Consequently, he said, I had done what many people with my injury do: I had developed strategies for, as he put it, “speaking around the problem” – retraining m

Consequently, he said, I had done what many people with my injury do: I had developed strategies for, as he put it, “speaking around the problem” – retraining my recurrent laryngeal nerve (the nerve that, among other things, controls the tension on the vocal cords) to drop the pitch of my voice, slackening my freighted vocal membrane so that the 3 or 4% that was still pliable would vibrate. This reduced the rattle in my voice, but at a cost. It was robbing me of the natural variation in pitch and volume that people use to give colour, animation, expression and personality to their utterances – what linguists call prosody, the melody of everyday speech. ... “You’re behaving through a veil of monotone,” he went on. “When you talk, you can’t express emotion properly. You can’t change pitch, can’t get loud, can’t do the normal things that a voice does to express how you feel.” The first example that jumped to mind when I read this section was Jonathan Banks (Mike Ehrmantraut from Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul). Anyone know how accurate my armchair diagnosis is?