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How a 22-year-old chatterbox prepares to lose her voice permanently

31 July 2017

Lucy is the youngest person with MND in Scotland

Meet Lucy. She’s a 22-year-old woman who lives in the north-east of Scotland. She loves food and country music. She also has motor neurone disease.

The illness can cause weaknesses in the tongue, lips, vocal cords and chest – speech can become faint, slurred or unclear.

• In detail: About motor neurone disease and its symptoms

One option that Lucy may need in the future is a digital device that produces speech, such as the kind used by Professor Stephen Hawking.

But our voices are unique to us and are a fundamental aspect of who we are as individuals.

Picking from a limited selection of options means using voice which might bear little resemblance to how they spoke before they were ill.

Depositing your voice at a bank

The documentary MND and 22-Year-Old Me followed Lucy on her visit to Speak:Unique, a research project at the University of Edinburgh aiming to create personalised synthetic voices.

She was recorded speaking a selection of 400 sentences that include the various combinations of English speech sounds.

To generate the synthetic voice, a person’s voice is mixed with a base of other, donor voices.

Phillipa Rewaj, a Speech and Language Therapist, compares it to buying bespoke paint: a small amount of colour is added to a tin of the closest matching base paint.

For the best results, the person would record their voice before there has been any effect on their speech.

But if there has already been some impact on the speech of the person, it may be possible to ‘repair’ some of the voice by adding in higher levels of the donor voice.

Making a new voice

Lucy makes a synthetic voice

MND sufferer Lucy Lintott goes to the voicebank to create a personalised synthetic voice

Lucy’s sister’s Laura also recorded her voice, allowing a clearer synthetic version to be created.

Speak:Unique is in a trial phase and, while it hopes to become more widely available, it doesn’t currently offer a bespoke service to all patients.

Life with a digital voice

Recording your voice is one thing.

But what’s it actually like using a digital communication device to speak to other people?

Lucy asked one of the best-known s of a communication aids in the UK, Lee Ridley, about his experiences.

Despite not being able to speak naturally, he has a job where your voice is an essential tool – stand up comedy.

Lee performs under the name Lost Voice Guy and was the BBC New Comedy Award winner in 2015.

A stand-up role model

Comedian 'Lost Voice Guy' and Lucy talk ing a voice machine

MND sufferer Lucy Lintott chats to comedian 'Lost Voice Guy' who speaks using an iPad

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