The Ties That Bind (Raspy Voice)

[static_whisper]

10 April 2021: Part of the thing with The Ties That Bind is that Malcolm’s voice box has been damaged, and he talks with a “raspy whisper” when not using Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). This runs counter to my usual editing process, so I’m trying to put down some notes, in the hopes that I’ll remember this.

So, first, I think I put in my ao3 profile but haven’t bothered mentioning this here before, but I have acquired subglottic stenosis. Due to prolonged intubation as an infant in the NICU [neonatal intensive care unit], I have scar buildup and a resultant narrowing in (more or less) the bit of your airway below the vocal cords but before you’re actually in the trachea proper. Since I was an infant (and everything was all small and close together), it’s also possible that the breathing tube affected my vocal cords a bit as well.

Some medical people will recognize where the subglottic airway is and know what the cricoid is, but that’s pretty much what I’ve understood and told others when necessary. As far as I’m aware, I never underwent any surgical corrections, and I did not need to have a tracheostomy tube inserted, which are usually for more severe cases. I occasionally have some stridor [high pitched whistling noise when breathing], and my voice is described as hoarse, a whisper, or ‘distinctive’ by others.

My uploaded podfics go through a fair bit of editing, including cutting out breathing when I can. I leave my fans running in my room, so that the Noise Reduction will also have more of an effect on the spoken parts. Then Normalization, Equalization (Bass Boost), Low Pass Filter, and Change Pitch as described elsewhere. However, for the purposes of doing Malcolm’s voice in “Bound to Possibility”, I didn’t really do as much. I turned off the fans, generated silence between words, and ultimately did a separate Noise Reduction (with less of an effect on the spoken parts). I normalized to match the rest of the podfic, and I still did the usual Change Pitch, but I didn’t do anything else.