Voice project day 3: Fighting my neighbor’s orgasms

The walls in my apartment building are exceedingly thin, which means I am doubly-blessed by having neighbors that both keep me up at night with their drunk-ass yelling and wake me up early in the morning with the sound of their orgasms.

Ever hear a male orgasm? There’s a reason it shouldn’t be heard. It sounds like sasquatch with a sore throat and a finger in the light socket. This is my alarm clock.

One neighbor makes a regular habit of getting too high and then shouting “I am God! I. AM. GOOOOODDD!  EVERYONE IS SO FUCKING STUPID. SMOKE WEEEEEEEEEED!” This is then repeated more times than the chorus in a soulja boy song.

I finally had to speak to my other neighbor, “Red” after she insisted — and this is not a metaphor — on showing her friends her pterodactyl impression at 2:30 in the morning.

I end my gripe by saying this: Voice lessons are a baller way to take my sweet, sweet revenge. For all those orgasms and assertions about being god, I now shout back “mmeeeeeeeee, maaaaaaaaaaaa, mooooo, muuuu.”

Last night my roommate, who has been helping with the lessons, and I got distracted enough that our singing of vowels devolved into competing Michael Caine impressions and singing the things we saw the names of: ”Vaaaseline! Chips, Chips! That mouse in the corner trying to cover its eaaaars,” we sang.

This is all fun and good, but I want to up my game, drunk on the counter-productive power of pissing off the people who live semi-permanently one shitty wall away. It has been recommended that I use one standard text to practice a monologue. This way I can easily measure my progress.

Using the immense (meager) powers of my mind (google), I came up with some options, by googling “dirtiest monologue.” Word of warning: Do not google image search this at home.

My netflix queue is now FILLED with dirty movies! I can't wait for Saturday!

One is George Carlin’s famous Seven Dirty Words monologue. Interestingly, I found a word for word transcript of this monologue that was apparently featured in the Supreme Court FCC vs. Pacifica Foundation case on censorship and decency.

I also found Al Pacino’s monologue from the Devil’s Advocate, to add a demonic quality to whatever my neighbors will be hearing.

For the out-of-context angle, I found Vin Diesel’s short but profoundly beautiful monologue from the Fast and the Furious

And finally, just see if I can compete My-neighbor-who-would-be-god, this monologue from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Thoughts? Any better suggestions? I will choose today, announce tomorrow.

Voice Project 3: Like Barry White, but drunk and on the subway

If you want people to think you’re crazy, go do some vocal exercises on the street.  Need some extra room on the subway? I recommend working on your hard glottal stop.  Say the word “hooch”, just as you are about to make the vowel sound after the “h”, slam it to a stop by tensing up your throat.  Then let it go with some force. That “punch” as you let go on “ooch” is a glottal stop. Great way to get some elbow room, or get into a territory war with the guy pan-handling for change at the end of the train platform.

Here is my voice sample from the exercise. Apparently, you can only host something on youtube if it has an image, and this is what I got when I Googled “weird subway guy”. Also, I’m embarrassed and afraid of the internet, so you have to click this link to hear the clip.

The focus of my work is a tonal issue–I speak from the back of my throat, which makes me sound a little bit croaky, and if I try to get louder, or shout something like “hey!” as in “Hey girl! I like the way you responsibly herd your children away from crazy persons like myself in such a busy metropolis”, it sounds a little bit honky.  Already being a honky, I have no need to further advertise.

Much like you can’t write about dance or Christian about Jews (except Jesus), it’s proved some dumb ish to read about voice.  I’ve  faithfully done all of the exercises that involve me lying on the floor, breathing through my butt, humming, hemming and hawing, cawing and mowing.

All these exercises and I thought I was on the fast track to Barry White status with my tone. I even recorded myself in what I thought was a rich, sexual chocolate of a voice.

Like a drunk man on the subway, how hard the proud fall.  The results weren’t just bad, but…creepy.  Really, really creepy.  Creepy and sad, like someone upset about the fact that no one will sit next to them on a subway even when it’s crowded.

Here it is, again with link.

By the way, I made two voice samples, but one of the excerpts I was reading mentioned children, and that made me far too uncomfortable.

As much as the books are helping, some help from my roommate, a former chorus singer and current Glee watcher, has gone way further.  We’ve worked on humming, which helps bring the voice out of my throat.

The trick is to hum in such a way that your lips start tingling.  Really good singers like that Chris Martin lady from Coldplay should feel the vibration up through their cheeks and even their forehead.  After humming with my roomate (the right way) for even twenty minutes, my lips were tingling in such a way that guys tweaking on the subway  could really relate to.

The next step was doing a five-step scale with my mouth open.  An easy way to get this going was to start by humming and then open into an “ah” sound–going “mmmmm–Aahh”.

The result, peer-reviewed, has been much better.

Voice work day 2: Poop metaphors–a critical analysis of Vocal coaching books

Since I’m working on my voice, I’m going take a minute to talk about the voice of my main two books–both recommended by actors: Voice: Onstage and Off, and Freeing the Natural Voice.

If I had to choose a voice to narrate these in, I’d have to say that Freeing the Natural Voice should be read by a stuffy English professor, while Voice shoud read more like that uncle of yours who dresses like he’s going to an Eminem concert and dominates a little bit too much of your female friends’ time at your high school graduation.

While the British Freeing the Natural Voice, has lines like, “The lips, as the part of the face that guards the mouth, can develop into heavily armed portcullises or doors on well-oiled hinges which open readily to allow egress,”  Voice is more interested in whether you announce you’re going to the bathroom by saying you’re going to “powder your nose” or “take a dump” or “park a coil”?  It also talks about how sometimes you, like, are totally “grossed out” by your voice.

While I’m annoyed by metaphors like “park a coil” in a book that really isn’t about the finer points of how to improve your shits, it does win points for hating on Tom Cruise — with quotes!  ”All I could think of was (in a Mickey Mouse voice) ‘I am the vampire Lestat!’ I mean, he has the highest, reediest voice in the world!” says Julia Phillips, the original producer of Interview with a Vampire.

There’s another long quote from Anne Rice about Tom Cruise’s inherent suckiness–I’d heard this one before.

One book wants to improve your voice by being your friend, the other by being your professor. Either way, they’re chock full of advice about how my voice is a cave, its deep inside me, its the most subtle part of my subconscious, I need to free it, I need to control it, I need to think of it as an instrument, I need to relax it and forget about it, talk more like a man (how did they know?!), talk less like a man.

Both books are focused on 1) having me do breathing exercisees (relaxing the abs to find a natural pace of breath) and 2) asking myself questions to find out what my voice really sounds like.

All these breathing exercises and  moments of shallow introspection mean that I’ve been falling asleep on the early side.  This isn’t too say it hasn’t been working–when I have more time I will upload some samples of my voice.

I can tell you that I speak with vocal fry–my voice catches and is heard from my throat, with a somehwat staccato rhythm and a moderate speaking tempo.  I’m sure part of its psychological, but al these breathing exercises have at least made me aware of how tense I keep my throat–to the point where it is actually distractingly disconcerting.

In other words, the perfect excuse to go walk around the office when I’m bored.

New! Singing for my supper: the latest 30-day project.

Like pubescent boys and muscular girls the world over, I’m self-conscious of my voice. This does not mean screech like a banshee with a bullhorn whenever I hear my recorded voice, to my mind a pretty counter-productive way to drown out the sound of you, if you’re worried about it. The most I’ve done to bring my voice into a rich and sexy baritone range is to buy an audio series, called, “The Sound of Your Voice” by dictionatrix Dr. Carol Fleming. Yes, I own this. I discovered it while reading “The Game”–a book focused on the lives and techniques of professional pick up artists. As an average 15-year-old I was bored and horny. I was also of the belief that I could find most answers in a book.

The Sound of Dr. Fleming’s voice was irritatingly earnest, and I turned the tapes off before I got past chapter two.. But the time has come — five months into my 30-day projects — to work on something that will be both a constructive waste of time for you, and hopefully an amusing waste of time for you.

This month, I will be working to improve the quality of my voice (and perhaps learn an accent as a bonus). I will be sharing voice recording, tips, and the anguished notes of my neighbors begging me to stop so they can concentrate on having sex that wakes up the whole damn building.

January’s self-tracking project: Days 10 and 11

Is knowing thyself enough?  The dictum, which fortunately has a robust (and interesting) wikipedia page seems to be at the core of this project–and all others like it.  But to what end? Knowing yourself is great–being able to say just how much time you spend watching TV instead of just feeling like you spend too much time boobtubing is a great thing.  This knowledge, unfortunately, often simply ends at self-awareness–at self-congratulation for good habits and mild (but no less pleasureable) flagellation for bad ones.  It is like a friend who is always saying how xyz is going to make them fat. The knowledge is there, the connection to action is not.  Or a patient who needs to lower his cholesterol but instead of holding off on the cream cheese merely points out that they “at least don’t do heroin”, which really flies in the face of the forthcoming Keith Richards diet book.  We are an animal smart enough to know how to prolong our lives, but too smart to allow our life-saving instincts to rule our behavior.

It is somewhat of an obnoxious stance for me to unpack a part of huma nature of which we are  all apart and aware.  My goal isn’t to set myself aside (or above) other people–but I’m at a curiously level of intellectual mediocrity that I am only interested in an idea as far as I can act on it.  For more existential–and therefore utterly silly–reasons I can say that I have the motivation, at least, to give over portions of my day to trcking everything I can find useful.  But as we near the end of week two, my interest is shifting to using this meagre two weeks of data to start thinking about ways to improve my health, my environmental impact, or my productivity.

Knowing how many bananas I eat is only interesting to me in as far as I know how many will turn me into a bonafide George of the Jungle–and how many more I need to eat to make that a reality.  I want to do something with this info, just not sure what, yet.

Enough.

Here are my chartsies (for right now, I’m just compounding it from day one). The first is my favorite. As a good illustration of how pointless these charts can be, it lists my foods starting with ‘most recently eaten”.  This happens to be pickles, and its always amusing to see “pickles” in big letters.

Dinner

Lunch

Time Spent

January’s tracking project: Day 7-9

Recordign just about everything that you do in a day means a lot of data. All’s well and god and some things come to light, like how much time one spends staring at oneself in front of the mirror making favorable comparisons to vintage Mick Jagger (answer: not enough). But what to do with all of the data? What to do what to do?

The first step, and admittedly the most challenging, is how to appropriately organize it. For this I enlisted Daytum, a tracking site that is highly customizable and allows you to create any number of categories. Its not fool proof, but instead of providing the list of the past few days, I will be showing you charts culled from the data since Saturday. Let me know if you like it better/worse if you see any insights or not (as I have my doubts as to whether it is useful).

Breakfast and Lunch from days 7-9

Dinner items, Day 7-9

What I’ve been drinking:

What I’ve been doing ( in minutes. Also note: Julio Cortazar is the author of the short story collection I’m currently reading):

 

Do y’all like this better?

30-day tracking project: Days 4 and 5

As usual there is quite a learning curve to my project. The biggest one currently is managing all of the data and learning how to organize it. Because I didn’t have computer access yesterday, not only was I forced to deal with more data, but I was also able to much more easily compare the two days. My thought is to spend the rest of this week in this most basic tracking, and then start more carefully watching consumption and other metrics of interest–making it more interesting, if this is at all interesting, for you.  Here are the totals:

Day 4 (Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2011)

Totals:

Woke up -8:30

Urinated: 4

Bowel movements: 1

computer on: 3 hours, 39 minutes

shower: 5 min.

Time spent on subway: 1 hour, 52 minutes

Time spent walking: 52 minutes

Ate:
one bowl of cereal
sandwich (pickles, tomato, cheese)
one burrito
one pb and J sandwich
one chocolate truffle
1/2 pint mixed veg.
1/2 pint veg. fried rice

Drank:
3/4 cup milk
1.5 cups water
1 cup coffee
1 cup wine
2 pints water
1/2 pint ginger ale

Time spent reading: 57 minutes

Movie: 2:30 hours (MI4: Ghost Protocol)

t.v: 45 minutes

Total (Thursday, Jan. 5)

woke up: 9 AM

urinated: 5

BM: 2

Computer: 9 hours, 30 minutes

shower 4 min.

Time spent on subway: 50 minutes

Time spent walking: 40 minutes

Ate: one sandwich (cheese, tomato, lettuce)
2 piece chocolate
banana
25 almonds
apple
pizza (approx. 6 slices)

Drank: 1 cup coffee
1 cup orange juice
1 glass seltzer
1 cu tea
17 oz protein shake
1 cup soda

Subway: 50 minutes

Walk: 40 minutes