10:46pm October 7, 2014

Tone of voice

I’m functionally nonverbal, meaning basically I can’t use speech for communication on any reliable level whatsoever.

I use a keyboard to communicate.  It has a mechanical voice.

Sometimes I type things into it and it says them out loud, in its mechanical voice.

But when I remember back to what I typed, I remember it with a totally different voice, with inflection and everything.  Like really, really obvious inflection that was absolutely not in the computer’s voice.

My friends often hear inflection too, but they hear it differently.  They don’t hear it in the actual words, they hear it in the way my hands sound on the keyboard.  They say they can identify that it’s me just by my typing style, and then identify my mood pretty well by the rhythm and intensity of my typing.  But that’s an entirely different kind of tone.  One of my friends coined the term “tone of type” to describe that.  She says she can especially tell when I’m royally pissed off by the way my hands hit the keyboard really hard, but she can also tell much subtler things too.

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