January 2011
4 posts
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American/Canadian Dialect Tour
At the beginning of May 2011, I’m pulling out of Houston in my ‘87 VW camper (Van Coover) and setting off on a dialect-gathering tour of the US and Canada, hitting as many of the accents I don’t “have” yet as possible. Can you help? Here are my major accent goals and destinations:
In May: Beaufort SC for Gullah accents Pittsburgh - yins are welcome to hook me up...
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The (Boston) Friends of Eddie Coyle
I’m working on the Boston accent right now for AccentHelp, so I’ve been listening to a lot of clips - both my own and online - and last night I had the pleasure of getting to see Robert Mitchum’s film The Friends of Eddie Coyle. (It’s apparently a Mitchum week for me, catching Night of the Hunter just a few days ago.)
This is an outstanding work, darkly displaying the...
Received Pronunciation Syll-bles
Even with a dialect as defined as Received Pronunciation, there is an amazing amount of variation that fits within that category. At last night’s first read through for Shaw’s Candida with the Classical Theatre Company, we ended up discussing possible ways to make further distinctions between classes clearer - It’s not like we can just read Shaw’s endless character...
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To Be or Not to Be German
This evening we watched the 1942 version of Jack Benny and Carole Lombard’s film To Be or Not to Be, which actually turned out to be Lombard’s last time on screen before her tragic plane crash. The film was finished in 1941, but its release was delayed because it was too far ahead of it’s time: The US had yet to enter the war, and this film focused on Germany’s invasion of...
December 2010
3 posts
Tell No One - Kristin Scott Thomas' French
We added one additional T-movie to make it four in one day: the French adaptation of Harlan Coben’s thriller Tell No One. Excellent - all the better because it didn’t get made in Hollywood, keeping it a bit more gritty and holding the mysteries off until the end, just like Coben’s writing. Francois Cluzet was outstanding in the lead role - think of him as the good looking...
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Three-T Movie Day!
True Grit, Tron: Legacy, and Tangled - and we saw them on Tursday in a teatre, or something like that… Not a lot of dialect work to write home about - some strong choices in True Grit that fit into the American Southern accent realm. The young lead (Hailee Steinfeld) was supposed to be from Yell County in Arkansas, and Matt Damon’s LaBoeuf was a Texas Ranger - all of them were well...
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Welsh Accent in "Undertaking Betty"
Undertaking Betty (2002) takes place in a village in Wales and includes quite a few big names, learning the Welsh dialect. Alfred Molina, Brenda Blethyn, and Naomi Watts all do good work overall, but the smaller roles in the film, as well as the ever-amazing Lee Evans, are perhaps the best examples to base your dialect work on. Evans was born in Avonmouth Bristol, which is very close to the...
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"Nice Person Voice"
I can’t help but use the term “Nice Person Voice” sometimes… This is the voice you likely put on when you answer the phone, not knowing who it is - so you damned well better be nice, just in case it’s someone important!
One way to describe this Nice voice is that you probably go up slightly in pitch, and you leave behind almost any trace of your chest resonance....
November 2010
4 posts
Castilian Accent of Spain →
The CaTHtilian aTHent of THpain iTH now on aTHent help!
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Accents Create Character →
Fluent in 3 Months is a blog by Benny, the Irish polyglot, about his adventures in learning multiple languages in shorter periods of time. Key to his success: Just speak it! (Don’t wait until you’re comfortable to get started - it’s okay to suck.) He shares another key to handling multiple language in this post: Create a “character” that defines the language....
Generican Disease
I’ve had a fixation for the last week and a half: What is unique about you?
This isn’t a touchy-feelie thing - it’s marketing, damn it! And it’s an ongoing issue for actors. I think it’s the downside of training, sometimes. Congratulations, you’ve learned a lot of technique, so now you do what you do better, but you have also learned how to turn off your...
July 2010
2 posts
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May 2010
1 post
2 tags
Time to Test Your Phonetics! →
Someone designed a game to test your IPA skills. (You should realize that it’s broad transcription, so the R’s are right-side up, for example.) My only problem was actually spelling the words correctly in normal human spelling! If only English had followed Shaw’s lead to simplify spelling!
April 2010
2 posts
3 tags
March 2010
2 posts
Bad Accents: Better Off Not Trying? →
I’m actually even more interested in the responses than the article itself. One of my favorite responses is the comment that no one ever gets a Boston accent right in the movies, even from actors who are from Boston.
February 2010
1 post
5 tags
December 2009
2 posts
4 tags
Worst Movie Accents →
Here’s one person’s less-than-a-minute version, anyway…
November 2009
7 posts
X-Ray of Speaking →
This brief X-Ray video clip shows a speaker saying the Swedish word “pion.” Notice all of the movement in the tongue and the lips, as well as the soft palate—you can even see the tongue movement affecting the larynx. This person is obviously not involving the jaw in speech nearly as much as many people habitually do. Wacky Swedes…
Change Your Voice on Your iPhone →
Record yourself and listen to your shopping list in your chipmunk voice or as if you’re in need of an exorcism. If you’re feeling subliminally evil, you can even hear it all in reverse…
Newborn Babies Cry with an Accent?! →
‘Nuff said!
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Free Audio Editor: Audacity →
If you have any need for editing sound recordings, I would highly recommend Audacity, which is a free software. It doesn’t have some of the bells and whistles of Adobe’s Audition software (such as their great noise-reduction) but it’s a good basic editor. It will allow you to export files in a variety of formats, including MP3, if you add the aptly named “lame”...
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Da' Der Es SEXAY! →
After a great deal of highly scientific research into the human psyche, Irish has been declared the sexiest accent! Is this from years of kissing the Blarney Stone? (What do you mean, the locals pee on it?!)
Holding Your Breath →
I’m always working with students on not holding their breath, but I guess if you’re going to hold it, you might as well do it right!
More & More Microphones on Broadway →
Body mics are making their way into more plays, and more musicals are using prerecorded vocal tracks so the performers simply mouth the words… Is it live?
October 2009
18 posts
4 tags
Making Words →
Sara Phillips passed this wonderful podcast link on to me. In the first bit, you can hear a brief reflection on why American and British accents are so different—and how the American accent may more closely reflect the speech of Shakespeare’s day, answering the question: When did Americans lose their British accent?
An awesome second segment on a tonal language: The difference...
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NYTimes Article on Language and Smiles →
This was posted on the Voice & Speech Trainers’ Association—Theoretically it’s about how language impacts emotion, but it’s even more about how physiology and habitual facial expressions relate to emotions. The moral of the story: Use happier vowels.
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Eric Armstrong's "Voice Guy" Blog →
Eric has a rather extensive blog that leads you through a series of vocal exercises. He’s the Voice Guy. I’m merely Voice Boy. And my costume isn’t nearly as cool.
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There is a tendency for dialects to...
“It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than...”
– -Ivan Illich
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WatchJulie Adams, a dialect coach in LA, passed this video link on to me: It’s pretty accurate, though over the top—He’s relying a lot on imitation, and he falls into some tendencies that are his own habits (vocal more so than dialectical) that don’t necessarily best define the dialect he’s touting. Don’t get me wrong—he kicks ass. Can you do this? Are you...
3 tags
Type Phonetics →
If you need to type just a little bit of IPA (International Phonetics Alphabet) and don’t want to download and install a whole font package and learn how to work with it, you can use this webpage to create the phonetic phrase—and then copy & paste it into your document. It’s a little odd, the simple things that excite me…
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I recorded this gentleman from Armagh Northern...
“Here could I breathe my soul into the air…”
– William Shakespeare from 2 Henry 6
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Why you so picky 'bout it?
“Results of a blind listening test show that a third of people can’t tell the difference between music encoded at 48Kbps and the same music encoded at 160Kbps. The test was conducted by CNet to find out whether streaming music service Spotify sounded better than new rival Sky Songs. Spotify uses 160Kbps OGG compression for its free service, whereas Sky Songs uses 48Kbps AAC+...
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Here’s another funky dialect recording that...
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“We are ashamed of everything that is real about us: ashamed of ourselves, of our...”
– -George Bernard Shaw
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A former student of mine grew up in West Virginia,...
Learn Accents & Dialects →
This is where I teach accents & dialects via the online materials I’ve developed with some other coaches.