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What's Nicky Learning? (Jan 2020)
🕑 Added 2020-01-24 16:44:53 +0000 UTC(reading time: 8 minutes)
First off, thank y'all for the kind response to my What's Nicky Learnt This Decade? post! It means a lot to hear it resonated with you, and I didn't get cancelled on the internet over it. 💖
Also, here's your monthly Wall of Thanks and Polygon Avatar rewards!
Now, back to our regular, Patreon-exclusive What's Nicky Learning? post...
😎 Misc Habits
Odysseus tied himself to a mast to resist the Sirens' call of destruction. In January 2020, I tried the following to resist the Internet's call of distraction.
Whatever your New Year's Resolutions / Habits are, I hope these tips are helpful!
💪 Analog To-Do Lists, Attached To My Arm With A Rubber Band
With digital to-do lists, my current task would go off-screen when I switched applications. Thus, I'd often find myself going off-task.
But with an analog to-do list – always visible on these malevolent hands which doth typeth the URLs of Distraction – forces me to see my current objective at all times. It helps!
(Don't worry, the rubber band's loose. My blood circulates ok.)
🍅Pomodoro Technique + Screen-less, Standing-Up Breaks
I've heard a zillion times before about the Pomodoro Technique, but didn't really use it until this month. The technique is: pick a task, set a timer to focus on it for 25 minutes, take a 5 minute break, repeat. This is supposed to increase flow while decreasing fatigue.
It's nice! I also make sure I do NOT look at a screen during breaks, and I take time to stand up & walk around.
😴Record Sleep Cycle + Wake Naturally
I do not like starting my days with a glowing rectangle screaming at me.
So instead, I've been trying to wake up naturally, by:
- Setting an alarm to sleep instead of to wake
- Upon waking, immediately turn on my UV-free sun-lamp (cost: $30 CAD) to calibrate my circadian rhythm
- Record the time I slept & woke. (my goal: sleep at 11, wake at 7)
The sun-lamp also helps with my Seasonal Affective Disorder! Or maybe it's placebo. (I choose to believe I can get the placebo effect even if I know it's placebo. This way I can get a meta-placebo.)
💀Apps to Block Websites & Limit Tabs
SelfControl is an open-source Mac app that lets you block websites for a set time – and you can't get around it by using a different browser, a different computer account, or even uninstalling the app! (There's Windows and Linux versions too)
Yes, that's how bad my natural self-control is. But wait, it gets worse:
Limit Tabs for Firefox and Tab Limiter for Chrome are two browser extensions to stop you from opening more than X number of tabs. I set my X = 5. (I disable it only to look up code documentation)
👫Lunch + Co-working With Friends
As I said in What's Nicky Learnt This Decade?, one unresolved tension in my life is that I deeply value being with friends, but I spend the bulk of my day working alone.
Solution 1: Collaborate with friends on projects. However, all my friends already have their own projects / work / school.
Solution 2: Co-work with friends! However, when I tried this in the past, we just socialized the whole time & didn't actually work.
This month, I found a workaround: get lunch together first, socialize there, then we can work with focus, keep each other accountable on tasks, and take breaks together with the same Pomodoro timer.
(P.S: In my to-do list above, you can see I'm doing lunch-and-cowork today!)
🕴️Recording my Physical / Social / Growth Needs
My current working model of being human:
Humans are animals, thus have physical needs – like sleep, food & exercise. Humans are social animals, thus have social needs – like friendship, giving & receiving. Humans evolved as nomads in highly-variable environments, thus have "growth" needs – to learn, play, and get shtuff done.
Hypothesis: a fulfilling life is simply one that fulfils those 3 needs.
So this month, at the end of each day, I recorded what (+)fulfilled or (–)frustrated each need, and what to try the next day. For example:
Before this, my daily journal was very work-focused. I hope this new system will help me structure work/life/health-balance directly into my days!
✏️️ Drawing & Deliberate Practice
Two What's Nicky Learning? posts ago, I said I needed to improve my drawing with deliberate practice. This month I did that! Deliberate practice goes like this:
- Pick a specific thing to practice drawing
- Draw it
- Note (+)what worked & (–)what didn't
- Re-draw it, keeping the + and fixing the –
- Repeat until Pomodoro timer runs out. Highlight your favorite iterations!
(If you noticed the similarity to my daily needs log, yes! I'm trying to "deliberately practice" living a balanced life)
Anyway, here's examples from my sketchbook:
Finally, some catgirls:
🗣Voice Feminization
Slim Shady and Scarlett Johansson have the same voice pitch. (~160Hz)
Contrary to "common sense", pitch is NOT the most important factor for having a voice perceived as feminine/masculine. The secret is "vocal resonance".
What is vocal resonance? Glad you asked! According to McAdams & Bregman (1979), resonance is...
“the multidimensional waste-basket category for everything that cannot be labeled pitch or loudness.”
...well, great.
Up until this month, that's all I knew about vocal resonance. (other than "vowel formants") I started my current project, Voice Gender Trainer 5000, to spur me to find better research on how to feminize / masculinize / androgynize one's voice.
Most online resources are... bad. Like "talk higher-pitched & breathier" or "end each sentence like it's a question?" (I followed this terrible advice from 2018 to 2019)
Some are annoyingly metaphorical. Like "make your voice brighter" or "project your voice into the mask of your face."
But this month, I finally found the good stuff! (See: Zheanna's Guide, L's Guide)
They're concrete, specific, and based in anatomy. Like "raise your larynx" or "constrict your pharynx" – which sound complicated, but these are muscle movements you already do when swallowing & coughing. You just need exercises to learn how to manipulate those muscles consciously.
What's more, there's a Unified Theory for vocal resonance gender-perception!
1) Smaller spaces have higher resonances, bigger spaces have lower resonances. (See: blowing on bottles to make music)
2) On average, Assigned Female At Birth (AFAB) folks have smaller vocal tracts than Assigned Male At Birth (AMAB) folks. Specifically, ~25% smaller.* That's why AFAB folks have higher resonance than AMAB folks. And that's why Slim Shady & Scarlett Johansson's voices are gendered differently, despite the same pitch.
* In contrast, AFAB pitch is 66% higher than AMAB pitch on average. That's why if you digitally shift a masc voice up to a femme pitch, it sounds like Alvin And The Chipmunks – the resonance is too high, 66% vs 25%!
3) Therefore: to feminize your vocal resonance, "all you need to do" is make your throat + oral cavities smaller. (And to masculinize, make cavities bigger)
This physics-based conclusion finally helped me sort good advice from bad. Raising the larynx, lifting the tongue's root, narrowing the pharynx – which, again, you already can do – these all make your cavities smaller!
Meanwhile, uptalk & breathiness don't. So at best, you can use them as polishing touches. At worst, you use them as a crutch. (Which I did for 2 years)
I've incorporated these findings into Voice Gender Trainer 5000, and am training my voice with my own tool! I'll post a recording of my voice once I feel it's good enough.
(In the meantime, check out L's incredible voice demo, where she starts at her guymode voice, then gradually layers on 8 vocal techniques to get her femme voice.)
Voice Gender Trainer 5000 will also ship with a "general interest" video on the science of how voice works, and how to genderbend one's voice. If you're curious how I outline my explainers, it looks like a horror movie asylum wall-scribbling:
(As you saw in my todo list + daily needs log, I've a habit of mixing pictures & words, à la Byrne's Euclid. Maybe in a future What's Nicky Learning? I'll explain my personal hieroglyphs.)
Hopefully, the beta will come out mid-February – which you'll be the first to see, of course! – and the full thing will launch in March.
Questions For You:
- Did my explanation of vocal resonance make sense? Do you have better examples than Slim Shady vs Scarlett Johansson? I need to explain these concepts in the final tool + video, so your feedback will be super valuable!
- Many of you want to share these What's Nicky Learning? posts, but they're currently "Patreon-exclusive". Feel free to forward & copy-paste them! But, would you like these posts to be unlocked to the public after, say, 24 hours?
- What are your New Year Resolutions / Habits? (& how are they coming along so far?)
And, once again & with fully earnest gratitude, thank you so much for supporting me thus far. You're awesome~
💖,
~ Nicky Case
Comments
Nicky Case
Thanks! There are way more MTF voice resources than FTM, so your feedback+info is helpful for me making sure this is useful for all trans/nb folk > start with a Yoda voice! bébé yoda
Nicky Case
Ooh yay I'm glad to hear logging has been helping you too! And thank you for reminding me, as I read your post, to drink some water. > you need to drink N ounces where N = bodyweight/2 I was absolutely not aware of this! I assume bodyweight is in... pounds, right? Not ounces. That would be a lot of water otherwise
Emelin Ringuette
I am tracking many of the same things as you for my physical/mental/emotional/social well-being! I've been using various apps on my phone and calculating blood pressure, heart rate, and heart rate variability with Welltory app in order to gauge the effectiveness of different recovery/energy-building activities. I'm managing an anxiety disorder and my heart shows chronic stress, so my biggest challenge has been to figure out how to actually relax and let my body recover. I started off a few weeks ago basically running on empty 24/7, and that's worked up to a "moderate" level where I was able to be really physically active 2-3 times a week. Today, I woke up and am showing my best scores EVER! The big changes my data shows worked: my asthma is worse than I thought, so I made a conscious effort to measure peak flow of my breath at least twice a day AND use my inhaler daily; I wasn't drinking enough water! I was going off "women should drink at least 64 oz a day" or whatever, when in reality you need to drink N ounces where N = bodyweight/2. I'm so excited!!!
Rev Storm
I've been practicing voice stuff more now that testosterone's helping thicken my vocal cords, and found that a helpful thing to make your throat space "bigger" is to think of it as using the "rim" instead of the "core," so your voice is "hollow." This is counterintuitive to what I'd been doing to sound more masculine all my life, because using the center made my voice seem stronger, but it also kept me from pushing my larynx out to make a bigger space. I was also afraid to do this before because it locked my voice into a tighter range, but that's actually a good thing--more masculine voices cover a broader range, but they can't vary much within it, like a big animal in a small space. A more feminine voice is like a small animal in a big space, not filling as much of it but able to move more freely in it. Because of this, where women tend to move their voices up and down for emphasis (where some of this "women are more emotional" and "be sure to end sentences like a question" stuff comes from, I think), men tend to just say a word more loudly. Finally: I've found that the best way to shift into a masculine speaking voice is to start with a Yoda voice! EDIT: Instead of Slim Slady and Scarlet Johansson, the examples I've always given are Mrs. Puff and Spongebob, lol
