Quote from: Sybil on January 24, 2014, 06:08:18 PM
I am not simply coming into the thread to be frustrating or to pursue dispute; I would love to share what I know, but it is complex and I am still learning despite having a completely passable, varied, normalized voice for a good length of time now. I have tried to share in the past, but I found that my explanations were too confusing -- a result of my own lack of complete understanding. I only want to encourage people to keep trying and to support methods like the one linked in this thread, which I do find to be extremely helpful.
The thing is, even if you understand completely, it seems nearly impossible to share effectively. I find language (especially conlangs) to be quite interesting but, when doing research on them I noticed something sort of startling about English, it simply lacks words to describe certain sorts of things. What I mean by this is, color for example is a totally abstract thing, we can only define it by what it is like, when I say a red car you think in your mind what your conception of red is, be it the color of a rose, or brick or whatever. I can describe shades of color only because you have seen those shades and there is at least some consensus as to what "teal" or "seafoam green" is. Now, try describing a smell that someone has never smelled before, unless it smells like something else, and you can use that association there really isn't a meaningful way to do so in English.
This seems to be a large part of the problem with describing these methods to people, we don't really have precise words for muscle control. Sure just like smells we have some basic generalized things, but telling someone to move their adams apple up and back, while somewhat informative is like telling someone to drive a car by getting in it and going; close but there are alot of specifics along the way. The thing is we can break down driving a car to really precise steps with our language but for something like moving a muscle we just don't seem to have anything that precise.
In a way I feel this problem in analogous to a programming language, if we could assign a muscle the value of V and then say contract V by 10 units, we could get to rather exact precision on what we mean just like we do with a computer, but not only do human bodies work differently we have no methods by which we can measure things precisely, you can grip lightly with your hand or as hard as you can, but we really seem to fail at doing a 37% grip, where would that even be? This seems to lead to thousands of attempts at replicating what was told for me, and then once I do it right it just "clicks" I can feel the steps to do, but I really don't have words to describe them much like trying to explain to someone who has never eaten meat, what chicken smells like, I wouldn't have the words to describe it, but I do indeed know what it smells like myself.
Sorry for the rant, merely attempting to point out that the problem likely isn't you; I am not too certain anyone can accurately explain precision muscle movements that aren't visible with current language. I note that on "Finding your female voice" Andrea James relies on building the similarity of feeling from simple vocal exercises to the complex ones to attempt to let the viewer gain some understanding, but even that isn't really 100%. I have the feeling this problem will be around for some time, at least with the rough instructions, practice, and trial and error it seems that people can pick it up.
