What's Nicky Learning? (Jan 2020)

(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:

1. Setting an alarm to sleep instead of to wake
2. Upon waking, immediately turn on my UV-free sun-lamp (cost: $30 CAD) to calibrate my circadian rhythm
3. 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:

1. Pick a specific thing to practice drawing
2. Draw it
3. Note (+)what worked & (–)what didn't
4. Re-draw it, keeping the + and fixing the –
5. 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:

1. 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!
   
2. 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?
   
3. 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