. We used the spectral analyzer as an initial training point, and I read sentences she had selected for the training. I was to take a quick breath, into each corner of my mouth, before pronouncing the first word of the sentence. Since I had been a brass player for my high school orchestra, it was second nature to start a breath stream that way. It worked! Increasingly, I could be heard pronouncing each word of every training sentence clearly, and the spectral analysis captured it – all those squiggles were as fat and frolicking as 1970’s Elvis. I will survive!

F____ cautioned me that the work wasn’t done yet. Not at all, in real life you don’t carry around a small computer to give you instant feedback on how loud and clear your voice was. She then took me around our campus on a brisk Fall Day, to practice speaking to people in different places, doing different things, and in different kinds of listening conditions – quiet and noisy; good and horrible acoustic environments, where my voice might get lost in curtains, or bounce off concrete and end up in Georgia! “You have to depend on your ears, your eyes and your throat now, B____!” she said. “The feedback you get from your own body, and from the person you’re talking with, tells you if you got it right, OK?” F____ was brusque but reliable in treatment sessions. She was a mother outside the clinic, and her attitude she expressed to her kids was “Get with the program!” Another raucous laugh, before I followed her to find a speaking partner.

Needless to say, F____ got me speaking with enough volume for every situation I faced, through our treatment program and through the rest of our time as graduate students. Oh my God, we made it! She gave me a quick hug as we left the Auditorium on graduation day – her family was waiting. Then there was a tug on my gown sleeve, she pulled me close and whispered quickly in my ear – “Don’t screw it up, OK B____?” Flashing that smile, she peeled off quickly to exit with her husband and kids.

And she laughed!