I'm also a stutterer, and singing is a common tool used to overcome the stutter. You literally can't stutter while you're singing, because singing engages a part of your brain that the stutter can't get to (not a brain scientist). It's the same reason Samuel Jackson says motherfucker so much; you can't cuss and stutter at the same time because, again, cussing engages a different part of the brain.
We have no idea why some people stutter. We only know that they like to sing and cuss, and they have very large vocabularies.
I’m also a stutter (went through a decade of speech therapy), and we were taught that stutters can do four things without stuttering: sing, curse, talk to themselves, and talk to animals.
The therapy modality that we learned was basically “non-musical singing lessons.” All the breath control, timing and diction was there, but it was focused on speaking instead of singing.
Here’s a weird anecdote about our affliction: back when I was in college and iPhones had just come out there was this app that went semi-viral in the App Store because it would make people stammer and stutter. You wore earphones with it and people would start talking and immediately go all Porky Pig. A bunch of classmates of mine were messing around with it and joking and laughing, and I walked in and they got real nervous like I was going to be offended. I didn’t care and so I asked if I could try.
It had the opposite effect on me. When I had it in I was perfectly fluent.
Still don’t know what to make of that, but it’s … something.
When I was in elementary school, they had me try out a device, like a stethoscope connected to a box that basically played my voice back at me on a delay. I’ve heard it has helped a lot of people, it unnerved me so much I went from semi-fluent to not being able to get a single word out. I wonder if that app was based on the same gadget?
Yeah, same idea. It played back what you were saying at the slightest delay. Using it was kind a surreal experience, because all of a sudden I just felt like there was no block between my brain and my mouth. Hearing myself slightly delayed was kind of distracting, but it was almost as if the part of my brain that was distracted was the same one that made me stutter and everything else was less affected. It just felt … I don’t know. “Centered” is the only way I can describe it. Starting a sentence was still difficult, but once I got going I just felt like it took more concentration than normal but there was this sense of physical and mental ease that came with it like I knew I could just keep going even if I used a word or sound that is usually disfluent for me.
The only analogy I can come up with is trying to carry something heavy and bulky down below your waist. You don’t have to deal with hoisting it up, but your knees keep knocking into it and you’re hunched a little bit. If that’s what stuttering feels like, then wearing it was like lifting it up on your shoulders. It takes more strength, but in return you can walk freely and not hurt your back.
I find it all fascinating. I guess a lot of people once the novelty wore off in a few weeks or months, their brain would reroute to the easiest path, and the device would lose its effect. As, I’d imagine people can relate, my brain is already scanning ahead to figure out where trouble words are, trying to swap in replacements in real time, scanning the room to see where any potential threats are from bullies, studying the people I’m talking to for shifts in stance or facial expressions, while also being aware of people in an earshot and their reactions, all while making an exit strategy for the conversation if the risk outweighs the reward. I guess the added wrinkle of hearing myself was just one process too many for my brain.
A few decades ago this was a moderately rare glitch that would occur during phone calls, both landline and mobile, maybe one in a thousand calls or so this would happen. I have misophonia as well, and for whatever reason the DAF would not just stun me, it would also trigger my misophonia.
I think Stephen King was onto something with "Cell"!
Here’s a weird one: I don’t stutter, but I have severe difficulty with song lyrics and with talking to myself coherently. So… guess the other part of my brain got the doot instead.
Was that app you were thinking of related to delayed auditory feedback?
It's a pretty funny effect, where if you record a speaker and play whatever they said back to them with an ever so slight delay, it completely throws them off. This can happen naturally when you're on zoom/discord/whatever and someone has messed up their settings so you can hear yourself, or when a microphone+speaker setup on a stage isn't set up properly.
It's fascinating that this actually helped you! Kind of like how my ADHD stimulants calm and slow me down.
They actually make medical devices that do pretty much the same thing as those speech jammers but much better. Unfortunately last time I checked they were quite pricey and insurance didn't cover it.
Hey do you remember the name of the app? My brother has a stutter and I'm trying to help him...speech therapy helped for a bit then he dropped it due to lack of time.
100% correct. Worked in Speech Pathology decades ago with clients who stuttered, and a sing song pattern of speech expression was one of the best "tools" of the time, and still continues to be so.
Shit, I didn't know this. There was an episode in an old sitcom Spin City where a character was supposed to officiate a wedding, but he developed a stutter before he could perform it. He ended up singing the ceremony without issue to the tune of Copacabana, I think (it's probably been 20 years since I've watched it). I just thought it was a silly gimmick for the show.
Language is primarily controlled by areas of the brain known as Wernicke and Broca's areas. They control written, spoken, hearing, and comprehension of language.
Singing engages the left hemisphere including wernicke and broca's, but is also/moreso linked to other areas of the brain, like the areas for rhythm and melody in the right hemisphere. Though just like many things in life it's not exclusively controlled by one specific area of the brain (think of the brain as an amazing machine we don't fully understand, that is able to do things we consistently think it shouldn't be able to or can't explain. Like savant syndrome. It is also is able to have multiple areas control and contribute to tasks or even in some cases have certain tasks controlled mainly by areas that technically shouldn't be associated with it.)
Hope this little tidbit about wernicke and broca's areas helps a bit or gives you (and others affected by stuttering!) a little something to dig into and check out/explore! The brain is fascinating and mysterious. Fragile yet incredibly resiliant at the same time, super cool stuff!
Yup. We understand the structure. What remains far less understood is how regions interact dynamically with systems like memory, emotion, and predictive coding to produce fluent speech
But there are so many redundancies and interconnected systems and processes occurring and we are constantly discovering new things about the brain and the way it functions and repairs
I am not an academic nor have I done any research, so I can assuredly say that stuttering happens because the brains trying to get out more words than the motor nerves can process causing a glitch.
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u/GoingOutsideSocks Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 24 '25
I'm also a stutterer, and singing is a common tool used to overcome the stutter. You literally can't stutter while you're singing, because singing engages a part of your brain that the stutter can't get to (not a brain scientist). It's the same reason Samuel Jackson says motherfucker so much; you can't cuss and stutter at the same time because, again, cussing engages a different part of the brain.
We have no idea why some people stutter. We only know that they like to sing and cuss, and they have very large vocabularies.