It's afflicted Darwin, Newton, Aesop, Churchill. James Earl Jones battled it long before he became the voice of Darth Vader and CNN. Stuttering has been a puzzling malady for ages, sometimes capricious, often maddeningly relentless. Therapies have ranged from the homespun (slow down, take a deep breath) to the radical (Demosthenes is said to have put pebbles in his mouth and shouted before the roar of the ocean).
More recently, stuttering has yielded its secrets to technology. Casa Futura Technologies has two effective devices that use delayed auditory feedback to help stutterers effectively reduce or eliminate the problem with minimum effort (and less wear on the teeth than Demosthenes' method).
The principle is simple: By adjusting an array of easily operated controls and speaking into a microphone, you hear your own words delayed by milliseconds. On the more expensive desktop model, you can vary the pitch of your voice as it bounces back at you, a fraction of a fraction of a second later. These devices have been proven to correct the cerebral activity generally associated with stuttering.
The sensation is momentarily eerie: The ricochet of your voice isn't something you're used to hearing. But this system works, surely in the short-term. When used consistently and combined with vocal exercises and practice, it cuts stuttering dramatically, certainly in this writer's tryout of the desktop and portable versions.
Both units are fairly inconspicuous. The portable easily masquerades as a pocket tape-recorder, and the desktop unit travels incognito to the office. Either way, after years of ineffectual therapies and well-meant advice, today's stutterers have a valid option for speech therapy.
Pocket Fluency System: US$495; Desktop Fluency System: $695. Casa Futura Technologies: +1 (303) 417 9752.
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